SandDune reads in 2023 - thread 2

But the evening was as warm as summer, with the still, backward-looking warmth that returns sometimes when summer is long past; and the little group of ladies who came out from the Forum gardens across the way wore only light wraps, pretty and fragile as flower petals, over their indoor tunics. One of them carried a late white rosebud, and another sniffed at a ball of amber in her hand, and they laughed together, softly, as they went on up the street. A man came out through the Forum gate, with a slave behind him carrying his books. Maybe he was a lawyer. How odd that there were still towns where the Magistrates sat to administer the laws and discuss the water supply, and women walked abroad with balls of amber in their hands for its delicate fragrance. The town was shabby as all towns were, the walls that had gleamed so white against the distant mountains of Cymru, stained and pitted here and there with fallen plaster, the streets inclined to be dirty. But there were things to buy in the shops, and on the citizens’ faces a look of unawareness that made Aquila want to climb on to the mounting-block and cry out to them. ‘Don’t you know what is happening all round the coasts? Haven’t you heard?’

What can the effect on the Britons of this astonishing structure? This wall in the wilds of northern Brittania divides nowhere from nowhere. Visually, it makes about as much sense as René Magritte's open door suspended in a cloudscape. The effect of all this insistence on uniformity and precision despite the terrain must have been impressive, if not cowing; part of its purpose, surely, was to intimidate. It is now thought that its value as a symbol of Roman might was at least as great as any practical purpose

In 1801, William Hutton, a native of Birmingham, walked from his home city to the wall. He tramped along it twice, there and back, and then took himself back to the Midlands. At the end of his account of the walk, published in 1802, he reported his 'loss by perspiration, of one stone of animal weight; an expenditure of forty guineas; a lapse of thirty-five days, and a walk of six hundred and one miles.' That was an average of seventeen miles a day. He was seventy-eight years old. 'Perhaps,' he wrote, 'I am the first man that ever travelled the whole length of the Wall, and probably the last that ever will attempt it.'

'Looking at them, at the numbers of them, you would have thought them infinite, you would have thought there could be no end to them, to their proliferation. This island was larder to us then, store and pantry for all it bore no vegetation, not grass or moss, no tree, no soil, nothing but the rock and the spray and the birds, and now not even the birds.

'An observer to my marriage would think I have made no effort to be a good or better wife. Or, seeing me that night, that I must have set out to be this way and achieved it after years of concentrated effort. They could not tell that for most of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been trying to become the opposite of myself.'