  Because of the rapidly falling particle spectrum at large $p_T$ from jet
fragmentation at the CERN SPS energy, the high-$p_T$ hadron distribution should
be highly sensitive to parton energy loss inside a dense medium as predicted by
recent perturbative QCD (pQCD) studies. A careful analysis of recent data from
CERN SPS experiments via pQCD calculation shows little evidence of energy loss.
This implies that either the life-time of the dense partonic matter is very
short or one has to re-think about the problem of parton energy loss in dense
matter. The hadronic matter does not seem to cause jet quenching in $Pb+Pb$
collisions at the CERN SPS. High-$p_T$ two particle correlation in the
azimuthal angle is proposed to further clarify this issue.
