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Salammbo

by Gustave Flaubert · English · Gutenberg #1290 · 629,689 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Salammbo

Author: Gustave Flaubert


        
Release date: February 11, 2006 [eBook #1290]
                Most recently updated: April 16, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1290


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALAMMBO ***




Salammbô

By Gustave Flaubert





    CONTENTS


    CHAPTER I

    CHAPTER II

    CHAPTER III

    CHAPTER IV

    CHAPTER V

    CHAPTER VI

    CHAPTER VII

    CHAPTER VIII

    CHAPTER IX

    CHAPTER X

    CHAPTER XI

    CHAPTER XII

    CHAPTER XIII

    CHAPTER XIV

    CHAPTER XV





CHAPTER I THE FEAST

It was at Megara, a suburb of Carthage, in the gardens of Hamilcar. The
soldiers whom he had commanded in Sicily were having a great feast to
celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Eryx, and as the master was
away, and they were numerous, they ate and drank with perfect freedom.

The captains, who wore bronze cothurni, had placed themselves in the
central path, beneath a gold-fringed purple awning, which reached from
the wall of the stables to the first terrace of the palace; the common
soldiers were scattered beneath the trees, where numerous flat-roofed
buildings might be seen, wine-presses, cellars, storehouses, bakeries,
and arsenals, with a court for elephants, dens for wild beasts, and a
prison for slaves.

Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a wood of sycamores stretched away to
meet masses of verdure, where the pomegranate shone amid the white tufts
of the cotton-plant; vines, grape-laden, grew up into the branches of
the pines; a field of roses bloomed beneath the plane-trees; here and
there lilies rocked upon the turf; the paths were strewn with black sand
mingled with powdered coral, and in the centre the avenue of cypress
formed, as it were, a double colonnade of green obelisks from one
extremity to the other.

Far in the background stood the palace, built of yellow mottled Numidian
marble, broad courses supporting its four terraced stories. With its
large, straight, ebony staircase, bearing the prow of a vanquished
galley at the corners of every step, its red doors quartered with black
crosses, its brass gratings protecting it from scorpions below, and its
trellises of gilded rods closing the apertures above, it seemed to the
soldiers in its haughty opulence as solemn and impenetrable as the face
of Hamilcar.

The Council had appointed his house for the holding of this feast; the
convalescents lying in the temple of Eschmoun had set out at daybreak
and dragged themselves thither on their crutches. Every minute others
were arriving. They poured in ceaselessly by every path like torrents
rushing into a lake; through the trees the slaves of the kitchens might
be seen running scared and half-naked; the gazelles fled bleating on the
lawns; the sun was setting, and the perfume of citron trees rendered the
exhalation from the perspiring crowd heavier still.

Men of all nations were there, Ligurians, Lusitanians, Balearians,
Negroes, and fugitives from Rome. Beside the heavy Dorian dialect were
audible the resonant Celtic syllables rattling like chariots of war,
while Ionian terminations conflicted with consonants of the desert
as harsh as the jackal’s cry. The Greek might be recognised by his
slender figure, the Egyptian by his elevated shoulders, the Cantabrian
by his broad calves. There were Carians proudly nodding their helmet
plumes, Cappadocian archers displaying large flowers painted on their
bodies with the juice of herbs, and a few Lydians in women’s robes,
dining in slippers and earrings. Others were ostentatiously daubed with
vermilion, and resembled coral statues.

They stretched themselves on the cushions, they ate squatting round
large trays, or lying face downwards they drew out the pieces of meat
and sated themselves, leaning on their elbows in the peaceful posture
of lions tearing their prey. The last comers stood leaning against the
trees watching the low tables half hidden beneath the scarlet coverings,
and awaiting their turn.

Hamilcar’s kitchens being insufficient, the Council had sent them
slaves, ware, and beds, and in the middle of the garden, as on a
battle-field when they burn the dead, large bright fires might be seen,
at which oxen were roasting. Anise-sprinkled loaves alternated with
great cheeses heavier than discuses, crateras filled with wine,
and cantharuses filled with water, together with baskets of gold
filigree-work containing flowers. Every eye was dilated with the joy of
being able at last to gorge at pleasure, and songs were beginning here
and there.

First they were served with birds and green sauce in plates of red clay
relieved by drawings in black, then with every kind of shell-fish that
is gathered on the Punic coasts, wheaten porridge, beans and barley, and
snails dressed with cumin on dishes of yellow amber.

Afterwards the tables were covered with meats, antelopes with their
horns, peacocks with their feathers, whole sheep cooked in sweet wine,
haunches of she-camels and buffaloes, hedgehogs with garum, fried
grasshoppers, and preserved dormice. Large pieces of fat floated in the
midst of saffron in bowls of Tamrapanni wood. Everything was running
over with wine, truffles, and asafotida. Pyramids of fruit were
crumbling upon honeycombs, and they had not forgotten a few of those
plump little dogs with pink silky hair and fattened on olive lees,—a
Carthaginian dish held in abhorrence among other nations. Surprise at
the novel fare excited the greed of the stomach. The Gauls with
their long hair drawn up on the crown of the head, snatched at the
water-melons and lemons, and crunched them up with the rind. The
Negroes, who had never seen a lobster, tore their faces with its red
prickles. But the shaven Greeks, whiter than marble, threw the leavings
of their plates behind them, while the herdsmen from Brutium, in their
wolf-skin garments, devoured in silence with their faces in their
portions.

Night fell. The velarium, spread over the cypress avenue, was drawn
back, and torches were brought.

The apes, sacred to the moon, were terrified on the cedar tops by the
wavering lights of the petroleum as it burned in the porphyry vases.
They uttered screams which afforded mirth to the soldiers.

Oblong flames trembled in cuirasses of brass. Every kind of
scintillation flashed from the gem-incrusted dishes. The crateras with
their borders of convex mirrors multiplied and enlarged the images of
things; the soldiers thronged around, looking at their reflections with
amazement, and grimacing to make themselves laugh. They tossed the ivory
stools and golden spatulas to one another across the tables. They gulped
down all the Greek wines in their leathern bottles, the Campanian wine
enclosed in amphoras, the Cantabrian wines brought in casks, with the
wines of the jujube, cinnamomum and lotus. There were pools of these on
the ground that made the foot slip. The smoke of the meats ascended into
the foliage with the vapour of the breath. Simultaneously were heard
the snapping of jaws, the noise of speech, songs, and cups, the crash of
Campanian vases shivering into a thousand pieces, or the limpid sound of
a large silver dish.

In proportion as their intoxication increased they more and more
recalled the injustice of Carthage. The Republic, in fact, exhausted by
the war, had allowed all the returning bands to accumulate in the town.
Gisco, their general, had however been prudent enough to send them back
severally in order to facilitate the liquidation of their pay, and
the Council had believed that they would in the end consent to some
reduction. But at present ill-will was caused by the inability to pay
them. This debt was confused in the minds of the people with the 3200
Euboic talents exacted by Lutatius, and equally with Rome they were
regarded as enemies to Carthage. The Mercenaries understood this, and
their indignation found vent in threats and outbreaks. At last they
demanded permission to assemble to celebrate one of their victories,
and the peace party yielded, at the same time revenging themselves on
Hamilcar who had so strongly upheld the war. It had been terminated
notwithstanding all his efforts, so that, despairing of Carthage, he
had entrusted the government of the Mercenaries to Gisco. To appoint his
palace for their reception was to draw upon him something of the hatred
which was borne to them. Moreover, the expense must be excessive, and he
would incur nearly the whole.

Proud of having brought the Republic to submit, the Mercenaries thought
that they were at last about to return to their homes with the payment
for their blood in the hoods of their cloaks. But as seen through the
mists of intoxication, their fatigues seemed to them prodigious and but
ill-rewarded. They showed one another their wounds, they told of their
combats, their travels and the hunting in their native lands. They
imitated the cries and the leaps of wild beasts. Then came unclean
wagers; they buried their heads in the amphoras and drank on without
interruption, like thirsty dromedaries. A Lusitanian of gigantic stature
ran over the tables, carrying a man in each hand at arm’s length, and
spitting out fire through his nostrils. Some Lacedæmonians, who had not
taken off their cuirasses, were leaping with a heavy step. Some advanced
like women, making obscene gestures; others stripped naked to fight amid
the cups after the fashion of gladiators, and a company of Greeks danced
around a vase whereon nymphs were to be seen, while a Negro tapped with
an ox-bone on a brazen buckler.

Suddenly they heard a plaintive song, a song loud and soft, rising and
falling in the air like the wing-beating of a wounded bird.

It was the voice of the slaves in the ergastulum. Some soldiers rose at
a bound to release them and disappeared.

They returned, driving through the dust amid shouts, twenty men,
distinguished by their greater paleness of face. Small black felt caps
of conical shape covered their shaven heads; they all wore wooden shoes,
and yet made a noise as of old iron like driving chariots.

They reached the avenue of cypress, where they were lost among the crowd
of those questioning them. One of them remained apart, standing. Through
the rents in his tunic his shoulders could be seen striped with long
scars. Drooping his chin, he looked round him with distrust, closing his
eyelids somewhat against the dazzling light of the torches, but when
he saw that none of the armed men were unfriendly to him, a great sigh
escaped from his breast; he stammered, he sneered through the bright
tears that bathed his face. At last he seized a brimming cantharus by
its rings, raised it straight up into the air with his outstretched
arms, from which his chains hung down, and then looking to heaven, and
still holding the cup he said:

“Hail first to thee, Baal-Eschmoun, the deliverer, whom the people of
my country call Æsculapius! and to you, genii of the fountains, light,
and woods! and to you, ye gods hidden beneath the mountains and in the
caverns of the earth! and to you, strong men in shining armour who have
set me free!”

Then he let fall the cup and related his history. He was called
Spendius. The Carthaginians had taken him in the battle of Æginusæ,
and he thanked the Mercenaries once more in Greek, Ligurian and Punic;
he kissed their hands; finally, he congratulated them on the banquet,
while expressing his surprise at not perceiving the cups of the Sacred
Legion. These cups, which bore an emerald vine on each of their
six golden faces, belonged to a corps composed exclusively of young
patricians of the tallest stature. They were a privilege, almost a
sacerdotal distinction, and accordingly nothing among the treasures
of the Republic was more coveted by the Mercenaries. They detested the
Legion on this account, and some of them had been known to risk their
lives for the inconceivable pleasure of drinking out of these cups.

Accordingly they commanded that the cups should be brought. They were
in the keeping of the Syssitia, companies of traders, who had a common
table. The slaves returned. At that hour all the members of the Syssitia
were asleep.

“Let them be awakened!” responded the Mercenaries.

After a second excursion it was explained to them that the cups were
shut up in a temple.

“Let it be opened!” they replied.

And when the slaves confessed with trembling that they were in the
possession of Gisco, the general, they cried out:

“Let him bring them!”

Gisco soon appeared at the far end of the garden with an escort of the
Sacred Legion. His full, black cloak, which was fastened on his head to
a golden mitre starred with precious stones, and which hung all about
him down to his horse’s hoofs, blended in the distance with the colour
of the night. His white beard, the radiancy of his head-dress, and his
triple necklace of broad blue plates beating against his breast, were
alone visible.

When he entered, the soldiers greeted him with loud shouts, all crying:

“The cups! The cups!”

He began by declaring that if reference were had to their courage, they
were worthy of them.

The crowd applauded and howled with joy.

He knew it, he who had commanded them over yonder, and had returned with
the last cohort in the last galley!

“True! True!” said they.

Nevertheless, Gisco continued, the Republic had respected their national
divisions, their customs, and their modes of worship; in Carthage
they were free! As to the cups of the Sacred Legion, they were private
property. Suddenly a Gaul, who was close to Spendius, sprang over the
tables and ran straight up to Gisco, gesticulating and threatening him
with two naked swords.

Without interrupting his speech, the General struck him on the head with
his heavy ivory staff, and the Barbarian fell. The Gauls howled, and
their frenzy, which was spreading to the others, would soon have swept
away the legionaries. Gisco shrugged his shoulders as he saw them
growing pale. He thought that his courage would be useless against these
exasperated brute beasts. It would be better to revenge himself upon
them by some artifice later; accordingly, he signed to his soldiers and
slowly withdrew. Then, turning in the gateway towards the Mercenaries,
he cried to them that they would repent of it.

The feast recommenced. But Gisco might return, and by surrounding the
suburb, which was beside the last ramparts, might crush them against the
walls. Then they felt themselves alone in spite of their crowd, and the
great town sleeping beneath them in the shade suddenly made them afraid,
with its piles of staircases, its lofty black houses, and its vague gods
fiercer even than its people. In the distance a few ships’-lanterns
were gliding across the harbour, and there were lights in the temple of
Khamon. They thought of Hamilcar. Where was he? Why had he forsaken
them when peace was concluded? His differences with the Council were
doubtless but a pretence in order to destroy them. Their unsatisfied
hate recoiled upon him, and they cursed him, exasperating one another
with their own anger. At this juncture they collected together beneath
the plane-trees to see a slave who, with eyeballs fixed, neck contorted,
and lips covered with foam, was rolling on the ground, and beating the
soil with his limbs. Some one cried out that he was poisoned. All then
believed themselves poisoned. They fell upon the slaves, a terrible
clamour was raised, and a vertigo of destruction came like a whirlwind
upon the drunken army. They struck about them at random, they smashed,
they slew; some hurled torches into the foliage; others, leaning over
the lions’ balustrade, massacred the animals with arrows; the most
daring ran to the elephants, desiring to cut down their trunks and eat
ivory.

Some Balearic slingers, however, who had gone round the corner of the
palace, in order to pillage more conveniently, were checked by a lofty
barrier, made of Indian cane. They cut the lock-straps with their
daggers, and then found themselves beneath the front that faced
Carthage, in another garden full of trimmed vegetation. Lines of white
flowers all following one another in regular succession formed long
parabolas like star-rockets on the azure-coloured earth. The gloomy
bushes exhaled warm and honied odours. There were trunks of trees
smeared with cinnabar, which resembled columns covered with blood. In
the centre were twelve pedestals, each supporting a great glass ball,
and these hollow globes were indistinctly filled with reddish lights,
like enormous and still palpitating eyeballs. The soldiers lighted
themselves with torches as they stumbled on the slope of the deeply
laboured soil.

But they perceived a little lake divided into several basins by walls
of blue stones. So limpid was the wave that the flames of the torches
quivered in it at the very bottom, on a bed of white pebbles and golden
dust. It began to bubble, luminous spangles glided past, and great fish
with gems about their mouths, appeared near the surface.

With much laughter the soldiers slipped their fingers into the gills and
brought them to the tables. They were the fish of the Barca family, and
were all descended from those primordial lotes which had hatched the
mystic egg wherein the goddess was concealed. The idea of committing
a sacrilege revived the greediness of the Mercenaries; they speedily
placed fire beneath some brazen vases, and amused themselves by watching
the beautiful fish struggling in the boiling water.

The surge of soldiers pressed on. They were no longer afraid. They
commenced to drink again. Their ragged tunics were wet with the perfumes
that flowed in large drops from their foreheads, and resting both fists
on the tables, which seemed to them to be rocking like ships, they
rolled their great drunken eyes around to devour by sight what they
could not take. Others walked amid the dishes on the purple table
covers, breaking ivory stools, and phials of Tyrian glass to pieces with
their feet. Songs mingled with the death-rattle of the slaves expiring
amid the broken cups. They demanded wine, meat, gold. They cried out for
women. They raved in a hundred languages. Some thought that they were at
the vapour baths on account of the steam which floated around them,
or else, catching sight of the foliage, imagined that they were at
the chase, and rushed upon their companions as upon wild beasts. The
conflagration spread to all the trees, one after another, and the lofty
mosses of verdure, emitting long white spirals, looked like volcanoes
beginning to smoke. The clamour redoubled; the wounded lions roared in
the shade.

In an instant the highest terrace of the palace was illuminated, the
central door opened, and a woman, Hamilcar’s daughter herself, clothed
in black garments, appeared on the threshold. She descended the first
staircase, which ran obliquely along the first story, then the second,
and the third, and stopped on the last terrace at the head of the galley
staircase. Motionless and with head bent, she gazed upon the soldiers.

Behind her, on each side, were two long shadows of pale men, clad in
white, red-fringed robes, which fell straight to their feet. They had no
beard, no hair, no eyebrows. In their hands, which sparkled with rings,
they carried enormous lyres, and with shrill voice they sang a hymn to
the divinity of Carthage. They were the eunuch priests of the temple of
Tanith, who were often summoned by Salammbô to her house.

At last she descended the galley staircase. The priests followed her.
She advanced into the avenue of cypress, and walked slowly through the
tables of the captains, who drew back somewhat as they watched her pass.

Her hair, which was powdered with violet sand, and combined into the
form of a tower, after the fashion of the Chanaanite maidens, added to
her height. Tresses of pearls were fastened to her temples, and fell to
the corners of her mouth, which was as rosy as a half-open pomegranate.
On her breast was a collection of luminous stones, their variegation
imitating the scales of the murena. Her arms were adorned with diamonds,
and issued naked from her sleeveless tunic, which was starred with
red flowers on a perfectly black ground. Between her ankles she wore a
golden chainlet to regulate her steps, and her large dark purple mantle,
cut of an unknown material, trailed behind her, making, as it were, at
each step, a broad wave which followed her.

The priests played nearly stifled chords on their lyres from time to
time, and in the intervals of the music might be heard the tinkling of
the little golden chain, and the regular patter of her papyrus sandals.

No one as yet was acquainted with her. It was only known that she led a
retired life, engaged in pious practices. Some soldiers had seen her in
the night on the summit of her palace kneeling before the stars amid the
eddyings from kindled perfuming-pans. It was the moon that had made her
so pale, and there was something from the gods that enveloped her like a
subtle vapour. Her eyes seemed to gaze far beyond terrestrial space. She
bent her head as she walked, and in her right hand she carried a little
ebony lyre.

They heard her murmur:

“Dead! All dead! No more will you come obedient to my voice as when,
seated on the edge of the lake, I used to throw seeds of the watermelon
into your mouths! The mystery of Tanith ranged in the depths of your
eyes that were more limpid than the globules of rivers.” And she called
them by their names, which were those of the months—“Siv! Sivan!
Tammouz, Eloul, Tischri, Schebar! Ah! have pity on me, goddess!”

The soldiers thronged about her without understanding what she said.
They wondered at her attire, but she turned a long frightened look upon
them all, then sinking her head beneath her shoulders, and waving her
arms, she repeated several times:

“What have you done? what have you done?

“Yet you had bread, and meats and oil, and all the malobathrum of the
granaries for your enjoyment! I had brought oxen from Hecatompylos;
I had sent hunters into the desert!” Her voice swelled; her cheeks
purpled. She added, “Where, pray, are you now? In a conquered town,
or in the palace of a master? And what master? Hamilcar the Suffet, my
father, the servant of the Baals! It was he who withheld from Lutatius
those arms of yours, red now with the blood of his slaves! Know you of
any in your own lands more skilled in the conduct of battles? Look! our
palace steps are encumbered with our victories! Ah! desist not! burn
it! I will carry away with me the genius of my house, my black serpent
slumbering up yonder on lotus leaves! I will whistle and he will follow
me, and if I embark in a galley he will speed in the wake of my ship
over the foam of the waves.”

Her delicate nostrils were quivering. She crushed her nails against the
gems on her bosom. Her eyes drooped, and she resumed:

“Ah! poor Carthage! lamentable city! No longer hast thou for thy
protection the strong men of former days who went beyond the oceans to
build temples on their shores. All the lands laboured about thee, and
the sea-plains, ploughed by thine oars, rocked with thy harvests.”
Then she began to sing the adventures of Melkarth, the god of the
Sidonians, and the father of her family.

She told of the ascent of the mountains of Ersiphonia, the journey to
Tartessus, and the war against Masisabal to avenge the queen of the
serpents:

“He pursued the female monster, whose tail undulated over the dead
leaves like a silver brook, into the forest, and came to a plain where
women with dragon-croups were round a great fire, standing erect on the
points of their tails. The blood-coloured moon was shining within a
pale circle, and their scarlet tongues, cloven like the harpoons of
fishermen, reached curling forth to the very edge of the flame.”

