Only the stately phraseology and the measured speech of the sons of the Prophet are suited to a venerable antiquity like this.

Here is a crumbling wall that was old when Columbus discovered America; was old when Peter the Hermit roused the knightly men of the Middle Ages to arm for the first Crusade; was old when Charlemagne and his paladins beleaguered enchanted castles and battled with giants and genii in the fabled days of the olden time; was old when Christ and his disciples walked the earth; stood where it stands today when the lips of Memnon were vocal and men bought and sold in the streets of ancient Thebes! The Phoenicians, the Carthagenians, the English, Moors, Romans, all have battled for Tangier--all have won it and lost it.

Here is a ragged, oriental-looking Negro from some desert place in interior Africa, filling his goatskin with water from a stained and battered fountain built by the Romans twelve hundred years ago.

Yonder is a ruined arch of a bridge built by Julius Caesar nineteen hundred years ago.

Men who had seen the infant Saviour in the Virgin's arms have stood upon it, maybe.
Near it are the ruins of a dockyard where Caesar repaired his ships and loaded them with grain when he invaded Britain, fifty years before the Christian era.
Here, under the quiet stars, these old streets seem thronged with the phantoms of forgotten ages.