Leptis Magna
Leptis Magna is the grandest Roman city in Africa and one of the best preserved anywhere, and it stands by the sea an hour and a half east of Tripoli, waiting: a Phoenician port that Rome made rich on olive oil and that Septimius Severus, the emperor born here in 145, rebuilt in marble at the turn of the third century — a four-way arch at the crossroads, a new forum with Medusa heads between its arches, a basilica of red granite columns and carved pilasters, a colonnaded street to a harbour with a lighthouse and a curved quay, and, older, the theatre of the first years of the first century, the market with its stone measuring tables, the Hadrianic baths with their marble latrines and their nymphaeum, and, along the coast, an amphitheatre cut into a quarry and a circus by the waves. The sand covered it for fifteen centuries and gave it back almost whole; the Wadi Lebda still runs through it to the sea.
When the doors open, the traveller will come from Tripoli for the day or sleep in Al-Khums, three kilometres away, and walk the city as it was walked — in from the arch, down the colonnaded street with the porticoes of the forum on the right, into the basilica for the pilasters of Hercules and Bacchus, out to the harbour and the empty quays, back through the old forum to the market and up to the theatre for the sea behind the stage; will give the baths their hour and the museum at the gate another; will follow the coast to the amphitheatre and the circus, and go on to Villa Sileen for its mosaics; and will do it all in the morning, before the marble turns white and the sea breeze dies.
The Guide's honesty, which here is a vow: this postal waits with its lamps lit. Libya today asks for an invitation, a visa, an escort and a season of calm that the Guide cannot promise, and it sends no travellers until it can promise them; the columns have waited fifteen centuries under the sand and can wait a little longer in the open air. When the mornings on the coast are ordinary again — schoolchildren on the road from Al-Khums, a guard asleep by the theatre, nothing louder —, the doors below will fill like all the others, and Leptis will be the first day out of Tripoli. Rome never took Leptis off its charts; neither does the Guide.