New Britain Herald Newspaper, August 12, 1927, Page 19

B 0 W \\}‘) A other Ro O the average American, who has forgotten his schoolboy Latin, Algeria is merely an- other North African state conquered and administered by the up- and-coming French. A country where primi- tive people ride on camel back and live in tents, where tribesmen occasionally clash with colonial troops, where “there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Never does he think of it as the repository of the very finest relics of Roman power and glory that are to be found anywhere, and yet Algeria has more interesting Roman rel- ics than Rome itself. The land is dotted with Roman ruins, monuments to Roman achievement, reminders of the strength with which they built in that old state. Here is a mighty arch of triumph above a crumbling gate that opens on a vista of weather-beaten pillars. There the re- mains of an amphitheatre. Yonder, the skeleton of a temple. Fragments of Roman splendor wearing away in the African wastes. Ashes of Roman glory, whitening beneath the desert sun. Comment on the Roman relics in North Africa is timely just now, because scholars have, for the thousandth time, begun a careful examination of the cele- brated” Temple of Tellus at Djemila in Algeria. This ruined temple has caused more speculation than any other in that remarkably Roman am- phitheatre in the town of El Djem, Algeria particular part of the world, more even | than the ruins of the temple at Timgad. In the first place, it was built along the lines of the finest temples of the Roman Forum, the remains of which constitute one of the avonders of the world. In fact, some students say that the Djemila temple was an exact replica of one in the Roman Forum, and probably was built fifty or seventy-five years after the original. It is in a fine state of preser- vation, and of interest to engineers and architects as well as {o archaeologists and historians. The ruin is worth traveling many miles to see, even to the casual tourist, and it causes the contemplative modern to do some important thinking. It was erected about 100 B. C., the scholars say, and this is the year 1927 A. D., yet & View of the well preserved ruins of the the natives who look upon it every day Romans who had it built there in the desert country. Below, ruins of the Temple of Tellus, at Djemila, another Algerian town once occupied by the Romans Another ruin that is once more at-are the remains of the Great Roman am- live far more primitively than those old * tracting the attention and inspection of the scholars, who were interrupted and scattered by the world upheaval of 1914, Kills Her Own Snakeskin Dresses HEN Edith Rexford Holbert was a tiny miss, a favorite grandaunt told her it was a nice thing for a little girl to have a hobby, such as “collecting things.” By “things” the good old lady undoubted- ly meant ancient coins and postage stamps, rare old lace and butterflies. Edith Rexford Holbert is a big girl now, and lives in Tucson, Arvizona, but she has never forgotten the words of her dear old grandaunt. And she is a collector—of rattlesnakes. Miss Holbert’s idea of a really amus- ing afternoon is picking up the trail of a nice, big, deadly rattler, pursuing him into the underbrush in which he loves to conceal himself, and then prod- Miss Holbert capturing a dangerous rattler and wearing one of her snakeskin gowns ding and pronging him with a forked stick until she forces him into the thick bag which serves her as a trap. Unlike Eve, the first of her sex to be interested in snakes, Miss Holbert does net scek the reptiles out converse ith them about the apple crop or the scandalous skirts the girls are wearing. Once caught, a rattler is killed, unless it happens to be a particularly fine speci- men, worth keeping in a crate, or send- ing to a snake museum. Those that are killed are skinned. The skins are tanned. And the finished product is made up into wearing apparel. At first Miss Holbert had the snake skins made into hunting wear, shoes, hats, breeches, jackets, gloves. Even then, most women who chanced to meet her on her way out to the rattlesnake country showed a tendency to fight shy of her, not lik- ing the idea of being touched by the tanned rat- tler pelt. Then she began to have her shoes for evening wear made of rattler skin, and eventually she had an even- ing gown made almost en- tirely of snake skin, and boldly made her appearance in it on the dance floor of the Country Club. To date, however, Edith is the only woman snake hunter of any renown in the Arizona country, and her girl friends rely upon her for the pelts for their dresses and wraps. And she goes snake-hunting to get a new pair of shoes or even- ing cloak for a chum, quite as the male hunters of a more primitive day used to take their shotguns and go to the woods to get squir- rel-skin coats for their wives and “rabbit skins to wrap the baby in.” In a country where snake hunting had been considered one of the trades no woman cver could invade, Miss Holbert has made the men admit that her pro- ficiency is on a par with their own. She maintains she gets more fun out of rat- tler trapping than most people do out of fishing. phitheatre at El Djem, in Algeria. It is reputed to be the finest preserved structure of its kind in the world, not excepting those in Southern Europe, and is a wonderful specimen of the -archi- tecture of the Roman Empire. find little groups of aimless peo- ple halted outside the show windows of the fashion shops of upper Broadway and Tifth Avenue, watching the window dressers drape and pose, the dummies. If you linger long in such a group, you are bound to hear somebody say: “Don’t they look natural, though! 