Then Salammbô, without pausing, related how Melkarth, after vanquishing
Masisabal, placed her severed head on the prow of his ship. “At each
throb of the waves it sank beneath the foam, but the sun embalmed it; it
became harder than gold; nevertheless the eyes ceased not to weep, and
the tears fell into the water continually.”

She sang all this in an old Chanaanite idiom, which the Barbarians did
not understand. They asked one another what she could be saying to them
with those frightful gestures which accompanied her speech, and mounted
round about her on the tables, beds, and sycamore boughs, they strove
with open mouths and craned necks to grasp the vague stories hovering
before their imaginations, through the dimness of the theogonies, like
phantoms wrapped in cloud.

Only the beardless priests understood Salammbô; their wrinkled hands,
which hung over the strings of their lyres, quivered, and from time
to time they would draw forth a mournful chord; for, feebler than old
women, they trembled at once with mystic emotion, and with the
fear inspired by men. The Barbarians heeded them not, but listened
continually to the maiden’s song.

None gazed at her like a young Numidian chief, who was placed at the
captains’ tables among soldiers of his own nation. His girdle so
bristled with darts that it formed a swelling in his ample cloak,
which was fastened on his temples with a leather lace. The cloth parted
asunder as it fell upon his shoulders, and enveloped his countenance in
shadow, so that only the fires of his two fixed eyes could be seen. It
was by chance that he was at the feast, his father having domiciled him
with the Barca family, according to the custom by which kings used to
send their children into the households of the great in order to pave
the way for alliances; but Narr’ Havas had lodged there for six months
without having hitherto seen Salammbô, and now, seated on his heels,
with his head brushing the handles of his javelins, he was watching her
with dilated nostrils, like a leopard crouching among the bamboos.

On the other side of the tables was a Libyan of colossal stature, and
with short black curly hair. He had retained only his military jacket,
the brass plates of which were tearing the purple of the couch. A
necklace of silver moons was tangled in his hairy breast. His face was
stained with splashes of blood; he was leaning on his left elbow with a
smile on his large, open mouth.

Salammbô had abandoned the sacred rhythm. With a woman’s subtlety she
was simultaneously employing all the dialects of the Barbarians in order
to appease their anger. To the Greeks she spoke Greek; then she turned
to the Ligurians, the Campanians, the Negroes, and listening to her each
one found again in her voice the sweetness of his native land. She now,
carried away by the memories of Carthage, sang of the ancient battles
against Rome; they applauded. She kindled at the gleaming of the naked
swords, and cried aloud with outstretched arms. Her lyre fell, she was
silent; and, pressing both hands upon her heart, she remained for some
minutes with closed eyelids enjoying the agitation of all these men.

Matho, the Libyan, leaned over towards her. Involuntarily she approached
him, and impelled by grateful pride, poured him a long stream of wine
into a golden cup in order to conciliate the army.

“Drink!” she said.

He took the cup, and was carrying it to his lips when a Gaul, the same
that had been hurt by Gisco, struck him on the shoulder, while in a
jovial manner he gave utterance to pleasantries in his native tongue.
Spendius was not far off, and he volunteered to interpret them.

“Speak!” said Matho.

“The gods protect you; you are going to become rich. When will the
nuptials be?”

“What nuptials?”

“Yours! for with us,” said the Gaul, “when a woman gives drink to
a soldier, it means that she offers him her couch.”

He had not finished when Narr’ Havas, with a bound, drew a javelin
from his girdle, and, leaning his right foot upon the edge of the table,
hurled it against Matho.

The javelin whistled among the cups, and piercing the Lybian’s arm,
pinned it so firmly to the cloth, that the shaft quivered in the air.

Matho quickly plucked it out; but he was weaponless and naked; at last
he lifted the over-laden table with both arms, and flung it against
Narr’ Havas into the very centre of the crowd that rushed between
them. The soldiers and Numidians pressed together so closely that they
were unable to draw their swords. Matho advanced dealing great blows
with his head. When he raised it, Narr’ Havas had disappeared. He
sought for him with his eyes. Salammbô also was gone.

Then directing his looks to the palace he perceived the red door with
the black cross closing far above, and he darted away.

They saw him run between the prows of the galleys, and then reappear
along the three staircases until he reached the red door against which
he dashed his whole body. Panting, he leaned against the wall to keep
himself from falling.

But a man had followed him, and through the darkness, for the lights
of the feast were hidden by the corner of the palace, he recognised
Spendius.

“Begone!” said he.

The slave without replying began to tear his tunic with his teeth;
then kneeling beside Matho he tenderly took his arm, and felt it in the
shadow to discover the wound.

By a ray of the moon which was then gliding between the clouds, Spendius
perceived a gaping wound in the middle of the arm. He rolled the piece
of stuff about it, but the other said irritably, “Leave me! leave
me!”

“Oh no!” replied the slave. “You released me from the ergastulum.
I am yours! you are my master! command me!”

Matho walked round the terrace brushing against the walls. He strained
his ears at every step, glancing down into the silent apartments through
the spaces between the gilded reeds. At last he stopped with a look of
despair.

“Listen!” said the slave to him. “Oh! do not despise me for my
feebleness! I have lived in the palace. I can wind like a viper through
the walls. Come! in the Ancestor’s Chamber there is an ingot of gold
beneath every flagstone; an underground path leads to their tombs.”

“Well! what matters it?” said Matho.

Spendius was silent.

They were on the terrace. A huge mass of shadow stretched before them,
appearing as if it contained vague accumulations, like the gigantic
billows of a black and petrified ocean.

But a luminous bar rose towards the East; far below, on the left, the
canals of Megara were beginning to stripe the verdure of the gardens
with their windings of white. The conical roofs of the heptagonal
temples, the staircases, terraces, and ramparts were being carved by
degrees upon the paleness of the dawn; and a girdle of white foam rocked
around the Carthaginian peninsula, while the emerald sea appeared as if
it were curdled in the freshness of the morning. Then as the rosy sky
grew larger, the lofty houses, bending over the sloping soil, reared
and massed themselves like a herd of black goats coming down from the
mountains. The deserted streets lengthened; the palm-trees that topped
the walls here and there were motionless; the brimming cisterns seemed
like silver bucklers lost in the courts; the beacon on the promontory of
Hermæum was beginning to grow pale. The horses of Eschmoun, on the very
summit of the Acropolis in the cypress wood, feeling that the light was
coming, placed their hoofs on the marble parapet, and neighed towards
the sun.

It appeared, and Spendius raised his arms with a cry.

Everything stirred in a diffusion of red, for the god, as if he were
rending himself, now poured full-rayed upon Carthage the golden rain
of his veins. The beaks of the galleys sparkled, the roof of Khamon
appeared to be all in flames, while far within the temples, whose
doors were opening, glimmerings of light could be seen. Large chariots,
arriving from the country, rolled their wheels over the flagstones
in the streets. Dromedaries, baggage-laden, came down the ramps.
Money-changers raised the pent-houses of their shops at the cross ways,
storks took to flight, white sails fluttered. In the wood of Tanith
might be heard the tabourines of the sacred courtesans, and the furnaces
for baking the clay coffins were beginning to smoke on the Mappalian
point.

Spendius leaned over the terrace; his teeth chattered and he repeated:

“Ah! yes—yes—master! I understand why you scorned the pillage of
the house just now.”

Matho was as if he had just been awaked by the hissing of his voice, and
did not seem to understand. Spendius resumed:

“Ah! what riches! and the men who possess them have not even the steel
to defend them!”

Then, pointing with his right arm outstretched to some of the populace
who were crawling on the sand outside the mole to look for gold dust:

“See!” he said to him, “the Republic is like these wretches:
bending on the brink of the ocean, she buries her greedy arms in every
shore, and the noise of the billows so fills her ear that she cannot
hear behind her the tread of a master’s heel!”

He drew Matho to quite the other end of the terrace, and showed him the
garden, wherein the soldiers’ swords, hanging on the trees, were like
mirrors in the sun.

“But here there are strong men whose hatred is roused! and nothing
binds them to Carthage, neither families, oaths nor gods!”

Matho remained leaning against the wall; Spendius came close, and
continued in a low voice:

“Do you understand me, soldier? We should walk purple-clad like
satraps. We should bathe in perfumes; and I should in turn have slaves!
Are you not weary of sleeping on hard ground, of drinking the vinegar
of the camps, and of continually hearing the trumpet? But you will rest
later, will you not? When they pull off your cuirass to cast your corpse
to the vultures! or perhaps blind, lame, and weak you will go, leaning
on a stick, from door to door to tell of your youth to pickle-sellers
and little children. Remember all the injustice of your chiefs, the
campings in the snow, the marchings in the sun, the tyrannies of
discipline, and the everlasting menace of the cross! And after all this
misery they have given you a necklace of honour, as they hang a girdle
of bells round the breast of an ass to deafen it on its journey, and
prevent it from feeling fatigue. A man like you, braver than Pyrrhus! If
only you had wished it! Ah! how happy will you be in large cool halls,
with the sound of lyres, lying on flowers, with women and buffoons! Do
not tell me that the enterprise is impossible. Have not the Mercenaries
already possessed Rhegium and other fortified places in Italy? Who is to
prevent you? Hamilcar is away; the people execrate the rich; Gisco can
do nothing with the cowards who surround him. Command them! Carthage is
ours; let us fall upon it!”

“No!” said Matho, “the curse of Moloch weighs upon me. I felt it
in her eyes, and just now I saw a black ram retreating in a temple.”
Looking around him he added: “But where is she?”

Then Spendius understood that a great disquiet possessed him, and did
not venture to speak again.

The trees behind them were still smoking; half-burned carcases of apes
dropped from their blackened boughs from time to time into the midst
of the dishes. Drunken soldiers snored open-mouthed by the side of the
corpses, and those who were not asleep lowered their heads dazzled by
the light of day. The trampled soil was hidden beneath splashes of red.
The elephants poised their bleeding trunks between the stakes of their
pens. In the open granaries might be seen sacks of spilled wheat, below
the gate was a thick line of chariots which had been heaped up by the
Barbarians, and the peacocks perched in the cedars were spreading their
tails and beginning to utter their cry.

Matho’s immobility, however, astonished Spendius; he was even paler
than he had recently been, and he was following something on the horizon
with fixed eyeballs, and with both fists resting on the edge of the
terrace. Spendius crouched down, and so at last discovered at what he
was gazing. In the distance a golden speck was turning in the dust on
the road to Utica; it was the nave of a chariot drawn by two mules;
a slave was running at the end of the pole, and holding them by the
bridle. Two women were seated in the chariot. The manes of the animals
were puffed between the ears after the Persian fashion, beneath a
network of blue pearls. Spendius recognised them, and restrained a cry.

A large veil floated behind in the wind.





CHAPTER II AT SICCA

Two days afterwards the Mercenaries left Carthage.

They had each received a piece of gold on the condition that they
should go into camp at Sicca, and they had been told with all sorts of
caresses:

“You are the saviours of Carthage! But you would starve it if you
remained there; it would become insolvent. Withdraw! The Republic will
be grateful to you later for all this condescension. We are going to
levy taxes immediately; your pay shall be in full, and galleys shall be
equipped to take you back to your native lands.”

They did not know how to reply to all this talk. These men, accustomed
as they were to war, were wearied by residence in a town; there was
difficulty in convincing them, and the people mounted the walls to see
them go away.

They defiled through the street of Khamon, and the Cirta gate,
pell-mell, archers with hoplites, captains with soldiers, Lusitanians
with Greeks. They marched with a bold step, rattling their heavy
cothurni on the paving stones. Their armour was dented by the catapult,
and their faces blackened by the sunburn of battles. Hoarse cries issued
from their thick beards, their tattered coats of mail flapped upon the
pommels of their swords, and through the holes in the brass might be
seen their naked limbs, as frightful as engines of war. Sarissæ, axes,
spears, felt caps and bronze helmets, all swung together with a single
motion. They filled the street thickly enough to have made the walls
crack, and the long mass of armed soldiers overflowed between the lofty
bitumen-smeared houses six storys high. Behind their gratings of iron or
reed the women, with veiled heads, silently watched the Barbarians pass.

The terraces, fortifications, and walls were hidden beneath the crowd
of Carthaginians, who were dressed in garments of black. The sailors’
tunics showed like drops of blood among the dark multitude, and nearly
naked children, whose skin shone beneath their copper bracelets,
gesticulated in the foliage of the columns, or amid the branches of
a palm tree. Some of the Ancients were posted on the platform of the
towers, and people did not know why a personage with a long beard stood
thus in a dreamy attitude here and there. He appeared in the distance
against the background of the sky, vague as a phantom and motionless as
stone.

All, however, were oppressed with the same anxiety; it was feared that
the Barbarians, seeing themselves so strong, might take a fancy to stay.
But they were leaving with so much good faith that the Carthaginians
grew bold and mingled with the soldiers. They overwhelmed them with
protestations and embraces. Some with exaggerated politeness and
audacious hypocrisy even sought to induce them not to leave the city.
They threw perfumes, flowers, and pieces of silver to them. They gave
them amulets to avert sickness; but they had spit upon them three times
to attract death, or had enclosed jackal’s hair within them to put
cowardice into their hearts. Aloud, they invoked Melkarth’s favour,
and in a whisper, his curse.

Then came the mob of baggage, beasts of burden, and stragglers. The sick
groaned on the backs of dromedaries, while others limped along leaning
on broken pikes. The drunkards carried leathern bottles, and the greedy
quarters of meat, cakes, fruits, butter wrapped in fig leaves, and snow
in linen bags. Some were to be seen with parasols in their hands, and
parrots on their shoulders. They had mastiffs, gazelles, and panthers
following behind them. Women of Libyan race, mounted on asses, inveighed
against the Negresses who had forsaken the lupanaria of Malqua for the
soldiers; many of them were suckling children suspended on their bosoms
by leathern thongs. The mules were goaded out at the point of the sword,
their backs bending beneath the load of tents, while there were numbers
of serving-men and water-carriers, emaciated, jaundiced with fever,
and filthy with vermin, the scum of the Carthaginian populace, who had
attached themselves to the Barbarians.

When they had passed, the gates were shut behind them, but the people
did not descend from the walls. The army soon spread over the breadth of
the isthmus.

It parted into unequal masses. Then the lances appeared like tall blades
of grass, and finally all was lost in a train of dust; those of the
soldiers who looked back towards Carthage could now only see its long
walls with their vacant battlements cut out against the edge of the sky.

Then the Barbarians heard a great shout. They thought that some from
among them (for they did not know their own number) had remained in the
town, and were amusing themselves by pillaging a temple. They laughed a
great deal at the idea of this, and then continued their journey.

They were rejoiced to find themselves, as in former days, marching all
together in the open country, and some of the Greeks sang the old song
of the Mamertines:

“With my lance and sword I plough and reap; I am master of the house!
The disarmed man falls at my feet and calls me Lord and Great King.”

They shouted, they leaped, the merriest began to tell stories; the
time of their miseries was past. As they arrived at Tunis, some of
them remarked that a troop of Balearic slingers was missing. They were
doubtless not far off; and no further heed was paid to them.

Some went to lodge in the houses, others camped at the foot of the
walls, and the townspeople came out to chat with the soldiers.

During the whole night fires were seen burning on the horizon in the
direction of Carthage; the light stretched like giant torches across the
motionless lake. No one in the army could tell what festival was being
celebrated.

On the following day the Barbarians passed through a region that was
covered with cultivation. The domains of the patricians succeeded one
another along the border of the route; channels of water flowed
through woods of palm; there were long, green lines of olive-trees;
rose-coloured vapours floated in the gorges of the hills, while blue
mountains reared themselves behind. A warm wind was blowing. Chameleons
were crawling on the broad leaves of the cactus.

The Barbarians slackened their speed.

They marched on in isolated detachments, or lagged behind one another at
long intervals. They ate grapes along the margin of the vines. They lay
on the grass and gazed with stupefaction upon the large, artificially
twisted horns of the oxen, the sheep clothed with skins to protect their
wool, the furrows crossing one another so as to form lozenges, and the
ploughshares like ships’ anchors, with the pomegranate trees that were
watered with silphium. Such wealth of the soil and such inventions of
wisdom dazzled them.

In the evening they stretched themselves on the tents without unfolding
them; and thought with regret of Hamilcar’s feast, as they fell asleep
with their faces towards the stars.

In the middle of the following day they halted on the bank of a river,
amid clumps of rose-bays. Then they quickly threw aside lances, bucklers
and belts. They bathed with shouts, and drew water in their helmets,
while others drank lying flat on their stomachs, and all in the midst of
the beasts of burden whose baggage was slipping from them.

Spendius, who was seated on a dromedary stolen in Hamilcar’s parks,
perceived Matho at a distance, with his arm hanging against his breast,
his head bare, and his face bent down, giving his mule drink, and
watching the water flow. Spendius immediately ran through the crowd
calling him, “Master! master!”

Matho gave him but scant thanks for his blessings, but Spendius paid no
heed to this, and began to march behind him, from time to time turning
restless glances in the direction of Carthage.

He was the son of a Greek rhetor and a Campanian prostitute. He had at
first grown rich by dealing in women; then, ruined by a shipwreck, he
had made war against the Romans with the herdsmen of Samnium. He had
been taken and had escaped; he had been retaken, and had worked in the
quarries, panted in the vapour-baths, shrieked under torture, passed
through the hands of many masters, and experienced every frenzy. At
last, one day, in despair, he had flung himself into the sea from the
top of a trireme where he was working at the oar. Some of Hamilcar’s
sailors had picked him up when at the point of death, and had brought
him to the ergastulum of Megara, at Carthage. But, as fugitives were to
be given back to the Romans, he had taken advantage of the confusion to
fly with the soldiers.

During the whole of the march he remained near Matho; he brought him
food, assisted him to dismount, and spread a carpet in the evening
beneath his head. Matho at last was touched by these attentions, and by
degrees unlocked his lips.

He had been born in the gulf of Syrtis. His father had taken him on a
pilgrimage to the temple of Ammon. Then he had hunted elephants in the
forests of the Garamantes. Afterwards he had entered the service of
Carthage. He had been appointed tetrarch at the capture of Drepanum.
The Republic owed him four horses, twenty-three medimni of wheat, and
a winter’s pay. He feared the gods, and wished to die in his native
land.

Spendius spoke to him of his travels, and of the peoples and temples
that he had visited. He knew many things: he could make sandals,
boar-spears and nets; he could tame wild beasts and could cook fish.

Sometimes he would interrupt himself, and utter a hoarse cry from the
depths of his throat; Matho’s mule would quicken his pace, and others
would hasten after them, and then Spendius would begin again though
still torn with agony. This subsided at last on the evening of the
fourth day.

They were marching side by side to the right of the army on the side of
a hill; below them stretched the plain lost in the vapours of the night.
The lines of soldiers also were defiling below, making undulations in
the shade. From time to time these passed over eminences lit up by the
moon; then stars would tremble on the points of the pikes, the helmets
would glimmer for an instant, all would disappear, and others would come
on continually. Startled flocks bleated in the distance, and a something
of infinite sweetness seemed to sink upon the earth.

Spendius, with his head thrown back and his eyes half-closed, inhaled
the freshness of the wind with great sighs; he spread out his arms,
moving his fingers that he might the better feel the cares that streamed
over his body. Hopes of vengeance came back to him and transported him.
He pressed his hand upon his mouth to check his sobs, and half-swooning
with intoxication, let go the halter of his dromedary, which was
proceeding with long, regular steps. Matho had relapsed into his former
melancholy; his legs hung down to the ground, and the grass made a
continuous rustling as it beat against his cothurni.

The journey, however, spread itself out without ever coming to an end.
At the extremity of a plain they would always reach a round-shaped
plateau; then they would descend again into a valley, and the mountains
which seemed to block up the horizon would, in proportion as they were
approached, glide as it were from their positions. From time to time a
river would appear amid the verdure of tamarisks to lose itself at the
turning of the hills. Sometimes a huge rock would tower aloft like the
prow of a vessel or the pedestal of some vanished colossus.

At regular intervals they met with little quadrangular temples, which
served as stations for the pilgrims who repaired to Sicca. They were
closed like tombs. The Libyans struck great blows upon the doors to have
them opened. But no one inside responded.

