TOWARD THE END of the twentieth century, I lived with an Italian girlfriend in Rome, where I became conscious of what used to be called the grandeur of antiquity. Valeria was born in Tripoli, and one day she showed me some black-and-white photos of her mother and father, in their teens, courting in some Roman ruins on the Mediterranean coast of Libya. These images of an ideal colonial romance showed Mario in a white shirt and pleated grey trousers, and Anna in a white dress. They were both tanned and wearing sunglasses, leaning against columns, perched on chunks of antiquity. The grey sky looked amazingly blue. In one picture, Mario had his arm around Anna's shoulders; in another, they were holding hands. Often the sea could be seen behind them. In front of them -- behind the photographer's back (visible in one picture as a long snake of shadow) -- was, I imagined, the desert, the huge beach of the Sahara.

What was it called, I wanted to know, this buffer of ruination between sea and desert? "Leptis Magna," Valeria told me. Leptis Magna. The four syllables were as much summons as name. As soon as I heard them I knew I had to go there. There may have been other, equally impressive, more accessible ruins in Syria and Turkey, but, from that moment, Leptis, for me, became the ruin, metonym, and epicenter of antiquity. "The desire to have seen," writes John Berger, "has a deep ontological basis." So I would go to Leptis, to see it in the flesh, to see it for myself.

Until recently -- until the Lockerbie bomb suspects were handed over for trial and the Libyan government paid compensation for shooting British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher from a window of its embassy in London (one of the more gratuitous acts of international aggression in our time) -- this was next to impossible. And even now that it is possible to travel to Libya, it's still pretty unusual. Tours are occasionally arranged for those with a special interest in archaeology or schlepping across the Sahara, but it's almost unheard of to travel there independently. Information about traveling in Libya is, consequently, pretty thin on the ground. There are dozens of guides to neighboring Egypt and Tunisia, but none to Libya. In London I couldn't even buy a map or book a hotel. I did buy a book about Leptis but, despite my fascination with the place, I couldn't bring myself to read more than the first couple of pages, and I couldn't follow the story of the founding of the city, its history, its architectural features, its glory and subsequent decline. It was built on the site of a Phoenician settlement some time between the prehistoric days of Raquel Welch's fur bikini and the chariot race in Ben Hur. That much is certain. The ampitheater was inaugurated in about 1 A.D. (an easy date to remember) and was granted colonial status under the Emperor Trajan in A.D. 109. The really spectacular stuff was built in the reign of Septimus Severus (193-211). After that, apart from getting trashed (by the Vandals?) in 523, reclaimed by the Byzantines a few days later (relatively speaking), and burying its head in the sand (going ostrich as archaelogists tend not to say), the history of Leptis is a complete blank.

Consider yourself lucky that that is all I know. Since living in Rome, I had read quite a bit about the emperors and their atrocious appetites but, beyond this, the defining feature of antiquity was how uninteresting it was to read about.

Now, I have to tell you, I am no stranger to boredom. I have been bored for much of my life by many things, but, equally, I have also been fantastically interested by many other things. My current interest in antiquity represented a weird synthesis -- a kind of short-circuit almost -- of these two currents of my life: for the first time ever I was bored by what I was interested in. I didn't fight it. I would go to Leptis not knowing anything about it. For classicists and archaeologists, a visit to Leptis was probably the summit of a lifetime's study, but I was putting my faith in the power of ignorance as an investigative tool. Where Foucault proposed an archaeology of knowledge, my trip would proceed in the opposite direction: the archaeology of ignorance.

LEPTIS IS JUST OUTSIDE of Khoms, eighty miles or so east of Tripoli. It was pouring with rain when I set off in a taxi along an immensely deserted freeway. On the outskirts of Tripoli the road was lined with billboards of Qaddafi looking, as always, slightly camp (a consequence, I suppose, of spending time in his famous tent), but these did not suggest an omnipresent head of state so much as the imminent appearance in concert of an aging -- no longer 'cheb'-- rai star. The driver and I sat in that companionable silence that is the result of being able to speak no more than two or three words of each other's language while the rain -- tidal, almost -- crashed around us. It was more like being on a trawler in the North Sea than a road on the edge of the desert.

Already depressed by the rain, my spirits plummeted when we got to the hotel. There were three or four men lingering around the reception area, not one of whom was doing anything or looked like he was about to do anything this side of eternity. This is a feature of employment in many parts of the developing world: a job involves a commitment to turn up and loiter for eight or nine hours. When your shift is over, you go home and do nothing there, too. I, on the other hand, was desperate to do something. As it was, I was caught in an intolerable tension between raging impatience to see the ruins and the chronic frustration of staring out the window, waiting for the rains -- there seemed to be at least two storm systems contending for a single landing spot -- to stop.

