Towards evening we climb the slopes which lead to the village and, retracing our footsteps, we listen to explanations --" Here is the pagan city, this quarter which rises out of the earth is that of the Christians. Later .... " Yes, it is true. Men and societies have followed each other here; conquerors have marked this countryside with their civilization of subalterns. They had a mean and foolish conception of grandeur and measured that of their empire by the surface it covered. The miracle is that these ruins of their civilization are the very negation of their ideal. For this skeleton city, seen from so high, in the descending evening with the white flight of pigeons around the arch of triumph, did not write on the sky the signs of conquest and ambition. The world always ends by vanquishing history. This great stone outcry that Djemila utters amid mountains, sky, and silence, I know its poetry well; lucidity, indifference, the true signs of despair or beauty. The heart contracts before this grandeur we are already leaving. Djemila remains behind us with the sad water of its sky, a bird song that comes from the other side of the plateau, the sudden, brief descent of goats on the sides of the hills and, in the relaxed and echoing twilight, the living features of a homed god on the pediment of an altar. Albert Camus - The Wind at Djemila
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 00:26:23 +0000
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