Then the cultivation became more rare. They suddenly entered upon belts
of sand bristling with thorny thickets. Flocks of sheep were browsing
among the stones; a woman with a blue fleece about her waist was
watching them. She fled screaming when she saw the soldiers’ pikes
among the rocks.

They were marching through a kind of large passage bordered by two
chains of reddish coloured hillocks, when their nostrils were greeted
with a nauseous odour, and they thought that they could see something
extraordinary on the top of a carob tree: a lion’s head reared itself
above the leaves.

They ran thither. It was a lion with his four limbs fastened to a cross
like a criminal. His huge muzzle fell upon his breast, and his two
fore-paws, half-hidden beneath the abundance of his mane, were spread
out wide like the wings of a bird. His ribs stood severally out beneath
his distended skin; his hind legs, which were nailed against each other,
were raised somewhat, and the black blood, flowing through his hair,
had collected in stalactites at the end of his tail, which hung down
perfectly straight along the cross. The soldiers made merry around; they
called him consul, and Roman citizen, and threw pebbles into his eyes to
drive away the gnats.

But a hundred paces further on they saw two more, and then there
suddenly appeared a long file of crosses bearing lions. Some had been
so long dead that nothing was left against the wood but the remains
of their skeletons; others which were half eaten away had their jaws
twisted into horrible grimaces; there were some enormous ones; the
shafts of the crosses bent beneath them, and they swayed in the wind,
while bands of crows wheeled ceaselessly in the air above their heads.
It was thus that the Carthaginian peasants avenged themselves when
they captured a wild beast; they hoped to terrify the others by such
an example. The Barbarians ceased their laughter, and were long lost
in amazement. “What people is this,” they thought, “that amuses
itself by crucifying lions!”

They were, besides, especially the men of the North, vaguely uneasy,
troubled, and already sick. They tore their hands with the darts of the
aloes; great mosquitoes buzzed in their ears, and dysentry was breaking
out in the army. They were weary at not yet seeing Sicca. They were
afraid of losing themselves and of reaching the desert, the country of
sands and terrors. Many even were unwilling to advance further. Others
started back to Carthage.

At last on the seventh day, after following the base of a mountain for a
long time, they turned abruptly to the right, and there then appeared
a line of walls resting on white rocks and blending with them. Suddenly
the entire city rose; blue, yellow, and white veils moved on the walls
in the redness of the evening. These were the priestesses of Tanith,
who had hastened hither to receive the men. They stood ranged along the
rampart, striking tabourines, playing lyres, and shaking crotala, while
the rays of the sun, setting behind them in the mountains of Numidia,
shot between the strings of their lyres over which their naked arms were
stretched. At intervals their instruments would become suddenly still,
and a cry would break forth strident, precipitate, frenzied, continuous,
a sort of barking which they made by striking both corners of the mouth
with the tongue. Others, more motionless than the Sphynx, rested on
their elbows with their chins on their hands, and darted their great
black eyes upon the army as it ascended.

Although Sicca was a sacred town it could not hold such a multitude; the
temple alone, with its appurtenances, occupied half of it. Accordingly
the Barbarians established themselves at their ease on the plain;
those who were disciplined in regular troops, and the rest according to
nationality or their own fancy.

The Greeks ranged their tents of skin in parallel lines; the Iberians
placed their canvas pavilions in a circle; the Gauls made themselves
huts of planks; the Libyans cabins of dry stones, while the Negroes with
their nails hollowed out trenches in the sand to sleep in. Many, not
knowing where to go, wandered about among the baggage, and at nightfall
lay down in their ragged mantles on the ground.


The plain, which was wholly bounded by mountains, expanded around them.
Here and there a palm tree leaned over a sand hill, and pines and oaks
flecked the sides of the precipices: sometimes the rain of a storm would
hang from the sky like a long scarf, while the country everywhere was
still covered with azure and serenity; then a warm wind would drive
before it tornadoes of dust, and a stream would descend in cascades from
the heights of Sicca, where, with its roofing of gold on its columns of
brass, rose the temple of the Carthaginian Venus, the mistress of the
land. She seemed to fill it with her soul. In such convulsions of the
soil, such alternations of temperature, and such plays of light would
she manifest the extravagance of her might with the beauty of her
eternal smile. The mountains at their summits were crescent-shaped;
others were like women’s bosoms presenting their swelling breasts, and
the Barbarians felt a heaviness that was full of delight weighing down
their fatigues.

Spendius had bought a slave with the money brought him by his dromedary.
The whole day long he lay asleep stretched before Matho’s tent. Often
he would awake, thinking in his dreams that he heard the whistling of
the thongs; with a smile he would pass his hands over the scars on his
legs at the place where the fetters had long been worn, and then he
would fall asleep again.

Matho accepted his companionship, and when he went out Spendius would
escort him like a lictor with a long sword on his thigh; or perhaps
Matho would rest his arm carelessly on the other’s shoulder, for
Spendius was small.

One evening when they were passing together through the streets in the
camp they perceived some men covered with white cloaks; among them was
Narr’ Havas, the prince of the Numidians. Matho started.

“Your sword!” he cried; “I will kill him!”

“Not yet!” said Spendius, restraining him. Narr’ Havas was already
advancing towards him.

He kissed both thumbs in token of alliance, showing nothing of the anger
which he had experienced at the drunkenness of the feast; then he spoke
at length against Carthage, but did not say what brought him among the
Barbarians.

“Was it to betray them, or else the Republic?” Spendius asked
himself; and as he expected to profit by every disorder, he felt
grateful to Narr’ Havas for the future perfidies of which he suspected
him.

The chief of the Numidians remained amongst the Mercenaries. He appeared
desirous of attaching Matho to himself. He sent him fat goats, gold
dust, and ostrich feathers. The Libyan, who was amazed at such caresses,
was in doubt whether to respond to them or to become exasperated at
them. But Spendius pacified him, and Matho allowed himself to be ruled
by the slave, remaining ever irresolute and in an unconquerable torpor,
like those who have once taken a draught of which they are to die.

One morning when all three went out lion-hunting, Narr’ Havas
concealed a dagger in his cloak. Spendius kept continually behind him,
and when they returned the dagger had not been drawn.

Another time Narr’ Havas took them a long way off, as far as the
boundaries of his kingdom. They came to a narrow gorge, and Narr’
Havas smiled as he declared that he had forgotten the way. Spendius
found it again.

But most frequently Matho would go off at sunrise, as melancholy as
an augur, to wander about the country. He would stretch himself on the
sand, and remain there motionless until the evening.

He consulted all the soothsayers in the army one after the
other,—those who watch the trail of serpents, those who read the
stars, and those who breathe upon the ashes of the dead. He swallowed
galbanum, seseli, and viper’s venom which freezes the heart; Negro
women, singing barbarous words in the moonlight, pricked the skin of
his forehead with golden stylets; he loaded himself with necklaces
and charms; he invoked in turn Baal-Khamon, Moloch, the seven Kabiri,
Tanith, and the Venus of the Greeks. He engraved a name upon a copper
plate, and buried it in the sand at the threshold of his tent. Spendius
used to hear him groaning and talking to himself.

One night he went in.

Matho, as naked as a corpse, was lying on a lion’s skin flat on his
stomach, with his face in both his hands; a hanging lamp lit up his
armour, which was hooked on to the tent-pole above his head.

“You are suffering?” said the slave to him. “What is the matter
with you? Answer me?” And he shook him by the shoulder calling him
several times, “Master! master!”

At last Matho lifted large troubled eyes towards him.

“Listen!” he said in a low voice, and with a finger on his lips.
“It is the wrath of the Gods! Hamilcar’s daughter pursues me! I am
afraid of her, Spendius!” He pressed himself close against his breast
like a child terrified by a phantom. “Speak to me! I am sick! I want
to get well! I have tried everything! But you, you perhaps know some
stronger gods, or some resistless invocation?”

“For what purpose?” asked Spendius.

Striking his head with both his fists, he replied:

“To rid me of her!”

Then speaking to himself with long pauses he said:

“I am no doubt the victim of some holocaust which she has promised to
the gods?—She holds me fast by a chain which people cannot see. If I
walk, it is she that is advancing; when I stop, she is resting! Her eyes
burn me, I hear her voice. She encompasses me, she penetrates me. It
seems to me that she has become my soul!

“And yet between us there are, as it were, the invisible billows of a
boundless ocean! She is far away and quite inaccessible! The splendour
of her beauty forms a cloud of light around her, and at times I think
that I have never seen her—that she does not exist—and that it is
all a dream!”

Matho wept thus in the darkness; the Barbarians were sleeping. Spendius,
as he looked at him, recalled the young men who once used to entreat
him with golden cases in their hands, when he led his herd of courtesans
through the towns; a feeling of pity moved him, and he said—

“Be strong, my master! Summon your will, and beseech the gods no more,
for they turn not aside at the cries of men! Weeping like a coward! And
you are not humiliated that a woman can cause you so much suffering?”

“Am I a child?” said Matho. “Do you think that I am moved by their
faces and songs? We kept them at Drepanum to sweep out our stables. I
have embraced them amid assaults, beneath falling ceilings, and while
the catapult was still vibrating!—But she, Spendius, she!—”

The slave interrupted him:

“If she were not Hanno’s daughter—”

“No!” cried Matho. “She has nothing in common with the daughters
of other men! Have you seen her great eyes beneath her great eyebrows,
like suns beneath triumphal arches? Think: when she appeared all the
torches grew pale. Her naked breast shone here and there through the
diamonds of her necklace; behind her you perceived as it were the odour
of a temple, and her whole being emitted something that was sweeter than
wine and more terrible than death. She walked, however, and then she
stopped.”

He remained gaping with his head cast down and his eyeballs fixed.

“But I want her! I need her! I am dying for her! I am transported with
frenzied joy at the thought of clasping her in my arms, and yet I hate
her, Spendius! I should like to beat her! What is to be done? I have a
mind to sell myself and become her slave! You have been that! You were
able to get sight of her; speak to me of her! Every night she ascends
to the terrace of her palace, does she not? Ah! the stones must quiver
beneath her sandals, and the stars bend down to see her!”

He fell back in a perfect frenzy, with a rattling in his throat like a
wounded bull.

Then Matho sang: “He pursued into the forest the female monster, whose
tail undulated over the dead leaves like a silver brook.” And with
lingering tones he imitated Salammbô’s voice, while his outspread
hands were held like two light hands on the strings of a lyre.

To all the consolations offered by Spendius, he repeated the same words;
their nights were spent in these wailings and exhortations.

Matho sought to drown his thoughts in wine. After his fits of
drunkenness he was more melancholy still. He tried to divert himself at
huckle-bones, and lost the gold plates of his necklace one by one. He
had himself taken to the servants of the Goddess; but he came down the
hill sobbing, like one returning from a funeral.

Spendius, on the contrary, became more bold and gay. He was to be seen
in the leafy taverns discoursing in the midst of the soldiers. He mended
old cuirasses. He juggled with daggers. He went and gathered herbs in
the fields for the sick. He was facetious, dexterous, full of invention
and talk; the Barbarians grew accustomed to his services, and he came to
be loved by them.

However, they were awaiting an ambassador from Carthage to bring
them mules laden with baskets of gold; and ever beginning the same
calculation over again, they would trace figures with their fingers in
the sand. Every one was arranging his life beforehand; they would have
concubines, slaves, lands; others intended to bury their treasure,
or risk it on a vessel. But their tempers were provoked by want of
employment; there were constant disputes between horse-soldiers and
foot-soldiers, Barbarians and Greeks, while there was a never-ending din
of shrill female voices.

Every day men came flocking in nearly naked, and with grass on their
heads to protect them from the sun; they were the debtors of the rich
Carthaginians and had been forced to till the lands of the latter, but
had escaped. Libyans came pouring in with peasants ruined by the taxes,
outlaws, and malefactors. Then the horde of traders, all the dealers in
wine and oil, who were furious at not being paid, laid the blame upon
the Republic. Spendius declaimed against it. Soon the provisions ran
low; and there was talk of advancing in a body upon Carthage, and
calling in the Romans.

One evening, at supper-time, dull cracked sounds were heard approaching,
and something red appeared in the distance among the undulations of the
soil.

It was a large purple litter, adorned with ostrich feathers at the
corners. Chains of crystal and garlands of pearls beat against the
closed hangings. It was followed by camels sounding the great bells
that hung at their breasts, and having around them horsemen clad from
shoulder to heel in armour of golden scales.

They halted three hundred paces from the camp to take their round
bucklers, broad swords, and Boeotian helmets out of the cases which they
carried behind their saddles. Some remained with the camels, while
the others resumed their march. At last the ensigns of the Republic
appeared, that is to say, staves of blue wood terminated in horses’
heads or fir cones. The Barbarians all rose with applause; the women
rushed towards the guards of the Legion and kissed their feet.

The litter advanced on the shoulders of twelve Negroes who walked in
step with short, rapid strides; they went at random to right or left,
being embarrassed by the tent-ropes, the animals that were straying
about, or the tripods where food was being cooked. Sometimes a fat hand,
laden with rings, would partially open the litter, and a hoarse voice
would utter loud reproaches; then the bearers would stop and take a
different direction through the camp.

But the purple curtains were raised, and a human head, impassible and
bloated, was seen resting on a large pillow; the eyebrows, which were
like arches of ebony, met each other at the points; golden dust sparkled
in the frizzled hair, and the face was so wan that it looked as if
it had been powdered with marble raspings. The rest of the body was
concealed beneath the fleeces which filled the litter.

In the man so reclining the soldiers recognised the Suffet Hanno, he
whose slackness had assisted to lose the battle of the Ægatian islands;
and as to his victory at Hecatompylos over the Libyans, even if he did
behave with clemency, thought the Barbarians, it was owing to cupidity,
for he had sold all the captives on his own account, although he had
reported their deaths to the Republic.

After seeking for some time a convenient place from which to harangue
the soldiers, he made a sign; the litter stopped, and Hanno, supported
by two slaves, put his tottering feet to the ground.

He wore boots of black felt strewn with silver moons. His legs were
swathed in bands like those wrapped about a mummy, and the flesh crept
through the crossings of the linen; his stomach came out beyond the
scarlet jacket which covered his thighs; the folds of his neck fell down
to his breast like the dewlaps of an ox; his tunic, which was painted
with flowers, was bursting at the arm-pits; he wore a scarf, a girdle,
and an ample black cloak with laced double-sleeves. But the abundance of
his garments, his great necklace of blue stones, his golden clasps, and
heavy earrings only rendered his deformity still more hideous. He might
have been taken for some big idol rough-hewn in a block of stone; for
a pale leprosy, which was spread over his whole body, gave him the
appearance of an inert thing. His nose, however, which was hooked like
a vulture’s beak, was violently dilated to breathe in the air, and his
little eyes, with their gummed lashes, shone with a hard and metallic
lustre. He held a spatula of aloe-wood in his hand wherewith to scratch
his skin.

At last two heralds sounded their silver horns; the tumult subsided, and
Hanno commenced to speak.

He began with an eulogy of the gods and the Republic; the Barbarians
ought to congratulate themselves on having served it. But they must show
themselves more reasonable; times were hard, “and if a master has only
three olives, is it not right that he should keep two for himself?”

The old Suffet mingled his speech in this way with proverbs and
apologues, nodding his head the while to solicit some approval.

He spoke in Punic, and those surrounding him (the most alert, who
had hastened thither without their arms), were Campanians, Gauls, and
Greeks, so that no one in the crowd understood him. Hanno, perceiving
this, stopped and reflected, swaying himself heavily from one leg to the
other.

It occurred to him to call the captains together; then his heralds
shouted the order in Greek, the language which, from the time of
Xanthippus, had been used for commands in the Carthaginian armies.

The guards dispersed the mob of soldiers with strokes of the whip; and
the captains of the Spartan phalanxes and the chiefs of the Barbarian
cohorts soon arrived with the insignia of their rank, and in the
armour of their nation. Night had fallen, a great tumult was spreading
throughout the plain; fires were burning here and there; and the
soldiers kept going from one to another asking what the matter was, and
why the Suffet did not distribute the money?

He was setting the infinite burdens of the Republic before the captains.
Her treasury was empty. The tribute to Rome was crushing her. “We are
quite at a loss what to do! She is much to be pitied!”

From time to time he would rub his limbs with his aloe-wood spatula,
or perhaps he would break off to drink a ptisan made of the ashes of a
weasel and asparagus boiled in vinegar from a silver cup handed to
him by a slave; then he would wipe his lips with a scarlet napkin and
resume:

“What used to be worth a shekel of silver is now worth three shekels
of gold, while the cultivated lands which were abandoned during the war
bring in nothing! Our purpura fisheries are nearly gone, and even pearls
are becoming exhorbitant; we have scarcely unguents enough for the
service of the gods! As for the things of the table, I shall say nothing
about them; it is a calamity! For want of galleys we are without spices,
and it is a matter of great difficulty to procure silphium on account
of the rebellions on the Cyrenian frontier. Sicily, where so many slaves
used to be had, is now closed to us! Only yesterday I gave more money
for a bather and four scullions than I used at one time to give for a
pair of elephants!”

He unrolled a long piece of papyrus; and, without omitting a single
figure, read all the expenses that the government had incurred; so much
for repairing the temples, for paving the streets, for the construction
of vessels, for the coral-fisheries, for the enlargement of the
Syssitia, and for engines in the mines in the country of the
Cantabrians.

But the captains understood Punic as little as the soldiers, although
the Mercenaries saluted one another in that language. It was usual to
place a few Carthaginian officers in the Barbarian armies to act as
interpreters; after the war they had concealed themselves through fear
of vengeance, and Hanno had not thought of taking them with him; his
hollow voice, too, was lost in the wind.

The Greeks, girthed in their iron waist-belts, strained their ears as
they strove to guess at his words, while the mountaineers, covered with
furs like bears, looked at him with distrust, or yawned as they leaned
on their brass-nailed clubs. The heedless Gauls sneered as they
shook their lofty heads of hair, and the men of the desert listened
motionless, cowled in their garments of grey wool; others kept coming up
behind; the guards, crushed by the mob, staggered on their horses; the
Negroes held out burning fir branches at arm’s length; and the big
Carthaginian, mounted on a grassy hillock, continued his harangue.

The Barbarians, however, were growing impatient; murmuring arose, and
every one apostrophized him. Hanno gesticulated with his spatula; and
those who wished the others to be quiet shouted still more loudly,
thereby adding to the din.

Suddenly a man of mean appearance bounded to Hanno’s feet, snatched
up a herald’s trumpet, blew it, and Spendius (for it was he) announced
that he was going to say something of importance. At this declaration,
which was rapidly uttered in five different languages, Greek, Latin,
Gallic, Libyan and Balearic, the captains, half laughing and half
surprised, replied: “Speak! Speak!”

Spendius hesitated; he trembled; at last, addressing the Libyans who
were the most numerous, he said to them:

“You have all heard this man’s horrible threats!”

Hanno made no exclamation, therefore he did not understand Libyan; and,
to carry on the experiment, Spendius repeated the same phrase in the
other Barbarian dialects.

They looked at one another in astonishment; then, as by a tacit
agreement, and believing perhaps that they had understood, they bent
their heads in token of assent.

Then Spendius began in vehement tones:

“He said first that all the Gods of the other nations were but dreams
besides the Gods of Carthage! He called you cowards, thieves, liars,
dogs, and the sons of dogs! But for you (he said that!) the Republic
would not be forced to pay excessive tribute to the Romans; and through
your excesses you have drained it of perfumes, aromatics, slaves,
and silphium, for you are in league with the nomads on the Cyrenian
frontier! But the guilty shall be punished! He read the enumeration of
their torments; they shall be made to work at the paving of the streets,
at the equipment of the vessels, at the adornment of the Syssitia, while
the rest shall be sent to scrape the earth in the mines in the country
of the Cantabrians.”

Spendius repeated the same statements to the Gauls, Greeks, Campanians
and Balearians. The Mercenaries, recognising several of the proper
names which had met their ears, were convinced that he was accurately
reporting the Suffet’s speech. A few cried out to him, “You lie!”
but their voices were drowned in the tumult of the rest; Spendius added:

“Have you not seen that he has left a reserve of his horse-soldiers
outside the camp? At a given signal they will hasten hither to slay you
all.”