After a couple of hours, the sun peeped out. It was still raining, but the sun was shining. Then the rain stopped and the sun went in. For fifteen minutes it was a fifty-fifty, could-go-either-way stand-off. Then the sun came out again. This time it looked like staying out. Which it did. The clouds skulked off, the rain moved inland. The weather, in short, had improved dramatically. I was out of the door, on my way to antiquity.

The site is a couple of kilometers out of town and costs three dinars (a buck fifty) to get in. The entrance to the ruins themselves is indicated by the arch of Septimus Severus: scaffold-clad, in the process of some kind of renovation -- and therefore disappointing. Reminding us that the past's survival is not due entirely to its own stored reserves of longevity, scaffolding is fatal to the spell of antiquity. It gets -- mediates -- between the clean lines of ancient stone and the framing timelessness of the sky. I moved on, to the Palaestra, an expanse of grass and scattered columns. Immediately, there was the sense -- which I've had in only a few places in the world -- of entering not so much a physical space as a force-field, a place where time has stood its ground. The feeling is akin, I guess, to the one some people have on entering great cathedrals. The fact that I'd never been able to feel it myself was due, I assumed, to a lack of -- even a profound aversion to - the faith that inspired them. Equivalent places -- mosques, synagogues -- left me cold, too. Then, at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, I had a revelation. In that famously non-denominational environment -- a place designed to provide a setting for the contemplation of the spirit by those who, like myself, did not feel at home in any of the more traditional places of worship -- I felt . . . nothing. Not a thing. It was there, surrounded by the fathomless darkness of the paintings, that I realized I could never experience a sense of spiritual arrival indoors. D. H. Lawrence experienced exactly this sense of arrival, of "something final," at Taos Pueblo. While some places felt temporary on the face of the earth, Taos, according to Lawrence, retained "its old nodality." It is the same here, at Leptis. It is not a place one enters, but the dream-space of the past: a zone.

This impression was enhanced by two things: the narrow gauge railroad track winding its way through the site (now part of the ruin whose excavation it had once been designed to facilitate), and the Hadrianic Baths, which were flooded by the recent rain. The surface of the waters was stirred by the wind. A few tins rusted at the bottom of the baths. Weeds writhed over broken tiles. The combination of railroad and flooded baths was straight out of the Zone in Tarkovsky's Stalker. Here in Leptis, as in all Tarkovsky's films, the overwhelming feeling is the sense of beauty as force.

You feel this especially strongly in the Severan Forum. Enclosed by four high walls and a vast lid of sky, the Forum is completely hidden from view until you are inside it. The effect, when you enter, is hard to describe. In the Paleastra, I felt that I had entered the force-field of the past; here, I was completely enclosed -- sealed -- within it, walled in. This feeling was all the more marked because of the scale of the place, so huge it is difficult to think of comparisons (so many basketball or tennis courts).

Also, unlike the Paleastra -- open, sparsely columned -- it is dense with debris. It looks, actually, like a storage room or warehouse for bits and pieces of antiquity awaiting sorting and export. As well as a jumble of pillars and plinths, limestone fragments had been stacked up in neat piles as though the site were about to be redeveloped as a Cotswold village (Leptis on the Wold) with authentic dry-stone walling. Alongside the perimeter wall were columns and colonnades. In places, the earlier rain had all but disappeared. Marble slabs that had been drenched an hour ago, were now dry enough to sit on. (No wonder simulated marble is popular for kitchens and bathrooms.) Elsewhere, the water lay several inches deep. The sun bounced off puddles, throwing shadow ripples on the surrounding stones, making them seem liquid, melty. One of the columns, bathed in writhing shadow, was filled entirely with writing. The elision of the transitory and permanent -- 'Here lies one whose name is writ in water' -- was held vividly in balance. To that extent, my impressions conformed loyally to a template established by the Romantics. In other ways, though, my sentiments ran counter to theirs. The vast and trunkless legs of stone evoked by Shelley in "Ozymandias," are emblems of the futility of tyranny, the transitoriness of memorials to power. Here, though, the sense was of the capacity of power to endure. That is why Albert Speer evolved his "Theory of Ruin Value," planning Hitler's monuments with a view not just to their immediate impact but to how they would appear millennia hence when nothing survived of the Thousand- year Reich but ruins to rival the great models of antiquity. Obviously it didn't quite work out that way, but you can see what he had in mind.

Another bank of clouds moved swiftly across the ruins of the Forum. The sky darkened, brightened, grew dark again. Perhaps it was not the clouds that were moving but the earth itself, going through the motions of its orbit at a furious pace. It was like experiencing time from the perspective of the ruins: years, decades, even centuries whizzing by like a day viewed through a time-lapse camera. For a short while, the stones retained some of the glow that they had absorbed from the sun. Then, as the sky became uniformly grey, the stones lost their iridescence and I felt disappointed, cheated. As the gloom settled, it suddenly seemed to me that I had spent the last fifteen years dragging the same burden of frustrated expectation from one corner of the world to the next. I felt I could no longer take the roller-coaster emotions of travel, its surges of exaltation, its troughs of despondency, its huge stretches of boredom and inconvenience. It was no longer pleasant sitting here in the Forum, but the prospect of going back to the hotel seemed even more wretched. Then it started to rain again.