1 ATE of a summer evening, as you I stroll about New York, you will Copyright, 1927, by Johnson Features, Inc. sl Remains of an ancient Roman temple at Timgad, an Algerian town on the edge of the Sahara desert Half a dozen other cities and towns of Algeria are noted among the arch- aeologists for the importance of their ruins, but Timgad, the wonder city of North Africa, outshines them all. There is only one Timgad. It has more Roman relics than Rome and half a dozen other cities of Italy combined. And they are in a finer state of preservation. Timgad is In the foothills of the North African uplands, not a great way from the Sa- hara Desert, and nothing but ruins ex- ist to lure the tourist there. The French call it “the African Pompeii.” It is a gray ghost of a city, haunted by bygone and forgotten captains and senators and tribunes of the people, who when the dusk falls seem to whisper to the imaginative scholar of the golden long ago. Timgad was built by the discharged soldiers of the legions, at the behest of the Emperor Trajan, who then allotted ing Dum L. E. Oates, the Los Angeles maker, taking a cast of the shapely form of a professional artist's model wonder how they make them look s0 lifelike.” F e w people realize that the wax ladies of the show windows, who are doomed to pose forever with never a word of protest, are often mod- elled on the lines of women of flesh and blood, some of them quite fa- mous. L. E. Oates, a Los Angeles d u mmy maker, says that many screen stars have posed as the orig- inals for wax clothes models in their time, and some of the most famous living models of the artists of the West Coast have been glad to do likewise. In making a wax model of a living woman, the first and most dif- ficult step is the securing of a complete and faithful plaster cast of her. A girl's skin is treated with a special prepara tion, which permits the plaster to regi ter every curve, but prevents it from sticking so closely that the fair model will have to dig it out of her epidermis with a penknife afterwards. The plaster is applied in sections, the Dosert Wastes the land among them, their wives and their children. Lucius Munatius Gallus, commander of the Third Legion, super- intended the laying out of the city upon a sloping hillside, choosing the site be- cause it would drain itself. Two noble roads, the Cardo and the Decumanus Maximus, led into the city and divided it into quarters. The majestic capitol, modelled upon the capitol at Rome, was erected outside the original wall in a rising position at the southwest angle. A forum was built, and south of it, a theatre, which must have been a glary of marble and porphyry. Houses were built. Baths were built. Markets arose. In Timgad, all those centuries ago, a civilization blossomed that was civilized, and Roman. The first relic of those grand days that strikes the eye of the tourist as he approaches Timgad, set in the Aures up- lands, is the Arch of Trajan. It was ap- parently the western gateway of the city. when Timgad was in its prime, Next is the ruin of the Market of Sertius, all that remans of a once beau- tiful public bazaar that resounded to the cries of the hawkers back in 200 A. D. The market apparently was built in the form of a basilica, with the southern # end semi-circular. Little remains of Timgad’s once mag- nificent temple to the major gods of Rome, but that Little is suffi- cient to indicate that it was a temple fit for gods. Considerable remains, however, of; the smaller temple erected to the protecting genius of the city by the gaod citizens, who raised the money for it by popular subscription. The ruins of the theatre are particu- larly well preserved, and they constitute one of the potent reasons scholars go to Timgad. In its day, the Timgad theatre housed some’of the outstanding hits of the period, and the Timgad authors and players continued to produce fine work even after the stage at Rome fell upon evil days and was given over to levity and licentiousness. Underground, Timgad is interlaced with the ruins of a system of Roman baths, naturally much better presetrved than the structures exposed to the ele- ments. There were fifteen in the city. Roman baths were not merely places- where the good burghers got themselves clean, of course, as every student of the social life of the Romans knows, but ‘were soeial centers, more like modern clubs. In the ruins of the Northern Buaths of Timgad, the traveler may see the hot rooms, unused for 1500 years; the little reception halls where the great bnes re- ceived their friends; even the black smudges of the smoke of the ancient furnaces upon the walls. Lifelike legs, arms and trunk first being covered. It is allowed to remain on the living form until it hardens. Then it is cut off in sections, and sent to & sort of reassembling room, where, eventually, all the plaster parts are joined together. In taking the plaster cast, the head of the girl is left until the last. It is the most difficult to model. When the artist begins to appl}\the plaster, the girl must assume the expression she wants the dummy to wear, and hold that expres- sion to the end, otherwise the wax model will wear a grotesque, idiotic expression, and the job will be a total loss. While the plaster is on the face, the living model breathes through a small tube in- serted in the mouth or nose. When plastergeasts of the girl’s body in its entircty have been obtained, they are, as has been indicated, reassembled, and the wax is poured in. That is the simplest part of the whole proceeding, and it is accomplished quickly. And then, presto! You have before your eyes a lady in wax who has all the eye-filling curves of the living original. Of course, the plaster cast is so manip- ulated that it does not register the hair, the purpose being to get the shape of the girl model’s skull rather than her coif- fure. An expert hair dresser is called in, and fixes the wax lady up with an appropriate head of hair, long or short, bobbed or shingled. Then the artist in oils arrives. With oils and tempera, he reddens the lips and cheeks of the wax dummy, and gives the body subtle touches of color here and there to simu- late the characteristic glow of perfect health. On the fingers and toes he paints nails. And then he undertakes the hard- est job of all, whichs putting the color- ing in the eyes. After the final bit of retouching has been done, the wax model is shipped to the shop that ordered it, and there it is at once put on duty in the show win- dow, displaying in turn somebody’s cor- sets, somebody else’s hosiery, the newest and fluffiest in lingerie, and maybe even- ing gowns, o 93