The Barbarians turned in that direction, and as the crowd was then
scattering, there appeared in the midst of them, and advancing with the
slowness of a phantom, a human being, bent, lean, entirely naked, and
covered down to his flanks with long hair bristling with dried leaves,
dust and thorns. About his loins and his knees he had wisps of straw and
linen rags; his soft and earthy skin hung on his emaciated limbs like
tatters on dried boughs; his hands trembled with a continuous quivering,
and as he walked he leaned on a staff of olive-wood.

He reached the Negroes who were bearing the torches. His pale gums were
displayed in a sort of idiotic titter; his large, scared eyes gazed upon
the crowd of Barbarians around him.

But uttering a cry of terror he threw himself behind them, shielding
himself with their bodies. “There they are! There they are!” he
stammered out, pointing to the Suffet’s guards, who were motionless
in their glittering armour. Their horses, dazzled by the light of the
torches which crackled in the darkness, were pawing the ground; the
human spectre struggled and howled:

“They have killed them!”

At these words, which were screamed in Balearic, some Balearians came up
and recognised him; without answering them he repeated:

“Yes, all killed, all! crushed like grapes! The fine young men! the
slingers! my companions and yours!”

They gave him wine to drink, and he wept; then he launched forth into
speech.

Spendius could scarcely repress his joy, as he explained the horrors
related by Zarxas to the Greeks and Libyans; he could not believe them,
so appropriately did they come in. The Balearians grew pale as they
learned how their companions had perished.

It was a troop of three hundred slingers who had disembarked the evening
before, and had on that day slept too late. When they reached the
square of Khamon the Barbarians were gone, and they found themselves
defenceless, their clay bullets having been put on the camels with the
rest of the baggage. They were allowed to advance into the street of
Satheb as far as the brass sheathed oaken gate; then the people with a
single impulse had sprung upon them.

Indeed, the soldiers remembered a great shout; Spendius, who was flying
at the head of the columns, had not heard it.

Then the corpses were placed in the arms of the Patæc gods that fringed
the temple of Khamon. They were upbraided with all the crimes of the
Mercenaries; their gluttony, their thefts, their impiety, their disdain,
and the murder of the fishes in Salammbô’s garden. Their bodies were
subjected to infamous mutilations; the priests burned their hair
in order to torture their souls; they were hung up in pieces in the
meat-shops; some even buried their teeth in them, and in the evening
funeral-piles were kindled at the cross-ways to finish them.

These were the flames that had gleamed from a distance across the lake.
But some houses having taken fire, any dead or dying that remained were
speedily thrown over the walls; Zarxas had remained among the reeds on
the edge of the lake until the following day; then he had wandered about
through the country, seeking for the army by the footprints in the dust.
In the morning he hid himself in caves; in the evening he resumed his
march with his bleeding wounds, famished, sick, living on roots and
carrion; at last one day he perceived lances on the horizon, and he
had followed them, for his reason was disturbed through his terrors and
miseries.

The indignation of the soldiers, restrained so long as he was speaking,
broke forth like a tempest; they were going to massacre the guards
together with the Suffet. A few interposed, saying that they ought to
hear him and know at least whether they should be paid. Then they all
cried: “Our money!” Hanno replied that he had brought it.

They ran to the outposts, and the Suffet’s baggage arrived in the
midst of the tents, pressed forward by the Barbarians. Without waiting
for the slaves, they very quickly unfastened the baskets; in them they
found hyacinth robes, sponges, scrapers, brushes, perfumes, and antimony
pencils for painting the eyes—all belonging to the guards, who were
rich men and accustomed to such refinements. Next they uncovered a large
bronze tub on a camel: it belonged to the Suffet who had it for bathing
in during his journey; for he had taken all manner of precautions, even
going so far as to bring caged weasels from Hecatompylos, which were
burnt alive to make his ptisan. But, as his malady gave him a great
appetite, there were also many comestibles and many wines, pickle, meats
and fishes preserved in honey, with little pots of Commagene, or melted
goose-fat covered with snow and chopped straw. There was a considerable
supply of it; the more they opened the baskets the more they found, and
laughter arose like conflicting waves.

As to the pay of the Mercenaries it nearly filled two esparto-grass
baskets; there were even visible in one of them some of the leathern
discs which the Republic used to economise its specie; and as the
Barbarians appeared greatly surprised, Hanno told them that, their
accounts being very difficult, the Ancients had not had leisure to
examine them. Meanwhile they had sent them this.

Then everything was in disorder and confusion: mules, serving men,
litter, provisions, and baggage. The soldiers took the coin in the bags
to stone Hanno. With great difficulty he was able to mount an ass; and
he fled, clinging to its hair, howling, weeping, shaken, bruised, and
calling down the curse of all the gods upon the army. His broad necklace
of precious stones rebounded up to his ears. His cloak which was too
long, and which trailed behind him, he kept on with his teeth, and
from afar the Barbarians shouted at him, “Begone coward! pig! sink of
Moloch! sweat your gold and your plague! quicker! quicker!” The routed
escort galloped beside him.

But the fury of the Barbarians did not abate. They remembered that
several of them who had set out for Carthage had not returned; no doubt
they had been killed. So much injustice exasperated them, and they began
to pull up the stakes of their tents, to roll up their cloaks, and to
bridle their horses; every one took his helmet and sword, and instantly
all was ready. Those who had no arms rushed into the woods to cut
staves.

Day dawned; the people of Sicca were roused, and stirring in the
streets. “They are going to Carthage,” said they, and the rumour of
this soon spread through the country.

From every path and every ravine men arose. Shepherds were seen running
down from the mountains.

Then, when the Barbarians had set out, Spendius circled the plain,
riding on a Punic stallion, and attended by his slave, who led a third
horse.

A single tent remained. Spendius entered it.

“Up, master! rise! we are departing!”

“And where are you going?” asked Matho.

“To Carthage!” cried Spendius.

Matho bounded upon the horse which the slave held at the door.





CHAPTER III SALAMMBÔ

The moon was rising just above the waves, and on the town which
was still wrapped in darkness there glittered white and luminous
specks:—the pole of a chariot, a dangling rag of linen, the corner of
a wall, or a golden necklace on the bosom of a god. The glass balls on
the roofs of the temples beamed like great diamonds here and there.
But ill-defined ruins, piles of black earth, and gardens formed deeper
masses in the gloom, and below Malqua fishermen’s nets stretched
from one house to another like gigantic bats spreading their wings. The
grinding of the hydraulic wheels which conveyed water to the highest
storys of the palaces, was no longer heard; and the camels, lying
ostrich fashion on their stomachs, rested peacefully in the middle of
the terraces. The porters were asleep in the streets on the thresholds
of the houses; the shadows of the colossuses stretched across the
deserted squares; occasionally in the distance the smoke of a still
burning sacrifice would escape through the bronze tiling, and the heavy
breeze would waft the odours of aromatics blended with the scent of the
sea and the exhalation from the sun-heated walls. The motionless waves
shone around Carthage, for the moon was spreading her light at once upon
the mountain-circled gulf and upon the lake of Tunis, where flamingoes
formed long rose-coloured lines amid the banks of sand, while further
on beneath the catacombs the great salt lagoon shimmered like a piece
of silver. The blue vault of heaven sank on the horizon in one direction
into the dustiness of the plains, and in the other into the mists of the
sea, and on the summit of the Acropolis, the pyramidal cypress trees,
fringing the temple of Eschmoun, swayed murmuring like the regular waves
that beat slowly along the mole beneath the ramparts.

Salammbô ascended to the terrace of her palace, supported by a female
slave who carried an iron dish filled with live coals.

In the middle of the terrace there was a small ivory bed covered
with lynx skins, and cushions made with the feathers of the parrot, a
fatidical animal consecrated to the gods; and at the four corners rose
four long perfuming-pans filled with nard, incense, cinnamomum, and
myrrh. The slave lit the perfumes. Salammbô looked at the polar star;
she slowly saluted the four points of heaven, and knelt down on the
ground in the azure dust which was strewn with golden stars in imitation
of the firmament. Then with both elbows against her sides, her fore-arms
straight and her hands open, she threw back her head beneath the rays of
the moon, and said:

“O Rabetna!—Baalet!—Tanith!” and her voice was lengthened in
a plaintive fashion as if calling to some one. “Anaïtis! Astarte!
Derceto! Astoreth! Mylitta! Athara! Elissa! Tiratha!—By the hidden
symbols, by the resounding sistra,—by the furrows of the earth,—by
the eternal silence and by the eternal fruitfulness,—mistress of the
gloomy sea and of the azure shores, O Queen of the watery world, all
hail!”

She swayed her whole body twice or thrice, and then cast herself face
downwards in the dust with both arms outstretched.

But the slave nimbly raised her, for according to the rites someone must
catch the suppliant at the moment of his prostration; this told him
that the gods accepted him, and Salammbô’s nurse never failed in this
pious duty.

Some merchants from Darytian Gætulia had brought her to Carthage when
quite young, and after her enfranchisement she would not forsake her old
masters, as was shown by her right ear, which was pierced with a large
hole. A petticoat of many-coloured stripes fitted closely on her hips,
and fell to her ankles, where two tin rings clashed together. Her
somewhat flat face was yellow like her tunic. Silver bodkins of great
length formed a sun behind her head. She wore a coral button on the
nostril, and she stood beside the bed more erect than a Hermes, and with
her eyelids cast down.

Salammbô walked to the edge of the terrace; her eyes swept the horizon
for an instant, and then were lowered upon the sleeping town, while the
sigh that she heaved swelled her bosom, and gave an undulating movement
to the whole length of the long white simar which hung without clasp or
girdle about her. Her curved and painted sandals were hidden beneath
a heap of emeralds, and a net of purple thread was filled with her
disordered hair.

But she raised her head to gaze upon the moon, and murmured, mingling
her speech with fragments of hymns:

“How lightly turnest thou, supported by the impalpable ether! It
brightens about thee, and ’tis the stir of thine agitation that
distributes the winds and fruitful dews. According as thou dost wax
and wane the eyes of cats and spots of panthers lengthen or grow short.
Wives shriek thy name in the pangs of childbirth! Thou makest the shells
to swell, the wine to bubble, and the corpse to putrefy! Thou formest
the pearls at the bottom of the sea!

“And every germ, O goddess! ferments in the dark depths of thy
moisture.

“When thou appearest, quietness is spread abroad upon the earth; the
flowers close, the waves are soothed, wearied man stretches his breast
toward thee, and the world with its oceans and mountains looks at
itself in thy face as in a mirror. Thou art white, gentle, luminous,
immaculate, helping, purifying, serene!”

The crescent of the moon was then over the mountain of the Hot Springs,
in the hollow formed by its two summits, on the other side of the gulf.
Below it there was a little star, and all around it a pale circle.
Salammbô went on:

“But thou art a terrible mistress!—Monsters, terrifying phantoms,
and lying dreams come from thee; thine eyes devour the stones of
buildings, and the apes are ever ill each time thou growest young again.

“Whither goest thou? Why dost thou change thy forms continually? Now,
slender and curved thou glidest through space like a mastless galley;
and then, amid the stars, thou art like a shepherd keeping his flock.
Shining and round, thou dost graze the mountain-tops like the wheel of a
chariot.

“O Tanith! thou dost love me? I have looked so much on thee! But no!
thou sailest through thine azure, and I—I remain on the motionless
earth.

“Taanach, take your nebal and play softly on the silver string, for my
heart is sad!”

The slave lifted a sort of harp of ebony wood, taller than herself,
and triangular in shape like a delta; she fixed the point in a crystal
globe, and with both hands began to play.

The sounds followed one another hurried and deep, like the buzzing of
bees, and with increasing sonorousness floated away into the night with
the complaining of the waves, and the rustling of the great trees on the
summit of the Acropolis.

“Hush!” cried Salammbô.

“What ails you, mistress? The blowing of the breeze, the passing of a
cloud, everything disquiets you just now!”

“I do not know,” she said.

“You are wearied with too long prayers!”

“Oh! Tanaach, I would fain be dissolved in them like a flower in
wine!”

“Perhaps it is the smoke of your perfumes?”

“No!” said Salammbô; “the spirit of the gods dwells in fragrant
odours.”

Then the slave spoke to her of her father. It was thought that he had
gone towards the amber country, behind the pillars of Melkarth. “But
if he does not return,” she said, “you must nevertheless, since it
was his will, choose a husband among the sons of the Ancients, and then
your grief will pass away in a man’s arms.”

“Why?” asked the young girl. All those that she had seen had
horrified her with their fallow-deer laughter and their coarse limbs.

“Sometimes, Tanaach, from the depths of my being there exhale as it
were hot fumes heavier than the vapours from a volcano. Voices call me,
a globe of fire rolls and mounts within my bosom, it stifles me, I am at
the point of death; and then, something sweet, flowing from my brow to
my feet, passes through my flesh—it is a caress enfolding me, and I
feel myself crushed as if some god were stretched upon me. Oh! would
that I could lose myself in the mists of the night, the waters of the
fountains, the sap of the trees, that I could issue from my body, and be
but a breath, or a ray, and glide, mount up to thee, O Mother!”

She raised her arms to their full length, arching her form, which in
its long garment was as pale and light as the moon. Then she fell back,
panting, on the ivory couch; but Taanach passed an amber necklace with
dolphin’s teeth about her neck to banish terrors, and Salammbô said
in an almost stifled voice: “Go and bring me Schahabarim.”

Her father had not wished her to enter the college of priestesses,
nor even to be made at all acquainted with the popular Tanith. He was
reserving her for some alliance that might serve his political ends; so
that Salammbô lived alone in the midst of the palace. Her mother was
long since dead.

She had grown up with abstinences, fastings and purifications, always
surrounded by grave and exquisite things, her body saturated with
perfumes, and her soul filled with prayers. She had never tasted wine,
nor eaten meat, nor touched an unclean animal, nor set her heels in the
house of death.

She knew nothing of obscene images, for as each god was manifested
in different forms, the same principle often received the witness
of contradictory cults, and Salammbô worshipped the goddess in her
sidereal presentation. An influence had descended upon the maiden from
the moon; when the planet passed diminishing away, Salammbô grew weak.
She languished the whole day long, and revived at evening. During an
eclipse she nearly died.

But Rabetna, in jealousy, revenged herself for the virginity withdrawn
from her sacrifices, and she tormented Salammbô with possessions, all
the stronger for being vague, which were spread through this belief and
excited by it.

Unceasingly was Hamilcar’s daughter disquieted about Tanith. She had
learned her adventures, her travels, and all her names, which she would
repeat without their having any distinct signification for her. In
order to penetrate into the depths of her dogma, she wished to become
acquainted, in the most secret part of the temple, with the old idol in
the magnificent mantle, whereon depended the destinies of Carthage, for
the idea of a god did not stand out clearly from his representation,
and to hold, or even see the image of one, was to take away part of his
virtue, and in a measure to rule him.

But Salammbô turned around. She had recognised the sound of the golden
bells which Schahabarim wore at the hem of his garment.

He ascended the staircases; then at the threshold of the terrace he
stopped and folded his arms.

His sunken eyes shone like the lamps of a sepulchre; his long thin body
floated in its linen robe which was weighted by the bells, the latter
alternating with balls of emeralds at his heels. He had feeble limbs, an
oblique skull and a pointed chin; his skin seemed cold to the touch, and
his yellow face, which was deeply furrowed with wrinkles, was as if it
contracted in a longing, in an everlasting grief.

He was the high priest of Tanith, and it was he who had educated
Salammbô.

“Speak!” he said. “What will you?”

“I hoped—you had almost promised me—” She stammered and was
confused; then suddenly: “Why do you despise me? what have I forgotten
in the rites? You are my master, and you told me that no one was so
accomplished in the things pertaining to the goddess as I; but there are
some of which you will not speak. Is it so, O father?”

Schahabarim remembered Hamilcar’s orders, and replied:

“No, I have nothing more to teach you!”

“A genius,” she resumed, “impels me to this love. I have climbed
the steps of Eschmoun, god of the planets and intelligences; I have
slept beneath the golden olive of Melkarth, patron of the Tyrian
colonies; I have pushed open the doors of Baal-Khamon, the enlightener
and fertiliser; I have sacrificed to the subterranean Kabiri, to the
gods of woods, winds, rivers and mountains; but, can you understand?
they are all too far away, too high, too insensible, while she—I feel
her mingled in my life; she fills my soul, and I quiver with inward
startings, as though she were leaping in order to escape. Methinks I am
about to hear her voice, and see her face, lightnings dazzle me and then
I sink back again into the darkness.”

Schahabarim was silent. She entreated him with suppliant looks. At
last he made a sign for the dismissal of the slave, who was not of
Chanaanitish race. Taanach disappeared, and Schahabarim, raising one arm
in the air, began:

“Before the gods darkness alone was, and a breathing stirred dull
and indistinct as the conscience of a man in a dream. It contracted,
creating Desire and Cloud, and from Desire and Cloud there issued
primitive Matter. This was a water, muddy, black, icy and deep. It
contained senseless monsters, incoherent portions of the forms to be
born, which are painted on the walls of the sanctuaries.

“Then Matter condensed. It became an egg. It burst. One half formed
the earth and the other the firmament. Sun, moon, winds and clouds
appeared, and at the crash of the thunder intelligent creatures awoke.
Then Eschmoun spread himself in the starry sphere; Khamon beamed in
the sun; Melkarth thrust him with his arms behind Gades; the Kabiri
descended beneath the volcanoes, and Rabetna like a nurse bent over the
world pouring out her light like milk, and her night like a mantle.”

“And then?” she said.

He had related the secret of the origins to her, to divert her from
sublimer prospects; but the maiden’s desire kindled again at his last
words, and Schahabarim, half yielding resumed:

“She inspires and governs the loves of men.”

“The loves of men!” repeated Salammbô dreamily.

“She is the soul of Carthage,” continued the priest; “and although
she is everywhere diffused, it is here that she dwells, beneath the
sacred veil.”

“O father!” cried Salammbô, “I shall see her, shall I not? you
will bring me to her! I had long been hesitating; I am devoured with
curiosity to see her form. Pity! help me! let us go?”

He repulsed her with a vehement gesture that was full of pride.

“Never! Do you not know that it means death? The hermaphrodite Baals
are unveiled to us alone who are men in understanding and women in
weakness. Your desire is sacrilege; be satisfied with the knowledge that
you possess!”

She fell upon her knees placing two fingers against her ears in token of
repentance; and crushed by the priest’s words, and filled at once with
anger against him, with terror and humiliation, she burst into sobs.
Schahabarim remained erect, and more insensible than the stones of the
terrace. He looked down upon her quivering at his feet, and felt a kind
of joy on seeing her suffer for his divinity whom he himself could not
wholly embrace. The birds were already singing, a cold wind was blowing,
and little clouds were drifting in the paling sky.

Suddenly he perceived on the horizon, behind Tunis, what looked like
slight mists trailing along the ground; then these became a great
curtain of dust extending perpendicularly, and, amid the whirlwinds of
the thronging mass, dromedaries’ heads, lances and shields appeared.
It was the army of the Barbarians advancing upon Carthage.





CHAPTER IV BENEATH THE WALLS OF CARTHAGE

Some country people, riding on asses or running on foot, arrived in the
town, pale, breathless, and mad with fear. They were flying before the
army. It had accomplished the journey from Sicca in three days, in order
to reach Carthage and wholly exterminate it.

The gates were shut. The Barbarians appeared almost immediately; but
they stopped in the middle of the isthmus, on the edge of the lake.

At first they made no hostile announcement. Several approached with palm
branches in their hands. They were driven back with arrows, so great was
the terror.

In the morning and at nightfall prowlers would sometimes wander along
the walls. A little man carefully wrapped in a cloak, and with his face
concealed beneath a very low visor, was especially noticed. He would
remain whole hours gazing at the aqueduct, and so persistently that he
doubtless wished to mislead the Carthaginians as to his real designs.
Another man, a sort of giant who walked bareheaded, used to accompany
him.

