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Esto Perpetua: Algerian Studies and Impressions

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This is a remarkable travel book/autobiography by Hilaire Belloc, about a solitary walking trip that he took (Belloc almost always travelled on foot, alone)through Algeria in the first decade of the last century. Covering between fifteen and thirty miles a day, Belloc describes the remnants of the Roman Empire in the North African mountains and desert. He moves along the coast and then into the Atlas mountains, encountering the Bedouin culture flourishing amidst the architectural ruins of the old imperial province of Muritania. Although an Englishman and a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, Belloc was not an insular Edwardian; he was dedicated to the idea of Roman Europe as the continual basis of Western civilization, and his reflections on the haunting ruins of the once great pagan, and then Christian civilization are fascinating. The ruins, the mountains, the long daily hikes, meeting native Algerians, drinking Algerian red wine, are all bound together in a beautifully written account that is accompanied in most editions by Belloc's drawings.