APART FROM A FEW FEATHERS of cloud, the sky, next morning, was perfectly clear. Birds were singing. The air was chilly, waiting to become warm. I made my way to the amphitheater where time, in the idiom of the stage, was enjoying one of its longest-ever runs. It was a classic performance. (Did I wish that Oedipus Rex or something of that ilk was being performed here? Definitely not. No play could ever do justice to the setting. A film could, though.) On and behind the stage was a thicket of columns. Behind the pillars were sea and sky, two flat bands of blue. The sea could not be heard. Everything had become still. This is what I had wanted: the temporal experienced purely in terms of the spatial. Wind is the breath of time, hurrying by. Stillness, though, is like the trance of stopped time. I moved from place to place in the amphitheater, arranging the intersections of columns, sea, and sky in new ways, new angles. Perhaps the simplest lesson of antiquity is that, after a time, anything vertical -- Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, whatever -- commands admiration. Ultimately, though, the lure of the horizontal will always prove irresistible. This is why the sight of the ancient vertical is always enhanced by a backdrop horizon of sky and sea. Some columns sparkled slightly in the sunlight, the almost invisible remains of marble cladding long since stripped by erosion or thieves. That, I guessed, was the practical explanation. But it also seemed that these columns had been cast from such stuff as stars are made of. And just as stars are often dead before their light reaches us (it's been a cliché for ages, but it'll be a while before we realize it), so what I was seeing now seemed the light of the dead city.

I left the ampitheater and wandered through the vast site. I walked for hours without encountering a single person. It became hot. The moon appeared over the Arch of Trajan. Eventually, in the late afternoon, I found myself back in the Severan Forum and the adjacent Basilica. The walls and columns are made of limestone and glowed gold as toast against the sky. I looked at my book on Leptis and again made little progress. One page featured an artist's impression showing what the city would have looked like in its glorious heyday. From this perspective, what remains is a form of forensic evidence -- a negative blueprint -- of what was. The more meticulously such reconstructions are done, however, the less convincing they become: for me, antiquity is not what can be deduced but, exactly, what remains. Joseph Brodsky thought that antiquity was "a vast chronological jumble," "a visual concept, generated by objects whose age escapes definition." By giving in to my indiscipline and laziness, by failing to follow the history of the town's development, I had remained faithful to Brodsky's definition of antiquity. As far as I was concerned, Leptis only really got going when it fell into ruin, its decline was its glory (and vice-versa). From this point of view, in fact, the site was still in the early stages of a career of ruination which would end ultimately as desert, when the horizon would be undisturbed by any vestige of the vertical: the final triumph of space over time.

Sitting in the Forum, I was overcome by the simplest of emotions: I was glad I had come. Not only that: I was glad that Leptis was in the fundamentally unwelcoming, unappealing land of Libya.

In Rome, in 1956, the Forum seemed to John Cheever "to be a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, for we see not only the ghosts of Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and men with beards and little children rolling hoops." That is exactly the history invoked by Roman ruins in Italy: the history of visitors on the grand tour, aghast at the wonders of antiquity. Here, though, in unvisited Leptis, there was no sense of that long history of prior tourism. Even if the site had been visited extensively in the past -- by my girlfriend's parents, for example -- the Qaddafi era had effectively isolated Leptis from its recent past, and, in so doing, had brought the distant past into an extraordinary adjacency with the present. Stripped of the history noticed by Cheever, the ruins were bathed in a perpetual present -- a kind of eternity -- of which the golden light and stalled moon were the perfect expression. In vaguely Rilkean fashion, it had sometimes seemed to me that the sky was always at its bluest around trees. In fact, I saw now, it is far, far more blue around an antique column or arch. The blue that frames the broken columns of Leptis is especially deep because . . . well, let's take a detour into the realm of speculative optics.

Extrapolating from the native's proverbial fear of the camera stealing his soul, let's assume that it does the same with places, eroding them slightly with each click. And perhaps, in similar fashion, even looking does the same. You visit a place like the Forum in Rome and it is quite difficult to see it with your own eyes (I saw it through Cheever's). In a sense, there is nothing left to see. Because it is so radically under-visited, so unseen, the sky and columns of Leptis Magna have not been diminished, have not been diluted by looking. That is why you feel its nodality so powerfully. That is why the need to have seen is satisfied so profoundly here. You have to have seen it to believe.

Geoff Dyer  is the author of But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, and Paris, Trance. He lives in London.

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