But Carthage was defended throughout the whole breadth of the isthmus:
first by a trench, then by a grassy rampart, and lastly by a wall thirty
cubits high, built of freestone, and in two storys. It contained stables
for three hundred elephants with stores for their caparisons, shackles,
and food; other stables again for four thousand horses with supplies
of barley and harness, and barracks for twenty thousand soldiers with
armour and all materials of war. Towers rose from the second story, all
provided with battlements, and having bronze bucklers hung on cramps on
the outside.

This first line of wall gave immediate shelter to Malqua, the sailors’
and dyers’ quarter. Masts might be seen whereon purple sails were
drying, and on the highest terraces clay furnaces for heating the pickle
were visible.

Behind, the lofty houses of the city rose in an ampitheatre of cubical
form. They were built of stone, planks, shingle, reeds, shells, and
beaten earth. The woods belonging to the temples were like lakes of
verdure in this mountain of diversely-coloured blocks. It was levelled
at unequal distances by the public squares, and was cut from top to
bottom by countless intersecting lanes. The enclosures of the three old
quarters which are now lost might be distinguished; they rose here
and there like great reefs, or extended in enormous fronts, blackened,
half-covered with flowers, and broadly striped by the casting of filth,
while streets passed through their yawning apertures like rivers beneath
bridges.

The hill of the Acropolis, in the centre of Byrsa, was hidden beneath a
disordered array of monuments. There were temples with wreathed columns
bearing bronze capitals and metal chains, cones of dry stones with bands
of azure, copper cupolas, marble architraves, Babylonian buttresses,
obelisks poised on their points like inverted torches. Peristyles
reached to pediments; volutes were displayed through colonnades; granite
walls supported tile partitions; the whole mounting, half-hidden, the
one above the other in a marvellous and incomprehensible fashion. In it
might be felt the succession of the ages, and, as it were, the memorials
of forgotten fatherlands.

Behind the Acropolis the Mappalian road, which was lined with tombs,
extended through red lands in a straight line from the shore to the
catacombs; then spacious dwellings occurred at intervals in the gardens,
and this third quarter, Megara, which was the new town, reached as far
as the edge of the cliff, where rose a giant pharos that blazed forth
every night.

In this fashion was Carthage displayed before the soldiers quartered in
the plain.

They could recognise the markets and crossways in the distance, and
disputed with one another as to the sites of the temples. Khamon’s,
fronting the Syssitia, had golden tiles; Melkarth, to the left of
Eschmoun, had branches of coral on its roofing; beyond, Tanith’s
copper cupola swelled among the palm trees; the dark Moloch was below
the cisterns, in the direction of the pharos. At the angles of the
pediments, on the tops of the walls, at the corners of the squares,
everywhere, divinities with hideous heads might be seen, colossal or
squat, with enormous bellies, or immoderately flattened, opening their
jaws, extending their arms, and holding forks, chains or javelins in
their hands; while the blue of the sea stretched away behind the streets
which were rendered still steeper by the perspective.

They were filled from morning till evening with a tumultuous people;
young boys shaking little bells, shouted at the doors of the baths; the
shops for hot drinks smoked, the air resounded with the noise of anvils,
the white cocks, sacred to the Sun, crowed on the terraces, the oxen
that were being slaughtered bellowed in the temples, slaves ran about
with baskets on their heads; and in the depths of the porticoes a priest
would sometimes appear, draped in a dark cloak, barefooted, and wearing
a pointed cap.

The spectacle afforded by Carthage irritated the Barbarians; they
admired it and execrated it, and would have liked both to annihilate it
and to dwell in it. But what was there in the Military Harbour defended
by a triple wall? Then behind the town, at the back of Megara, and
higher than the Acropolis, appeared Hamilcar’s palace.

Matho’s eyes were directed thither every moment. He would ascend the
olive trees and lean over with his hand spread out above his eyebrows.
The gardens were empty, and the red door with its black cross remained
constantly shut.

More than twenty times he walked round the ramparts, seeking some breach
by which he might enter. One night he threw himself into the gulf and
swam for three hours at a stretch. He reached the foot of the Mappalian
quarter and tried to climb up the face of the cliff. He covered his
knees with blood, broke his nails, and then fell back into the waves and
returned.

His impotence exasperated him. He was jealous of this Carthage which
contained Salammbô, as if of some one who had possessed her. His
nervelessness left him to be replaced by a mad and continual eagerness
for action. With flaming cheek, angry eyes, and hoarse voice, he would
walk with rapid strides through the camp; or seated on the shore he
would scour his great sword with sand. He shot arrows at the passing
vultures. His heart overflowed into frenzied speech.

“Give free course to your wrath like a runaway chariot,” said
Spendius. “Shout, blaspheme, ravage and slay. Grief is allayed with
blood, and since you cannot sate your love, gorge your hate; it will
sustain you!”

Matho resumed the command of his soldiers. He drilled them pitilessly.
He was respected for his courage and especially for his strength.
Moreover he inspired a sort of mystic dread, and it was believed that
he conversed at night with phantoms. The other captains were animated
by his example. The army soon grew disciplined. From their houses the
Carthaginians could hear the bugle-flourishes that regulated their
exercises. At last the Barbarians drew near.

To crush them in the isthmus it would have been necessary for two armies
to take them simultaneously in the rear, one disembarking at the end of
the gulf of Utica, and the second at the mountain of the Hot Springs.
But what could be done with the single sacred Legion, mustering at most
six thousand men? If the enemy bent towards the east they would join the
nomads and intercept the commerce of the desert. If they fell back to
the west, Numidia would rise. Finally, lack of provisions would
sooner or later lead them to devastate the surrounding country like
grasshoppers, and the rich trembled for their fine country-houses, their
vineyards and their cultivated lands.

Hanno proposed atrocious and impracticable measures, such as promising
a heavy sum for every Barbarian’s head, or setting fire to their camp
with ships and machines. His colleague Gisco, on the other hand, wished
them to be paid. But the Ancients detested him owing to his popularity;
for they dreaded the risk of a master, and through terror of monarchy
strove to weaken whatever contributed to it or might re-establish it.

Outside the fortification there were people of another race and of
unknown origin, all hunters of the porcupine, and eaters of shell-fish
and serpents. They used to go into caves to catch hyenas alive, and
amuse themselves by making them run in the evening on the sands of
Megara between the stelæ of the tombs. Their huts, which were made
of mud and wrack, hung on the cliff like swallows’ nests. There they
lived, without government and without gods, pell-mell, completely naked,
at once feeble and fierce, and execrated by the people of all time on
account of their unclean food. One morning the sentries perceived that
they were all gone.

At last some members of the Great Council arrived at a decision. They
came to the camp without necklaces or girdles, and in open sandals
like neighbours. They walked at a quiet pace, waving salutations to
the captains, or stopped to speak to the soldiers, saying that all was
finished and that justice was about to be done to their claims.

Many of them saw a camp of Mercenaries for the first time. Instead of
the confusion which they had pictured to themselves, there prevailed
everywhere terrible silence and order. A grassy rampart formed a lofty
wall round the army immovable by the shock of catapults. The ground in
the streets was sprinkled with fresh water; through the holes in the
tents they could perceive tawny eyeballs gleaming in the shade. The
piles of pikes and hanging panoplies dazzled them like mirrors. They
conversed in low tones. They were afraid of upsetting something with
their long robes.

The soldiers requested provisions, undertaking to pay for them out of
the money that was due.

Oxen, sheep, guinea fowl, fruit and lupins were sent to them, with
smoked scombri, that excellent scombri which Carthage dispatched to
every port. But they walked scornfully around the magnificent cattle,
and disparaging what they coveted, offered the worth of a pigeon for
a ram, or the price of a pomegranate for three goats. The Eaters of
Uncleanness came forward as arbitrators, and declared that they were
being duped. Then they drew their swords with threats to slay.

Commissaries of the Great Council wrote down the number of years for
which pay was due to each soldier. But it was no longer possible to know
how many Mercenaries had been engaged, and the Ancients were dismayed at
the enormous sum which they would have to pay. The reserve of silphium
must be sold, and the trading towns taxed; the Mercenaries would
grow impatient; Tunis was already with them; and the rich, stunned by
Hanno’s ragings and his colleague’s reproaches, urged any citizens
who might know a Barbarian to go to see him immediately in order to win
back his friendship, and to speak him fair. Such a show of confidence
would soothe them.

Traders, scribes, workers in the arsenal, and whole families visited the
Barbarians.

The soldiers allowed all the Carthaginians to come in, but by a single
passage so narrow that four men abreast jostled one another in it.
Spendius, standing against the barrier, had them carefully searched;
facing him Matho was examining the multitude, trying to recognise some
one whom he might have seen at Salammbô’s palace.

The camp was like a town, so full of people and of movement was it. The
two distinct crowds mingled without blending, one dressed in linen or
wool, with felt caps like fir-cones, and the other clad in iron and
wearing helmets. Amid serving men and itinerant vendors there moved
women of all nations, as brown as ripe dates, as greenish as olives,
as yellow as oranges, sold by sailors, picked out of dens, stolen from
caravans, taken in the sacking of towns, women that were jaded with love
so long as they were young, and plied with blows when they were old, and
that died in routs on the roadsides among the baggage and the abandoned
beasts of burden. The wives of the nomads had square, tawny robes of
dromedary’s hair swinging at their heels; musicians from Cyrenaica,
wrapped in violet gauze and with painted eyebrows, sang, squatting on
mats; old Negresses with hanging breasts gathered the animals’ dung
that was drying in the sun to light their fires; the Syracusan women had
golden plates in their hair; the Lusitanians had necklaces of shells;
the Gauls wore wolf skins upon their white bosoms; and sturdy children,
vermin-covered, naked and uncircumcised, butted with their heads against
passers-by, or came behind them like young tigers to bite their hands.

The Carthaginians walked through the camp, surprised at the quantities
of things with which it was running over. The most miserable were
melancholy, and the rest dissembled their anxiety.

The soldiers struck them on the shoulder, and exhorted them to be gay.
As soon as they saw any one, they invited him to their amusements. If
they were playing at discus, they would manage to crush his feet, or
if at boxing to fracture his jaw with the very first blow. The slingers
terrified the Carthaginians with their slings, the Psylli with their
vipers, and the horsemen with their horses, while their victims,
addicted as they were to peaceful occupations, bent their heads and
tried to smile at all these outrages. Some, in order to show themselves
brave, made signs that they should like to become soldiers. They were
set to split wood and to curry mules. They were buckled up in armour,
and rolled like casks through the streets of the camp. Then, when
they were about to leave, the Mercenaries plucked out their hair with
grotesque contortions.

But many, from foolishness or prejudice, innocently believed that all
the Carthaginians were very rich, and they walked behind them entreating
them to grant them something. They requested everything that they
thought fine: a ring, a girdle, sandals, the fringe of a robe, and when
the despoiled Carthaginian cried—“But I have nothing left. What
do you want?” they would reply, “Your wife!” Others even said,
“Your life!”

The military accounts were handed to the captains, read to the soldiers,
and definitively approved. Then they claimed tents; they received them.
Next the polemarchs of the Greeks demanded some of the handsome suits of
armour that were manufactured at Carthage; the Great Council voted
sums of money for their purchase. But it was only fair, so the horsemen
pretended, that the Republic should indemnify them for their horses;
one had lost three at such a siege, another, five during such a march,
another, fourteen in the precipices. Stallions from Hecatompylos were
offered to them, but they preferred money.

Next they demanded that they should be paid in money (in pieces of
money, and not in leathern coins) for all the corn that was owing to
them, and at the highest price that it had fetched during the war; so
that they exacted four hundred times as much for a measure of meal as
they had given for a sack of wheat. Such injustice was exasperating; but
it was necessary, nevertheless, to submit.

Then the delegates from the soldiers and from the Great Council swore
renewed friendship by the Genius of Carthage and the gods of the
Barbarians. They exchanged excuses and caresses with oriental
demonstrativeness and verbosity. Then the soldiers claimed, as a proof
of friendship, the punishment of those who had estranged them from the
Republic.

Their meaning, it was pretended, was not understood, and they explained
themselves more clearly by saying that they must have Hanno’s head.

Several times a day, they left their camp, and walked along the foot of
the walls, shouting a demand that the Suffet’s head should be thrown
to them, and holding out their robes to receive it.

The Great Council would perhaps have given way but for a last exaction,
more outrageous than the rest; they demanded maidens, chosen from
illustrious families, in marriage for their chiefs. It was an idea
which had emanated from Spendius, and which many thought most simple and
practicable. But the assumption of their desire to mix with Punic blood
made the people indignant; and they were bluntly told that they were to
receive no more. Then they exclaimed that they had been deceived,
and that if their pay did not arrive within three days, they would
themselves go and take it in Carthage.

The bad faith of the Mercenaries was not so complete as their enemies
thought. Hamilcar had made them extravagant promises, vague, it is true,
but at the same time solemn and reiterated. They might have believed
that when they disembarked at Carthage the town would be abandoned to
them, and that they should have treasures divided among them; and
when they saw that scarcely their wages would be paid, the disillusion
touched their pride no less than their greed.

Had not Dionysius, Pyrrhus, Agathocles, and the generals of Alexander
furnished examples of marvellous good fortune? Hercules, whom the
Chanaanites confounded with the sun, was the ideal which shone on the
horizon of armies. They knew that simple soldiers had worn diadems, and
the echoes of crumbling empires would furnish dreams to the Gaul in
his oak forest, to the Ethiopian amid his sands. But there was a nation
always ready to turn courage to account; and the robber driven from
his tribe, the patricide wandering on the roads, the perpetrator of
sacrilege pursued by the gods, all who were starving or in despair
strove to reach the port where the Carthaginian broker was recruiting
soldiers. Usually the Republic kept its promises. This time, however,
the eagerness of its avarice had brought it into perilous disgrace.
Numidians, Libyans, the whole of Africa was about to fall upon Carthage.
Only the sea was open to it, and there it met with the Romans; so that,
like a man assailed by murderers, it felt death all around it.

It was quite necessary to have recourse to Gisco, and the Barbarians
accepted his intervention. One morning they saw the chains of the
harbour lowered, and three flat-bottomed boats passing through the canal
of Tænia entered the lake.

Gisco was visible on the first at the prow. Behind him rose an enormous
chest, higher than a catafalque, and furnished with rings like hanging
crowns. Then appeared the legion of interpreters, with their hair
dressed like sphinxes, and with parrots tattooed on their breasts.
Friends and slaves followed, all without arms, and in such numbers that
they shouldered one another. The three long, dangerously-loaded barges
advanced amid the shouts of the onlooking army.

As soon as Gisco disembarked the soldiers ran to him. He had a sort of
tribune erected with knapsacks, and declared that he should not depart
before he had paid them all in full.

There was an outburst of applause, and it was a long time before he was
able to speak.

Then he censured the wrongs done to the Republic, and to the Barbarians;
the fault lay with a few mutineers who had alarmed Carthage by their
violence. The best proof of good intention on the part of the latter was
that it was he, the eternal adversary of the Suffet Hanno, who was sent
to them. They must not credit the people with the folly of desiring to
provoke brave men, nor with ingratitude enough not to recognise their
services; and Gisco began to pay the soldiers, commencing with the
Libyans. As they had declared that the lists were untruthful, he made no
use of them.

They defiled before him according to nationality, opening their fingers
to show the number of their years of service; they were marked in
succession with green paint on the left arm; the scribes dipped into the
yawning coffer, while others made holes with a style on a sheet of lead.

A man passed walking heavily like an ox.

“Come up beside me,” said the Suffet, suspecting some fraud; “how
many years have you served?”

“Twelve,” replied the Libyan.

Gisco slipped his fingers under his chin, for the chin-piece of the
helmet used in course of time to occasion two callosities there; these
were called carobs, and “to have the carobs” was an expression used
to denote a veteran.

“Thief!” exclaimed the Suffet, “your shoulders ought to have what
your face lacks!” and tearing off his tunic he laid bare his back which
was covered with a bleeding scab; he was a labourer from Hippo-Zarytus.
Hootings were raised, and he was decapitated.

As soon as night fell, Spendius went and roused the Libyans, and said to
them:

“When the Ligurians, Greeks, Balearians, and men of Italy are paid,
they will return. But as for you, you will remain in Africa, scattered
through your tribes, and without any means of defence! It will be then
that the Republic will take its revenge! Mistrust the journey! Are you
going to believe everything that is said? Both the Suffets are agreed,
and this one is imposing on you! Remember the Island of Bones, and
Xanthippus, whom they sent back to Sparta in a rotten galley!”

“How are we to proceed?” they asked.

“Reflect!” said Spendius.

The two following days were spent in paying the men of Magdala, Leptis,
and Hecatompylos; Spendius went about among the Gauls.

“They are paying off the Libyans, and then they will discharge the
Greeks, the Balearians, the Asiatics and all the rest! But you, who are
few in number, will receive nothing! You will see your native lands
no more! You will have no ships, and they will kill you to save your
food!”

The Gauls came to the Suffet. Autaritus, he whom he had wounded at
Hamilcar’s palace, put questions to him, but was repelled by the
slaves, and disappeared swearing he would be revenged.

The demands and complaints multiplied. The most obstinate penetrated at
night into the Suffet’s tent; they took his hands and sought to move
him by making him feel their toothless mouths, their wasted arms, and
the scars of their wounds. Those who had not yet been paid were growing
angry, those who had received the money demanded more for their horses;
and vagabonds and outlaws assumed soldiers’ arms and declared that
they were being forgotten. Every minute there arrived whirlwinds of men,
as it were; the tents strained and fell; the multitude, thick pressed
between the ramparts of the camp, swayed with loud shouts from the gates
to the centre. When the tumult grew excessively violent Gisco would rest
one elbow on his ivory sceptre and stand motionless looking at the sea
with his fingers buried in his beard.

Matho frequently went off to speak with Spendius; then he would again
place himself in front of the Suffet, and Gisco could feel his eyes
continually like two flaming phalaricas darted against him. Several
times they hurled reproaches at each other over the heads of the crowd,
but without making themselves heard. The distribution, meanwhile,
continued, and the Suffet found expedients to remove every obstacle.

The Greeks tried to quibble about differences in currency, but he
furnished them with such explanations that they retired without a
murmur. The Negroes demanded white shells such as are used for trading
in the interior of Africa, but when he offered to send to Carthage for
them they accepted money like the rest.

But the Balearians had been promised something better, namely, women.
The Suffet replied that a whole caravan of maidens was expected for
them, but the journey was long and would require six moons more. When
they were fat and well rubbed with benjamin they should be sent in ships
to the ports of the Balearians.

Suddenly Zarxas, now handsome and vigorous, leaped like a mountebank
upon the shoulders of his friends and cried:

“Have you reserved any of them for the corpses?” at the same time
pointing to the gate of Khamon in Carthage.

The brass plates with which it was furnished from top to bottom shone
in the sun’s latest fires, and the Barbarians believed that they could
discern on it a trail of blood. Every time that Gisco wished to speak
their shouts began again. At last he descended with measured steps, and
shut himself up in his tent.

When he left it at sunrise his interpreters, who used to sleep outside,
did not stir; they lay on their backs with their eyes fixed, their
tongues between their teeth, and their faces of a bluish colour. White
mucus flowed from their nostrils, and their limbs were stiff, as if
they had all been frozen by the cold during the night. Each had a little
noose of rushes round his neck.

From that time onward the rebellion was unchecked. The murder of the
Balearians which had been recalled by Zarxas strengthened the distrust
inspired by Spendius. They imagined that the Republic was always trying
to deceive them. An end must be put to it! The interpreters should be
dispensed with! Zarxas sang war songs with a sling around his head;
Autaritus brandished his great sword; Spendius whispered a word to one
or gave a dagger to another. The boldest endeavoured to pay themselves,
while those who were less frenzied wished to have the distribution
continued. No one now relinquished his arms, and the anger of all
combined into a tumultuous hatred of Gisco.

Some got up beside him. So long as they vociferated abuse they were
listened to with patience; but if they tried to utter the least word in
his behalf they were immediately stoned, or their heads were cut off
by a sabre-stroke from behind. The heap of knapsacks was redder than an
altar.

They became terrible after their meal and when they had drunk wine! This
was an enjoyment forbidden in the Punic armies under pain of death, and
they raised their cups in the direction of Carthage in derision of its
discipline. Then they returned to the slaves of the exchequer and again
began to kill. The word strike, though different in each language, was
understood by all.

Gisco was well aware that he was being abandoned by his country; but in
spite of its ingratitude he would not dishonour it. When they reminded
him that they had been promised ships, he swore by Moloch to provide
them himself at his own expense, and pulling off his necklace of blue
stones he threw it into the crowd as the pledge of his oath.

Then the Africans claimed the corn in accordance with the engagements
made by the Great Council. Gisco spread out the accounts of the Syssitia
traced in violet pigment on sheep skins; and read out all that had
entered Carthage month by month and day by day.

Suddenly he stopped with gaping eyes, as if he had just discovered his
sentence of death among the figures.

The Ancients had, in fact, fraudulently reduced them, and the corn sold
during the most calamitous period of the war was set down at so low a
rate that, blindness apart, it was impossible to believe it.

“Speak!” they shouted. “Louder! Ah! he is trying to lie, the
coward! Don’t trust him.”

For some time he hesitated. At last he resumed his task.

The soldiers, without suspecting that they were being deceived, accepted
the accounts of the Syssitia as true. But the abundance that had
prevailed at Carthage made them furiously jealous. They broke open the
sycamore chest; it was three parts empty. They had seen such sums coming
out of it, that they thought it inexhaustible; Gisco must have buried
some in his tent. They scaled the knapsacks. Matho led them, and as they
shouted “The money! the money!” Gisco at last replied:

“Let your general give it to you!”

He looked them in the face without speaking, with his great yellow eyes,
and his long face that was paler than his beard. An arrow, held by its
feathers, hung from the large gold ring in his ear, and a stream of
blood was trickling from his tiara upon his shoulder.

At a gesture from Matho all advanced. Gisco held out his arms; Spendius
tied his wrists with a slip knot; another knocked him down, and he
disappeared amid the disorder of the crowd which was stumbling over the
knapsacks.

They sacked his tent. Nothing was found in it except things
indispensable to life; and, on a closer search, three images of Tanith,
and, wrapped up in an ape’s skin, a black stone which had fallen from
the moon. Many Carthaginians had chosen to accompany him; they were
eminent men, and all belonged to the war party.

They were dragged outside the tents and thrown into the pit used for the
reception of filth. They were tied with iron chains around the body to
solid stakes, and were offered food at the point of the javelin.

Autaritus overwhelmed them with invectives as he inspected them, but
being quite ignorant of his language they made no reply; and the Gaul
from time to time threw pebbles at their faces to make them cry out.


The next day a sort of languor took possession of the army. Now that
their anger was over they were seized with anxiety. Matho was suffering
from vague melancholy. It seemed to him that Salammbô had indirectly
been insulted. These rich men were a kind of appendage to her person.
He sat down in the night on the edge of the pit, and recognised in their
groanings something of the voice of which his heart was full.

All, however, upbraided the Libyans, who alone had been paid. But while
national antipathies revived, together with personal hatreds, it was
felt that it would be perilous to give way to them. Reprisals after
such an outrage would be formidable. It was necessary, therefore, to
anticipate the vengeance of Carthage. Conventions and harangues never
ceased. Every one spoke, no one was listened to; Spendius, usually so
loquacious, shook his head at every proposal.

One evening he asked Matho carelessly whether there were not springs in
the interior of the town.

“Not one!” replied Matho.

The next day Spendius drew him aside to the bank of the lake.

“Master!” said the former slave, “If your heart is dauntless, I
will bring you into Carthage.”

“How?” repeated the other, panting.

“Swear to execute all my commands and to follow me like a shadow!”

Then Matho, raising his arm towards the planet of Chabar, exclaimed:

“By Tanith, I swear!”

Spendius resumed:

“To-morrow after sunset you will wait for me at the foot of the
aqueduct between the ninth and tenth arcades. Bring with you an iron
pick, a crestless helmet, and leathern sandals.”

The aqueduct of which he spoke crossed the entire isthmus obliquely,—a
considerable work, afterwards enlarged by the Romans. In spite of her
disdain of other nations, Carthage had awkwardly borrowed this novel
invention from them, just as Rome herself had built Punic galleys; and
five rows of superposed arches, of a dumpy kind of architecture, with
buttresses at their foot and lions’ heads at the top, reached to
the western part of the Acropolis, where they sank beneath the town to
incline what was nearly a river into the cisterns of Megara.

Spendius met Matho here at the hour agreed upon. He fastened a sort of
harpoon to the end of a cord and whirled it rapidly like a sling; the
iron instrument caught fast, and they began to climb up the wall, the
one after the other.

But when they had ascended to the first story the cramp fell back every
time that they threw it, and in order to discover some fissure they had
to walk along the edge of the cornice. At every row of arches they found
that it became narrower. Then the cord relaxed. Several times it nearly
broke.

At last they reached the upper platform. Spendius stooped down from time
to time to feel the stones with his hand.

“Here it is,” he said; “let us begin!” And leaning on the
pick which Matho had brought they succeeded in dislodging one of the
flagstones.

In the distance they perceived a troop of horse-men galloping on horses
without bridles. Their golden bracelets leaped in the vague drapings
of their cloaks. A man could be seen in front crowned with ostrich
feathers, and galloping with a lance in each hand.

“Narr’ Havas!” exclaimed Matho.

“What matter?” returned Spendius, and he leaped into the hole which
they had just made by removing the flagstone.

Matho at his command tried to thrust out one of the blocks. But he could
not move his elbows for want of room.

“We shall return,” said Spendius; “go in front.” Then they
ventured into the channel of water.

It reached to their waists. Soon they staggered, and were obliged to
swim. Their limbs knocked against the walls of the narrow duct. The
water flowed almost immediately beneath the stones above, and their
faces were torn by them. Then the current carried them away. Their
breasts were crushed with air heavier than that of a sepulchre, and
stretching themselves out as much as possible with their heads between
their arms and their legs close together, they passed like arrows into
the darkness, choking, gurgling, and almost dead. Suddenly all became
black before them, and the speed of the waters redoubled. They fell.

When they came to the surface again, they remained for a few minutes
extended on their backs, inhaling the air delightfully. Arcades, one
behind another, opened up amid large walls separating the various
basins. All were filled, and the water stretched in a single sheet
throughout the length of the cisterns. Through the air-holes in the
cupolas on the ceiling there fell a pale brightness which spread upon
the waves discs, as it were, of light, while the darkness round about
thickened towards the walls and threw them back to an indefinite
distance. The slightest sound made a great echo.

Spendius and Matho commenced to swim again, and passing through the
opening of the arches, traversed several chambers in succession. Two
other rows of smaller basins extended in a parallel direction on each
side. They lost themselves; they turned, and came back again. At last
something offered a resistance to their heels. It was the pavement of
the gallery that ran along the cisterns.

Then, advancing with great precautions, they felt along the wall to
find an outlet. But their feet slipped, and they fell into the great
centre-basins. They had to climb up again, and there they fell again.
They experienced terrible fatigue, which made them feel as if all their
limbs had been dissolved in the water while swimming. Their eyes closed;
they were in the agonies of death.

Spendius struck his hand against the bars of a grating. They shook it,
it gave way, and they found themselves on the steps of a staircase. A
door of bronze closed it above. With the point of a dagger they moved
the bar, which was opened from without, and suddenly the pure open air
surrounded them.

The night was filled with silence, and the sky seemed at an
extraordinary height. Clusters of trees projected over the long lines of
walls. The whole town was asleep. The fires of the outposts shone like
lost stars.

Spendius, who had spent three years in the ergastulum, was but
imperfectly acquainted with the different quarters. Matho conjectured
that to reach Hamilcar’s palace they ought to strike to the left and
cross the Mappalian district.

“No,” said Spendius, “take me to the temple of Tanith.”

Matho wished to speak.

“Remember!” said the former slave, and raising his arm he showed him
the glittering planet of Chabar.

Then Matho turned in silence towards the Acropolis.

They crept along the nopal hedges which bordered the paths. The water
trickled from their limbs upon the dust. Their damp sandals made no
noise; Spendius, with eyes that flamed more than torches, searched
the bushes at every step;—and he walked behind Matho with his hands
resting on the two daggers which he carried on his arms, and which hung
from below the armpit by a leathern band.





CHAPTER V TANITH

After leaving the gardens Matho and Spendius found themselves checked
by the rampart of Megara. But they discovered a breach in the great wall
and passed through.

The ground sloped downwards, forming a kind of very broad valley. It was
an exposed place.

“Listen,” said Spendius, “and first of all fear nothing! I shall
fulfil my promise—”

He stopped abruptly, and seemed to reflect as though searching for
words,—“Do you remember that time at sunrise when I showed Carthage
to you on Salammbô’s terrace? We were strong that day, but you would
listen to nothing!” Then in a grave voice: “Master, in the sanctuary
of Tanith there is a mysterious veil, which fell from heaven and which
covers the goddess.”

“I know,” said Matho.

Spendius resumed: “It is itself divine, for it forms part of her. The
gods reside where their images are. It is because Carthage possesses it
that Carthage is powerful.” Then leaning over to his ear: “I have
brought you with me to carry it off!”

Matho recoiled in horror. “Begone! look for some one else! I will not
help you in this execrable crime!”

“But Tanith is your enemy,” retorted Spendius; “she is persecuting
you and you are dying through her wrath. You will be revenged upon
her. She will obey you, and you will become almost immortal and
invincible.”

Matho bent his head. Spendius continued:

“We should succumb; the army would be annihilated of itself. We have
neither flight, nor succour, nor pardon to hope for! What chastisement
from the gods can you be afraid of since you will have their power in
your own hands? Would you rather die on the evening of a defeat, in
misery beneath the shelter of a bush, or amid the outrages of the
populace and the flames of funeral piles? Master, one day you will enter
Carthage among the colleges of the pontiffs, who will kiss your sandals;
and if the veil of Tanith weighs upon you still, you will reinstate it
in its temple. Follow me! come and take it.”

Matho was consumed by a terrible longing. He would have liked to possess
the veil while refraining from the sacrilege. He said to himself that
perhaps it would not be necessary to take it in order to monopolise its
virtue. He did not go to the bottom of his thought but stopped at the
boundary, where it terrified him.

“Come on!” he said; and they went off with rapid strides, side by
side, and without speaking.

The ground rose again, and the dwellings were near. They turned again
into the narrow streets amid the darkness. The strips of esparto-grass
with which the doors were closed, beat against the walls. Some camels
were ruminating in a square before heaps of cut grass. Then they passed
beneath a gallery covered with foliage. A pack of dogs were barking. But
suddenly the space grew wider and they recognised the western face of
the Acropolis. At the foot of Byrsa there stretched a long black mass:
it was the temple of Tanith, a whole made up of monuments and galleries,
courts and fore-courts, and bounded by a low wall of dry stones.
Spendius and Matho leaped over it.

This first barrier enclosed a wood of plane-trees as a precaution
against plague and infection in the air. Tents were scattered here
and there, in which, during the daytime, depilatory pastes,
perfumes, garments, moon-shaped cakes, and images of the goddess with
representations of the temple hollowed out in blocks of alabaster, were
on sale.

They had nothing to fear, for on nights when the planet did not appear,
all rites were suspended; nevertheless Matho slackened his speed, and
stopped before the three ebony steps leading to the second enclosure.

“Forward!” said Spendius.

Pomegranate, almond trees, cypresses and myrtles alternated in regular
succession; the path, which was paved with blue pebbles, creaked beneath
their footsteps, and full-blown roses formed a hanging bower over the
whole length of the avenue. They arrived before an oval hole protected
by a grating. Then Matho, who was frightened by the silence, said to
Spendius:

“It is here that they mix the fresh water and the bitter.”

“I have seen all that,” returned the former slave, “in Syria, in
the town of Maphug”; and they ascended into the third enclosure by a
staircase of six silver steps.

A huge cedar occupied the centre. Its lowest branches were hidden
beneath scraps of material and necklaces hung upon them by the faithful.
They walked a few steps further on, and the front of the temple was
displayed before them.

Two long porticoes, with their architraves resting on dumpy pillars,
flanked a quadrangular tower, the platform of which was adorned with
the crescent of a moon. On the angles of the porticoes and at the four
corners of the tower stood vases filled with kindled aromatics. The
capitals were laden with pomegranates and coloquintidas. Twining knots,
lozenges, and rows of pearls alternated on the walls, and a hedge of
silver filigree formed a wide semicircle in front of the brass staircase
which led down from the vestibule.

There was a cone of stone at the entrance between a stela of gold and
one of emerald, and Matho kissed his right hand as he passed beside it.

The first room was very lofty; its vaulted roof was pierced by
numberless apertures, and if the head were raised the stars might be
seen. All round the wall rush baskets were heaped up with the first
fruits of adolescence in the shape of beards and curls of hair; and in
the centre of the circular apartment the body of a woman issued from a
sheath which was covered with breasts. Fat, bearded, and with eyelids
downcast, she looked as though she were smiling, while her hands were
crossed upon the lower part of her big body, which was polished by the
kisses of the crowd.

Then they found themselves again in the open air in a transverse
corridor, wherein there was an altar of small dimensions leaning against
an ivory door. There was no further passage; the priests alone could
open it; for the temple was not a place of meeting for the multitude,
but the private abode of a divinity.

“The enterprise is impossible,” said Matho. “You had not thought
of this! Let us go back!” Spendius was examining the walls.

He wanted the veil, not because he had confidence in its virtue
(Spendius believed only in the Oracle), but because he was persuaded
that the Carthaginians would be greatly dismayed on seeing themselves
deprived of it. They walked all round behind in order to find some
outlet.

Aedicules of different shapes were visible beneath clusters of
turpentine trees. Here and there rose a stone phallus, and large stags
roamed peacefully about, spurning the fallen fir-cones with their cloven
hoofs.

But they retraced their steps between two long galleries which ran
parallel to each other. There were small open cells along their sides,
and tabourines and cymbals hung against their cedar columns from top to
bottom. Women were sleeping stretched on mats outside the cells. Their
bodies were greasy with unguents, and exhaled an odour of spices and
extinguished perfuming-pans; while they were so covered with tattooings,
necklaces, rings, vermilion, and antimony that, but for the motion of
their breasts, they might have been taken for idols as they lay thus on
the ground. There were lotus-trees encircling a fountain in which fish
like Salammbô’s were swimming; and then in the background, against
the wall of the temple, spread a vine, the branches of which were of
glass and the grape-bunches of emerald, the rays from the precious
stones making a play of light through the painted columns upon the
sleeping faces.

Matho felt suffocated in the warm atmosphere pressed down upon him by
the cedar partitions. All these symbols of fecundation, these perfumes,
radiations, and breathings overwhelmed him. Through all the mystic
dazzling he kept thinking of Salammbô. She became confused with the
goddess herself, and his love unfolded itself all the more, like the
great lotus-plants blooming upon the depths of the waters.

Spendius was calculating how much money he would have made in former
days by the sale of these women; and with a rapid glance he estimated
the weight of the golden necklaces as he passed by.

The temple was impenetrable on this side as on the other, and they
returned behind the first chamber. While Spendius was searching and
ferreting, Matho was prostrate before the door supplicating Tanith. He
besought her not to permit the sacrilege, and strove to soften her with
caressing words, such as are used to an angry person.

Spendius noticed a narrow aperture above the door.

“Rise!” he said to Matho, and he made him stand erect with his back
against the wall. Placing one foot in his hands, and then the other
upon his head, he reached up to the air-hole, made his way into it and
disappeared. Then Matho felt a knotted cord—that one which Spendius
had rolled around his body before entering the cisterns—fall upon his
shoulders, and bearing upon it with both hands he soon found himself by
the side of the other in a large hall filled with shadow.

Such an attempt was something extraordinary. The inadequacy of the
means for preventing it was a sufficient proof that it was considered
impossible. The sanctuaries were protected by terror more than by their
walls. Matho expected to die at every step.

However a light was flickering far back in the darkness, and they went
up to it. It was a lamp burning in a shell on the pedestal of a statue
which wore the cap of the Kabiri. Its long blue robe was strewn with
diamond discs, and its heels were fastened to the ground by chains which
sank beneath the pavement. Matho suppressed a cry. “Ah! there she is!
there she is!” he stammered out. Spendius took up the lamp in order to
light himself.

“What an impious man you are!” murmured Matho, following him
nevertheless.

The apartment which they entered had nothing in it but a black painting
representing another woman. Her legs reached to the top of the wall, and
her body filled the entire ceiling; a huge egg hung by a thread from her
navel, and she fell head downwards upon the other wall, reaching as far
as the level of the pavement, which was touched by her pointed fingers.

They drew a hanging aside, in order to go on further; but the wind blew
and the light went out.

Then they wandered about, lost in the complications of the architecture.
Suddenly they felt something strangely soft beneath their feet. Sparks
crackled and leaped; they were walking in fire. Spendius touched the
ground and perceived that it was carefully carpeted with lynx skins;
then it seemed to them that a big cord, wet, cold, and viscous, was
gliding between their legs. Through some fissures cut in the wall there
fell thin white rays, and they advanced by this uncertain light. At last
they distinguished a large black serpent. It darted quickly away and
disappeared.

“Let us fly!” exclaimed Matho. “It is she! I feel her; she is
coming.”

“No, no,” replied Spendius, “the temple is empty.”

Then a dazzling light made them lower their eyes. Next they perceived
all around them an infinite number of beasts, lean, panting, with
bristling claws, and mingled together one above another in a mysterious
and terrifying confusion. There were serpents with feet, and bulls
with wings, fishes with human heads were devouring fruit, flowers were
blooming in the jaws of crocodiles, and elephants with uplifted trunks
were sailing proudly through the azure like eagles. Their incomplete or
multiplied limbs were distended with terrible exertion. As they thrust
out their tongues they looked as though they would fain give forth
their souls; and every shape was to be found among them as if the
germ-receptacle had been suddenly hatched and had burst, emptying itself
upon the walls of the hall.

Round the latter were twelve globes of blue crystal, supported by
monsters resembling tigers. Their eyeballs were starting out of their
heads like those of snails, with their dumpy loins bent they were
turning round towards the background where the supreme Rabbet, the
Omnifecund, the last invented, shone splendid in a chariot of ivory.

She was covered with scales, feathers, flowers, and birds as high as the
waist. For earrings she had silver cymbals, which flapped against her
cheeks. Her large fixed eyes gazed upon you, and a luminous stone,
set in an obscene symbol on her brow, lighted the whole hall by its
reflection in red copper mirrors above the door.

Matho stood a step forward; but a flag stone yielded beneath his heels
and immediately the spheres began to revolve and the monsters to roar;
music rose melodious and pealing, like the harmony of the planets; the
tumultuous soul of Tanith was poured streaming forth. She was about to
arise, as lofty as the hall and with open arms. Suddenly the monsters
closed their jaws and the crystal globes revolved no more.

Then a mournful modulation lingered for a time through the air and at
last died away.

“And the veil?” said Spendius.

Nowhere could it be seen. Where was it to be found? How could it be
discovered? What if the priests had hidden it? Matho experienced anguish
of heart and felt as though he had been deceived in his belief.

“This way!” whispered Spendius. An inspiration guided him. He drew
Matho behind Tanith’s chariot, where a cleft a cubit wide ran down the
wall from top to bottom.

Then they penetrated into a small and completely circular room, so lofty
that it was like the interior of a pillar. In the centre there was a
big black stone, of semispherical shape like a tabourine; flames were
burning upon it; an ebony cone, bearing a head and two arms, rose
behind.

But beyond it seemed as though there were a cloud wherein were twinkling
stars; faces appeared in the depths of its folds—Eschmoun with the
Kabiri, some of the monsters that had already been seen, the sacred
beasts of the Babylonians, and others with which they were not
acquainted. It passed beneath the idol’s face like a mantle, and
spread fully out was drawn up on the wall to which it was fastened by
the corners, appearing at once bluish as the night, yellow as the dawn,
purple as the sun, multitudinous, diaphanous, sparkling light. It was
the mantle of the goddess, the holy zaïmph which might not be seen.

Both turned pale.

“Take it!” said Matho at last.

Spendius did not hesitate, and leaning upon the idol he unfastened the
veil, which sank to the ground. Matho laid his hand upon it; then he put
his head through the opening, then he wrapped it about his body, and he
spread out his arms the better to view it.

“Let us go!” said Spendius.

Matho stood panting with his eyes fixed upon the pavement. Suddenly he
exclaimed:

“But what if I went to her? I fear her beauty no longer! What could
she do to me? I am now more than a man. I could pass through flames or
walk upon the sea! I am transported! Salammbô! Salammbô! I am your
master!”

His voice was like thunder. He seemed to Spendius to have grown taller
and transformed.

A sound of footsteps drew near, a door opened, and a man appeared, a
priest with lofty cap and staring eyes. Before he could make a gesture
Spendius had rushed upon him, and clasping him in his arms had buried
both his daggers in his sides. His head rang upon the pavement.

Then they stood for a while, as motionless as the corpse, listening.
Nothing could be heard but the murmuring of the wind through the
half-opened door.

The latter led into a narrow passage. Spendius advanced along it, Matho
followed him, and they found themselves almost immediately in the third
enclosure, between the lateral porticoes, in which were the dwellings of
the priests.

Behind the cells there must be a shorter way out. They hastened along.

Spendius squatted down at the edge of the fountain and washed his
bloodstained hands. The women slept. The emerald vine shone. They
resumed their advance.

But something was running behind them under the trees; and Matho, who
bore the veil, several times felt that it was being pulled very gently
from below. It was a large cynocephalus, one of those which dwelt at
liberty within the enclosure of the goddess. It clung to the mantle as
though it had been conscious of the theft. They did not dare to strike
it, however, fearing that it might redouble its cries; suddenly its
anger subsided, and it trotted close beside them swinging its body with
its long hanging arms. Then at the barrier it leaped at a bound into a
palm tree.

When they had left the last enclosure they directed their steps towards
Hamilcar’s palace, Spendius understanding that it would be useless to
try to dissuade Matho.

They went by the street of the Tanners, the square of Muthumbal, the
green market and the crossways of Cynasyn. At the angle of a wall a man
drew back frightened by the sparkling thing which pierced the darkness.

“Hide the zaïmph!” said Spendius.

Other people passed them, but without perceiving them.

At last they recognised the houses of Megara.

The pharos, which was built behind them on the summit of the cliff,
lit up the heavens with a great red brightness, and the shadow of the
palace, with its rising terraces, projected a monstrous pyramid, as it
were, upon the gardens. They entered through the hedge of jujube-trees,
beating down the branches with blows of the dagger.

The traces of the feast of the Mercenaries were everywhere still
manifest. The parks were broken up, the trenches drained, the doors
of the ergastulum open. No one was to be seen about the kitchens or
cellars. They wondered at the silence, which was occasionally broken by
the hoarse breathing of the elephants moving in their shackles, and the
crepitation of the pharos, in which a pile of aloes was burning.

Matho, however, kept repeating:

“But where is she? I wish to see her! Lead me!”

“It is a piece of insanity!” Spendius kept saying. “She will call,
her slaves will run up, and in spite of your strength you will die!”

They reached thus the galley staircase. Matho raised his head, and
thought that he could perceive far above a vague brightness, radiant and
soft. Spendius sought to restrain him, but he dashed up the steps.

As he found himself again in places where he had already seen her, the
interval of the days that had passed was obliterated from his memory.
But now had she been singing among the tables; she had disappeared, and
he had since been continually ascending this staircase. The sky above
his head was covered with fires; the sea filled the horizon; at each
step he was surrounded by a still greater immensity, and he continued to
climb upward with that strange facility which we experience in dreams.

The rustling of the veil as it brushed against the stones recalled his
new power to him; but in the excess of his hope he could no longer tell
what he was to do; this uncertainty alarmed him.

From time to time he would press his face against the quadrangular
openings in the closed apartments, and he thought that in several of the
latter he could see persons asleep.

The last story, which was narrower, formed a sort of dado on the summit
of the terraces. Matho walked round it slowly.

A milky light filled the sheets of talc which closed the little
apertures in the wall, and in their symmetrical arrangement they looked
in the darkness like rows of delicate pearls. He recognised the red door
with the black cross. The throbbing of his heart increased. He would
fain have fled. He pushed the door and it opened.

A galley-shaped lamp hung burning in the back part of the room,
and three rays, emitted from its silver keel, trembled on the lofty
wainscots, which were painted red with black bands. The ceiling was an
assemblage of small beams, with amethysts and topazes amid their gilding
in the knots of the wood. On both the great sides of the apartment there
stretched a very low bed made with white leathern straps; while above,
semi-circles like shells, opened in the thickness of the wall, suffered
a garment to come out and hang down to the ground.

There was an oval basin with a step of onyx round it; delicate slippers
of serpent skin were standing on the edge, together with an alabaster
flagon. The trace of a wet footstep might be seen beyond. Exquisite
scents were evaporating.

Matho glided over the pavement, which was encrusted with gold,
mother-of-pearl, and glass; and, in spite of the polished smoothness
of the ground, it seemed to him that his feet sank as though he were
walking on sand.

Behind the silver lamp he had perceived a large square of azure held in
the air by four cords from above, and he advanced with loins bent and
mouth open.

Flamingoes’ wings, fitted on branches of black coral, lay about
among purple cushions, tortoiseshell strigils, cedar boxes, and ivory
spatulas. There were antelopes’ horns with rings and bracelets strung
upon them; and clay vases were cooling in the wind in the cleft of the
wall with a lattice-work of reeds. Several times he struck his foot,
for the ground had various levels of unequal height, which formed a
succession of apartments, as it were, in the room. In the background
there were silver balustrades surrounding a carpet strewn with painted
flowers. At last he came to the hanging bed beside an ebony stool
serving to get into it.

But the light ceased at the edge;—and the shadow, like a great
curtain, revealed only a corner of the red mattress with the extremity
of a little naked foot lying upon its ankle. Then Matho took up the lamp
very gently.

She was sleeping with her cheek in one hand and with the other arm
extended. Her ringlets were spread about her in such abundance that she
appeared to be lying on black feathers, and her ample white tunic wound
in soft draperies to her feet following the curves of her person. Her
eyes were just visible beneath her half-closed eyelids. The curtains,
which stretched perpendicularly, enveloped her in a bluish atmosphere,
and the motion of her breathing, communicating itself to the cords,
seemed to rock her in the air. A long mosquito was buzzing.

Matho stood motionless holding the silver lamp at arm’s length; but
on a sudden the mosquito-net caught fire and disappeared, and Salammbô
awoke.

The fire had gone out of itself. She did not speak. The lamp caused
great luminous moires to flicker on the wainscots.

“What is it?” she said.

He replied:

“’Tis the veil of the goddess!”

“The veil of the goddess!” cried Salammbô, and supporting herself
on both clenched hands she leaned shuddering out. He resumed:

“I have been in the depths of the sanctuary to seek it for you!
Look!” The zaïmph shone a mass of rays.

“Do you remember it?” said Matho. “You appeared at night in my
dreams, but I did not guess the mute command of your eyes!” She put
out one foot upon the ebony stool. “Had I understood I should have
hastened hither, I should have forsaken the army, I should not have left
Carthage. To obey you I would go down through the caverns of Hadrumetum
into the kingdom of the shades!—Forgive me! it was as though mountains
were weighing upon my days; and yet something drew me on! I tried to
come to you! Should I ever have dared this without the Gods!—Let us
go! You must follow me! or, if you do not wish to do so, I will remain.
What matters it to me!—Drown my soul in your breath! Let my lips be
crushed with kissing your hands!”

“Let me see it!” she said. “Nearer! nearer!”

Day was breaking, and the sheets of talc in the walls were filled with
a vinous colour. Salammbô leaned fainting against the cushions of the
bed.

“I love you!” cried Matho.

“Give it!” she stammered out, and they drew closer together.

She kept advancing, clothed in her white trailing simar, and with her
large eyes fastened on the veil. Matho gazed at her, dazzled by the
splendours of her head, and, holding out the zaïmph towards her, was
about to enfold her in an embrace. She was stretching out her
arms. Suddenly she stopped, and they stood looking at each other,
open-mouthed.

Then without understanding the meaning of his solicitation a horror
seized upon her. Her delicate eyebrows rose, her lips opened; she
trembled. At last she struck one of the brass pateras which hung at the
corners of the red mattress, crying:

“To the rescue! to the rescue! Back, sacrilegious man! infamous and
accursed! Help, Taanach, Kroum, Ewa, Micipsa, Schaoul!”

And the scared face of Spendius, appearing in the wall between the clay
flagons, cried out these words:

“Fly! they are hastening hither!”

A great tumult came upwards shaking the staircases, and a flood of
people, women, serving-men, and slaves, rushed into the room with
stakes, tomahawks, cutlasses, and daggers. They were nearly paralysed
with indignation on perceiving a man; the female servants uttered
funeral wailings, and the eunuchs grew pale beneath their black skins.

Matho was standing behind the balustrades. With the zaïmph which was
wrapped about him, he looked like a sidereal god surrounded by the
firmament. The slaves were going to fall upon him, but she stopped them:

“Touch it not! It is the mantle of the goddess!”

She had drawn back into a corner; but she took a step towards him, and
stretched forth her naked arm:

“A curse upon you, you who have plundered Tanith! Hatred, vengeance,
massacre, and grief! May Gurzil, god of battles, rend you! may Mastiman,
god of the dead, stifle you! and may the Other—he who may not be
named—burn you!”

Matho uttered a cry as though he had received a sword-thrust. She
repeated several times: “Begone! begone!”

The crowd of servants spread out, and Matho, with hanging head, passed
slowly through the midst of them; but at the door he stopped, for the
fringe of the zaïmph had caught on one of the golden stars with which
the flagstones were paved. He pulled it off abruptly with a movement of
his shoulder and went down the staircases.

Spendius, bounding from terrace to terrace, and leaping over the hedges
and trenches, had escaped from the gardens. He reached the foot of the
pharos. The wall was discontinued at this spot, so inaccessible was the
cliff. He advanced to the edge, lay down on his back, and let himself
slide, feet foremost, down the whole length of it to the bottom; then
by swimming he reached the Cape of the Tombs, made a wide circuit of the
salt lagoon, and re-entered the camp of the Barbarians in the evening.

The sun had risen; and, like a retreating lion, Matho went down the
paths, casting terrible glances about him.

A vague clamour reached his ears. It had started from the palace, and it
was beginning afresh in the distance, towards the Acropolis. Some said
that the treasure of the Republic had been seized in the temple of
Moloch; others spoke of the assassination of a priest. It was thought,
moreover, that the Barbarians had entered the city.

Matho, who did not know how to get out of the enclosures, walked
straight before him. He was seen, and an outcry was raised. Every one
understood; and there was consternation, then immense wrath.

From the bottom of the Mappalian quarter, from the heights of the
Acropolis, from the catacombs, from the borders of the lake, the
multitude came in haste. The patricians left their palaces, and the
traders left their shops; the women forsook their children; swords,
hatchets, and sticks were seized; but the obstacle which had stayed
Salammbô stayed them. How could the veil be taken back? The mere sight
of it was a crime; it was of the nature of the gods, and contact with it
was death.

The despairing priests wrung their hands on the peristyles of the
temples. The guards of the Legion galloped about at random; the people
climbed upon the houses, the terraces, the shoulders of the colossuses,
and the masts of the ships. He went on, nevertheless, and the rage, and
the terror also, increased at each of his steps; the streets cleared at
his approach, and the torrent of flying men streamed on both sides up
to the tops of the walls. Everywhere he could perceive only eyes opened
widely as if to devour him, chattering teeth and outstretched fists, and
Salammbô’s imprecations resounded many times renewed.

Suddenly a long arrow whizzed past, then another, and stones began to
buzz about him; but the missiles, being badly aimed (for there was the
dread of hitting the zaïmph), passed over his head. Moreover, he made a
shield of the veil, holding it to the right, to the left, before him and
behind him; and they could devise no expedient. He quickened his steps
more and more, advancing through the open streets. They were barred
with cords, chariots, and snares; and all his windings brought him back
again. At last he entered the square of Khamon where the Balearians had
perished, and stopped, growing pale as one about to die. This time he
was surely lost, and the multitude clapped their hands.

He ran up to the great gate, which was closed. It was very high, made
throughout of heart of oak, with iron nails and sheathed with brass.
Matho flung himself against it. The people stamped their feet with joy
when they saw the impotence of his fury; then he took his sandal, spit
upon it, and beat the immovable panels with it. The whole city howled.
The veil was forgotten now, and they were about to crush him. Matho
gazed with wide vacant eyes upon the crowd. His temples were throbbing
with violence enough to stun him, and he felt a numbness as of
intoxication creeping over him. Suddenly he caught sight of the long
chain used in working the swinging of the gate. With a bound he grasped
it, stiffening his arms, and making a buttress of his feet, and at last
the huge leaves partly opened.

Then when he was outside he took the great zaïmph from his neck, and
raised it as high as possible above his head. The material, upborne by
the sea breeze, shone in the sunlight with its colours, its gems, and
the figures of its gods. Matho bore it thus across the whole plain as
far as the soldiers’ tents, and the people on the walls watched the
fortune of Carthage depart.





CHAPTER VI HANNO

“I ought to have carried her off!” Matho said in the evening to
Spendius. “I should have seized her, and torn her from her house! No
one would have dared to touch me!”

Spendius was not listening to him. Stretched on his back he was taking
delicious rest beside a large jar filled with honey-coloured water, into
which he would dip his head from time to time in order to drink more
copiously.

Matho resumed:

“What is to be done? How can we re-enter Carthage?”

“I do not know,” said Spendius.

Such impassibility exasperated Matho and he exclaimed:

“Why! the fault is yours! You carry me away, and then you forsake me,
coward that you are! Why, pray, should I obey you? Do you think that you
are my master? Ah! you prostituter, you slave, you son of a slave!” He
ground his teeth and raised his broad hand above Spendius.

The Greek did not reply. An earthen lamp was burning gently against the
tent-pole, where the zaïmph shone amid the hanging panoply. Suddenly
Matho put on his cothurni, buckled on his brazen jacket of mail, and
took his helmet.

“Where are you going?” asked Spendius.

“I am returning! Let me alone! I will bring her back! And if they
show themselves I will crush them like vipers! I will put her to death,
Spendius! Yes,” he repeated, “I will kill her! You shall see, I will
kill her!”

But Spendius, who was listening eagerly, snatched up the zaïmph
abruptly and threw it into a corner, heaping up fleeces above it.
A murmuring of voices was heard, torches gleamed, and Narr’ Havas
entered, followed by about twenty men.

They wore white woollen cloaks, long daggers, copper necklaces, wooden
earrings, and boots of hyena skin; and standing on the threshold they
leaned upon their lances like herdsmen resting themselves. Narr’
Havas was the handsomest of all; his slender arms were bound with straps
ornamented with pearls. The golden circlet which fastened his ample
garment about his head held an ostrich feather which hung down behind
his shoulder; his teeth were displayed in a continual smile; his eyes
seemed sharpened like arrows, and there was something observant and airy
about his whole demeanour.

He declared that he had come to join the Mercenaries, for the Republic
had long been threatening his kingdom. Accordingly he was interested in
assisting the Barbarians, and he might also be of service to them.

“I will provide you with elephants (my forests are full of them),
wine, oil, barley, dates, pitch and sulphur for sieges, twenty thousand
foot-soldiers and ten thousand horses. If I address myself to you,
Matho, it is because the possession of the zaïmph has made you chief
man in the army. Moreover,” he added, “we are old friends.”

Matho, however, was looking at Spendius, who, seated on the sheep-skins,
was listening, and giving little nods of assent the while. Narr’ Havas
continued speaking. He called the gods to witness he cursed Carthage. In
his imprecations he broke a javelin. All his men uttered simultaneously
a loud howl, and Matho, carried away by so much passion, exclaimed that
he accepted the alliance.

A white bull and a black sheep, the symbols of day and night, were then
brought, and their throats were cut on the edge of a ditch. When the
latter was full of blood they dipped their arms into it. Then Narr’
Havas spread out his hand upon Matho’s breast, and Matho did the
same to Narr’ Havas. They repeated the stain upon the canvas of their
tents. Afterwards they passed the night in eating, and the remaining
portions of the meat were burnt together with the skin, bones, horns,
and hoofs.

Matho had been greeted with great shouting when he had come back bearing
the veil of the goddess; even those who were not of the Chanaanitish
religion were made by their vague enthusiasm to feel the arrival of
a genius. As to seizing the zaïmph, no one thought of it, for the
mysterious manner in which he had acquired it was sufficient in the
minds of the Barbarians to justify its possession; such were the
thoughts of the soldiers of the African race. The others, whose hatred
was not of such long standing, did not know how to make up their minds.
If they had had ships they would immediately have departed.

Spendius, Narr’ Havas, and Matho despatched men to all the tribes on
Punic soil.

Carthage was sapping the strength of these nations. She wrung exorbitant
taxes from them, and arrears or even murmurings were punished with
fetters, the axe, or the cross. It was necessary to cultivate whatever
suited the Republic, and to furnish what she demanded; no one had the
right of possessing a weapon; when villages rebelled the inhabitants
were sold; governors were esteemed like wine-presses, according to the
quantity which they succeeded in extracting. Then beyond the regions
immediately subject to Carthage extended the allies roamed the Nomads,
who might be let loose upon them. By this system the crops were always
abundant, the studs skilfully managed, and the plantations superb.

The elder Cato, a master in the matters of tillage and slaves, was
amazed at it ninety-two years later, and the death-cry which he repeated
continually at Rome was but the exclamation of jealous greed.

During the last war the exactions had been increased, so that nearly
all the towns of Libya had surrendered to Regulus. To punish them, a
thousand talents, twenty thousand oxen, three hundred bags of gold dust,
and considerable advances of grain had been exacted from them, and the
chiefs of the tribes had been crucified or thrown to the lions.

Tunis especially execrated Carthage! Older than the metropolis, it could
not forgive her her greatness, and it fronted her walls crouching in
the mire on the water’s edge like a venomous beast watching her.
Transportation, massacres, and epidemics did not weaken it. It
had assisted Archagathas, the son of Agathocles, and the Eaters of
Uncleanness found arms there at once.

The couriers had not yet set out when universal rejoicing broke out
in the provinces. Without waiting for anything they strangled the
comptrollers of the houses and the functionaries of the Republic in
the baths; they took the old weapons that had been concealed out of the
caves; they forged swords with the iron of the ploughs; the children
sharpened javelins at the doors, and the women gave their necklaces,
rings, earrings, and everything that could be employed for the
destruction of Carthage. Piles of lances were heaped up in the country
towns like sheaves of maize. Cattle and money were sent off. Matho
speedily paid the Mercenaries their arrears, and owing to this, which
was Spendius’s idea, he was appointed commander-in-chief—the
schalishim of the Barbarians.

Reinforcements of men poured in at the same time. The aborigines
appeared first, and were followed by the slaves from the country;
caravans of Negroes were seized and armed, and merchants on their way
to Carthage, despairing of any more certain profit, mingled with the
Barbarians. Numerous bands were continually arriving. From the heights
of the Acropolis the growing army might be seen.

But the guards of the Legion were posted as sentries on the platform
of the aqueduct, and near them rose at intervals brazen vats, in which
floods of asphalt were boiling. Below in the plain the great crowd
stirred tumultuously. They were in a state of uncertainty, feeling the
embarrassment with which Barbarians are always inspired when they meet
with walls.

Utica and Hippo-Zarytus refused their alliance. Phonician colonies like
Carthage, they were self-governing, and always had clauses inserted
in the treaties concluded by the Republic to distinguish them from the
latter. Nevertheless they respected this strong sister of theirs who
protected them, and they did not think that she could be vanquished by
a mass of Barbarians; these would on the contrary be themselves
exterminated. They desired to remain neutral and to live at peace.

But their position rendered them indispensable. Utica, at the foot
of the gulf, was convenient for bringing assistance to Carthage from
without. If Utica alone were taken, Hippo-Zarytus, six hours further
distant along the coast, would take its place, and the metropolis, being
revictualled in this way, would be impregnable.

Spendius wished the siege to be undertaken immediately. Narr’ Havas
was opposed to this: an advance should first be made upon the frontier.
This was the opinion of the veterans, and of Matho himself, and it
was decided that Spendius should go to attack Utica, and Matho
Hippo-Zarytus, while in the third place the main body should rest on
Tunis and occupy the plain of Carthage, Autaritus being in command.
As to Narr’ Havas, he was to return to his own kingdom to procure
elephants and to scour the roads with his cavalry.

The women cried out loudly against this decision; they coveted the
jewels of the Punic ladies. The Libyans also protested. They had been
summoned against Carthage, and now they were going away from it! The
soldiers departed almost alone. Matho commanded his own companions,
together with the Iberians, Lusitanians, and the men of the West, and of
the islands; all those who spoke Greek had asked for Spendius on account
of his cleverness.

Great was the stupefaction when the army was seen suddenly in motion;
it stretched along beneath the mountain of Ariana on the road to Utica
beside the sea. A fragment remained before Tunis, the rest disappeared
to re-appear on the other shore of the gulf on the outskirts of the
woods in which they were lost.

They were perhaps eighty thousand men. The two Tyrian cities would offer
no resistance, and they would return against Carthage. Already there was
a considerable army attacking it from the base of the isthmus, and it
would soon perish from famine, for it was impossible to live without the
aid of the provinces, the citizens not paying contributions as they did
at Rome. Carthage was wanting in political genius. Her eternal anxiety
for gain prevented her from having the prudence which results from
loftier ambitions. A galley anchored on the Libyan sands, it was with
toil that she maintained her position. The nations roared like billows
around her, and the slightest storm shook this formidable machine.

The treasury was exhausted by the Roman war and by all that had been
squandered and lost in the bargaining with the Barbarians. Nevertheless
soldiers must be had, and not a government would trust the Republic!
Ptolemæus had lately refused it two thousand talents. Moreover the rape
of the veil disheartened them. Spendius had clearly foreseen this.

But the nation, feeling that it was hated, clasped its money and
its gods to its heart, and its patriotism was sustained by the very
constitution of its government.

First, the power rested with all, without any one being strong enough
to engross it. Private debts were considered as public debts, men of
Chanaanitish race had a monopoly of commerce, and by multiplying the
profits of piracy with those of usury, by hard dealings in lands and
slaves and with the poor, fortunes were sometimes made. These alone
opened up all the magistracies, and although authority and money were
perpetuated in the same families, people tolerated the oligarchy because
they hoped ultimately to share in it.

The societies of merchants, in which the laws were elaborated, chose the
inspectors of the exchequer, who on leaving office nominated the hundred
members of the Council of the Ancients, themselves dependent on the
Grand Assembly, or general gathering of all the rich. As to the two
Suffets, the relics of the monarchy and the less than consuls, they were
taken from distinct families on the same day. All kinds of enmities were
contrived between them, so that they might mutually weaken each other.
They could not deliberate concerning war, and when they were vanquished
the Great Council crucified them.

The power of Carthage emanated, therefore, from the Syssitia, that is
to say, from a large court in the centre of Malqua, at the place, it
was said, where the first bark of Phonician sailors had touched, the
sea having retired a long way since then. It was a collection of little
rooms of archaic architecture, built of palm trunks with corners of
stone, and separated from one another so as to accommodate the various
societies separately. The rich crowded there all day to discuss their
own concerns and those of the government, from the procuring of pepper
to the extermination of Rome. Thrice in a moon they would have their
beds brought up to the lofty terrace running along the wall of the
court, and they might be seen from below at table in the air, without
cothurni or cloaks, with their diamond-covered fingers wandering
over the dishes, and their large earrings hanging down among the
flagons,—all fat and lusty, half-naked, smiling and eating beneath the
blue sky, like great sharks sporting in the sea.

But just now they were unable to dissemble their anxiety; they were too
pale for that. The crowd which waited for them at the gates escorted
them to their palaces in order to obtain some news from them. As in
times of pestilence, all the houses were shut; the streets would fill
and suddenly clear again; people ascended the Acropolis or ran to the
harbour, and the Great Council deliberated every night. At last the
people were convened in the square of Khamon, and it was decided to
leave the management of things to Hanno, the conqueror of Hecatompylos.

He was a true Carthaginian, devout, crafty, and pitiless towards the
people of Africa. His revenues equalled those of the Barcas. No one had
such experience in administrative affairs.

He decreed the enrolment of all healthy citizens, he placed catapults on
the towers, he exacted exorbitant supplies of arms, he even ordered the
construction of fourteen galleys which were not required, and he desired
everything to be registered and carefully set down in writing. He had
himself conveyed to the arsenal, the pharos, and the treasuries of the
temples; his great litter was continually to be seen swinging from step
to step as it ascended the staircases of the Acropolis. And then in
his palace at night, being unable to sleep, he would yell out warlike
manouvres in terrible tones so as to prepare himself for the fray.

In their extremity of terror all became brave. The rich ranged
themselves in line along the Mappalian district at cockcrow, and tucking
up their robes practised themselves in handling the pike. But for
want of an instructor they had disputes about it. They would sit down
breathless upon the tombs and then begin again. Several even dieted
themselves. Some imagined that it was necessary to eat a great deal in
order to acquire strength, while others who were inconvenienced by their
corpulence weakened themselves with fasts in order to become thin.

Utica had already called several times upon Carthage for assistance; but
Hanno would not set out until the engines of war had been supplied with
the last screws. He lost three moons more in equipping the one hundred
and twelve elephants that were lodged in the ramparts. They were the
conquerors of Regulus; the people loved them; it was impossible to treat
such old friends too well. Hanno had the brass plates which adorned
their breasts recast, their tusks gilt, their towers enlarged, and
caparisons, edged with very heavy fringes, cut out of the handsomest
purple. Finally, as their drivers were called Indians (after the first
ones, no doubt, who came from the Indies) he ordered them all to be
costumed after the Indian fashion; that is to say, with white pads round
their temples, and small drawers of byssus, which with their transverse
folds looked like two valves of a shell applied to the hips.

The army under Autaritus still remained before Tunis. It was hidden
behind a wall made with mud from the lake, and protected on the top by
thorny brushwood. Some Negroes had planted tall sticks here and there
bearing frightful faces,—human masks made with birds’ feathers, and
jackals’ or serpents’ heads,—which gaped towards the enemy for
the purpose of terrifying him; and the Barbarians, reckoning themselves
invincible through these means, danced, wrestled, and juggled, convinced
that Carthage would perish before long. Any one but Hanno would easily
have crushed such a multitude, hampered as it was with herds and women.
Moreover, they knew nothing of drill, and Autaritus was so disheartened
that he had ceased to require it.

They stepped aside when he passed by rolling his big blue eyes. Then
on reaching the edge of the lake he would draw back his sealskin cloak,
unfasten the cord which tied up his long red hair, and soak the latter
in the water. He regretted that he had not deserted to the Romans along
with the two thousand Gauls of the temple of Eryx.

Often the sun would suddenly lose his rays in the middle of the day.
Then the gulf and the open sea would seem as motionless as molten lead.
A cloud of brown dust stretching perpendicularly would speed whirling
along; the palm trees would bend and the sky disappear, while stones
would be heard rebounding on the animals’ cruppers; and the Gaul, his
lips glued against the holes in his tent, would gasp with exhaustion and
melancholy. His thoughts would be of the scent of the pastures on autumn
mornings, of snowflakes, or of the bellowing of the urus lost in the
fog, and closing his eyelids he would in imagination behold the fires in
long, straw-roofed cottages flickering on the marshes in the depths of
the woods.

Others regretted their native lands as well as he, even though they
might not be so far away. Indeed the Carthaginian captives could
distinguish the velaria spread over the courtyards of their houses,
beyond the gulf on the slopes of Byrsa. But sentries marched round them
continually. They were all fastened to a common chain. Each one wore an
iron carcanet, and the crowd was never weary of coming to gaze at them.
The women would show their little children the handsome robes hanging in
tatters on their wasted limbs.

Whenever Autaritus looked at Gisco he was seized with rage at the
recollection of the insult that he had received, and he would have
killed him but for the oath which he had taken to Narr’ Havas. Then
he would go back into his tent and drink a mixture of barley and cumin
until he swooned away from intoxication,—to awake afterwards in broad
daylight consumed with horrible thirst.

Matho, meanwhile, was besieging Hippo-Zarytus. But the town was
protected by a lake, communicating with the sea. It had three lines of
circumvallation, and upon the heights which surrounded it there
extended a wall fortified with towers. He had never commanded in such
an enterprise before. Moreover, he was beset with thoughts of Salammbô,
and he raved in the delight of her beauty as in the sweetness of a
vengeance that transported him with pride. He felt an acrid, frenzied,
permanent want to see her again. He even thought of presenting himself
as the bearer of a flag of truce, in the hope that once within Carthage
he might make his way to her. Often he would cause the assault to be
sounded and waiting for nothing rush upon the mole which it was sought
to construct in the sea. He would snatch up the stones with his hands,
overturn, strike, and deal sword-thrusts everywhere. The Barbarians
would dash on pell-mell; the ladders would break with a loud crash, and
masses of men would tumble into the water, causing it to fly up in
red waves against the walls. Finally the tumult would subside, and the
soldiers would retire to make a fresh beginning.

Matho would go and seat himself outside the tents, wipe his
blood-splashed face with his arm, and gaze at the horizon in the
direction of Carthage.

In front of him, among the olives, palms, myrtles and planes, stretched
two broad ponds which met another lake, the outlines of which could not
be seen. Behind one mountain other mountains reared themselves, and
in the middle of the immense lake rose an island perfectly black and
pyramidal in form. On the left, at the extremity of the gulf, were
sand-heaps like arrested waves, large and pale, while the sea, flat as a
pavement of lapis-lazuli, ascended by insensible degrees to the edge
of the sky. The verdure of the country was lost in places beneath long
sheets of yellow; carobs were shining like knobs of coral; vine branches
drooped from the tops of the sycamores; the murmuring of the water could
be heard; crested larks were hopping about, and the sun’s latest fires
gilded the carapaces of the tortoises as they came forth from the reeds
to inhale the breeze.

Matho would heave deep sighs. He would lie flat on his face, with his
nails buried in the soil, and weep; he felt wretched, paltry, forsaken.
Never would he possess her, and he was unable even to take a town.

At night when alone in his tent he would gaze upon the zaïmph. Of what
use to him was this thing which belonged to the gods?—and doubt crept
into the Barbarian’s thoughts. Then, on the contrary, it would seem
to him that the vesture of the goddess was depending from Salammbô, and
that a portion of her soul hovered in it, subtler than a breath; and
he would feel it, breathe it in, bury his face in it, and kiss it with
sobs. He would cover his shoulders with it in order to delude himself
that he was beside her.

Sometimes he would suddenly steal away, stride in the starlight over
the sleeping soldiers as they lay wrapped in their cloaks, spring upon
a horse on reaching the camp gates, and two hours later be at Utica in
Spendius’s tent.

At first he would speak of the siege, but his coming was only to ease
his sorrow by talking about Salammbô. Spendius exhorted him to be
prudent.

“Drive away these trifles from your soul, which is degraded by them!
Formerly you were used to obey; now you command an army, and if Carthage
is not conquered we shall at least be granted provinces. We shall become
kings!”

But how was it that the possession of the zaïmph did not give them the
victory? According to Spendius they must wait.

Matho fancied that the veil affected people of Chanaanitish race
exclusively, and, in his Barbarian-like subtlety, he said to himself:
“The zaïmph will accordingly do nothing for me, but since they have
lost it, it will do nothing for them.”

Afterwards a scruple troubled him. He was afraid of offending Moloch
by worshipping Aptouknos, the god of the Libyans, and he timidly asked
Spendius to which of the gods it would be advisable to sacrifice a man.

“Keep on sacrificing!” laughed Spendius.

Matho, who could not understand such indifference, suspected the Greek
of having a genius of whom he did not speak.

All modes of worship, as well as all races, were to be met with in these
armies of Barbarians, and consideration was had to the gods of others,
for they too, inspired fear. Many mingled foreign practices with their
native religion. It was to no purpose that they did not adore the stars;
if a constellation were fatal or helpful, sacrifices were offered to
it; an unknown amulet found by chance at a moment of peril became
a divinity; or it might be a name and nothing more, which would be
repeated without any attempt to understand its meaning. But after
pillaging temples, and seeing numbers of nations and slaughters, many
ultimately ceased to believe in anything but destiny and death;—and
every evening these would fall asleep with the placidity of wild beasts.
Spendius had spit upon the images of Jupiter Olympius; nevertheless he
dreaded to speak aloud in the dark, nor did he fail every day to put on
his right boot first.

He reared a long quadrangular terrace in front of Utica, but in
proportion as it ascended the rampart was also heightened, and what was
thrown down by the one side was almost immediately raised again by the
other. Spendius took care of his men; he dreamed of plans and strove to
recall the stratagems which he had heard described in his travels. But
why did Narr’ Havas not return? There was nothing but anxiety.

Hanno had at last concluded his preparations. One night when there was
no moon he transported his elephants and soldiers on rafts across
the Gulf of Carthage. Then they wheeled round the mountain of the Hot
Springs so as to avoid Autaritus, and continued their march so slowly
that instead of surprising the Barbarians in the morning, as the Suffet
had calculated, they did not reach them until it was broad daylight on
the third day.

Utica had on the east a plain which extended to the large lagoon of
Carthage; behind it a valley ran at right angles between two low and
abruptly terminated mountains; the Barbarians were encamped further
to the left in such a way as to blockade the harbour; and they were
sleeping in their tents (for on that day both sides were too weary
to fight and were resting) when the Carthaginian army appeared at the
turning of the hills.

Some camp followers furnished with slings were stationed at intervals
on the wings. The first line was formed of the guards of the Legion in
golden scale-armour, mounted on their big horses, which were without
mane, hair, or ears, and had silver horns in the middle of their
foreheads to make them look like rhinoceroses. Between their squadrons
were youths wearing small helmets and swinging an ashen javelin in each
hand. The long files of the heavy infantry marched behind. All these
traders had piled as many weapons upon their bodies as possible. Some
might be seen carrying an axe, a lance, a club, and two swords all at
once; others bristled with darts like porcupines, and their arms stood
out from their cuirasses in sheets of horn or iron plates. At last the
scaffoldings of the lofty engines appeared: carrobalistas, onagers,
catapults and scorpions, rocking on chariots drawn by mules and
quadrigas of oxen; and in proportion as the army drew out, the captains
ran panting right and left to deliver commands, close up the files, and
preserve the intervals. Such of the Ancients as held commands had come
in purple cassocks, the magnificent fringes of which tangled in the
white straps of their cothurni. Their faces, which were smeared all over
with vermilion, shone beneath enormous helmets surmounted with images
of the gods; and, as they had shields with ivory borders covered with
precious stones, they might have been taken for suns passing over walls
of brass.

But the Carthaginians manouvred so clumsily that the soldiers in
derision urged them to sit down. They called out that they were just
going to empty their big stomachs, to dust the gilding of their skin,
and to give them iron to drink.

A strip of green cloth appeared at the top of the pole planted before
Spendius’s tent: it was the signal. The Carthaginian army replied to
it with a great noise of trumpets, cymbals, flutes of asses’ bones,
and tympanums. The Barbarians had already leaped outside the palisades,
and were facing their enemies within a javelin’s throw of them.

A Balearic slinger took a step forward, put one of his clay bullets into
his thong, and swung round his arm. An ivory shield was shivered, and
the two armies mingled together.

The Greeks made the horses rear and fall back upon their masters by
pricking their nostrils with the points of their lances. The slaves
who were to hurl stones had picked such as were too big, and they
accordingly fell close to them. The Punic foot-soldiers exposed the
right side in cutting with their long swords. The Barbarians broke their
lines; they slaughtered them freely; they stumbled over the dying and
dead, quite blinded by the blood that spurted into their faces. The
confused heap of pikes, helmets, cuirasses and swords turned round
about, widening out and closing in with elastic contractions. The gaps
increased more and more in the Carthaginian cohorts, the engines could
not get out of the sand; and finally the Suffet’s litter (his grand
litter with crystal pendants), which from the beginning might have
been seen tossing among the soldiers like a bark on the waves, suddenly
foundered. He was no doubt dead. The Barbarians found themselves alone.

The dust around them fell and they were beginning to sing, when Hanno
himself appeared on the top of an elephant. He sat bare-headed beneath a
parasol of byssus which was carried by a Negro behind him. His necklace
of blue plates flapped against the flowers on his black tunic; his huge
arms were compressed within circles of diamonds, and with open mouth he
brandished a pike of inordinate size, which spread out at the end like
a lotus, and flashed more than a mirror. Immediately the earth
shook,—and the Barbarians saw all the elephants of Carthage, with
their gilt tusks and blue-painted ears, hastening up in single line,
clothed with bronze and shaking the leathern towers which were placed
above their scarlet caparisons, in each of which were three archers
bending large bows.

The soldiers were barely in possession of their arms; they had taken
up their positions at random. They were frozen with terror; they stood
undecided.

Javelins, arrows, phalaricas, and masses of lead were already being
showered down upon them from the towers. Some clung to the fringes of
the caparisons in order to climb up, but their hands were struck off
with cutlasses and they fell backwards upon the swords’ points. The
pikes were too weak and broke, and the elephants passed through the
phalanxes like wild boars through tufts of grass; they plucked up the
stakes of the camp with their trunks, and traversed it from one end to
the other, overthrowing the tents with their breasts. All the Barbarians
had fled. They were hiding themselves in the hills bordering the valley
by which the Carthaginians had come.

The victorious Hanno presented himself before the gates of Utica. He had
a trumpet sounded. The three Judges of the town appeared in the opening
of the battlements on the summit of a tower.

But the people of Utica would not receive such well-armed guests. Hanno
was furious. At last they consented to admit him with a feeble escort.

The streets were too narrow for the elephants. They had to be left
outside.

As soon as the Suffet was in the town the principal men came to greet
him. He had himself taken to the vapour baths, and called for his cooks.


Three hours afterwards he was still immersed in the oil of cinnamomum
with which the basin had been filled; and while he bathed he ate
flamingoes’ tongues with honied poppy-seeds on a spread ox-hide.
Beside him was his Greek physician, motionless, in a long yellow robe,
directing the re-heating of the bath from time to time, and two young
boys leaned over the steps of the basin and rubbed his legs. But
attention to his body did not check his love for the commonwealth, for
he was dictating a letter to be sent to the Great Council, and as
some prisoners had just been taken he was asking himself what terrible
punishment could be devised.

“Stop!” said he to a slave who stood writing in the hollow of his
hand. “Let some of them be brought to me! I wish to see them!”

And from the bottom of the hall, full of a whitish vapour on which the
torches cast red spots, three Barbarians were thrust forward: a Samnite,
a Spartan, and a Cappadocian.

“Proceed!” said Hanno.

“Rejoice, light of the Baals! your Suffet has exterminated the
ravenous hounds! Blessings on the Republic! Give orders for prayers!”
He perceived the captives and burst out laughing: “Ah! ha! my fine
fellows of Sicca! You are not shouting so loudly to-day! It is I! Do
you recognise me? And where are your swords? What really terrible
fellows!” and he pretended to be desirous to hide himself as if
he were afraid of them. “You demanded horses, women, estates,
magistracies, no doubt, and priesthoods! Why not? Well, I will provide
you with the estates, and such as you will never come out of! You shall
be married to gibbets that are perfectly new! Your pay? it shall be
melted in your mouths in leaden ingots! and I will put you into good and
very exalted positions among the clouds, so as to bring you close to the
eagles!”

The three long-haired and ragged Barbarians looked at him without
understanding what he said. Wounded in the knees, they had been seized
by having ropes thrown over them, and the ends of the great chains on
their hands trailed upon the pavement. Hanno was indignant at their
impassibility.

“On your knees! on your knees! jackals! dust! vermin! excrements! And
they make no reply! Enough! be silent! Let them be flayed alive! No!
presently!”

He was breathing like a hippopotamus and rolling his eyes. The perfumed
oil overflowed beneath the mass of his body, and clinging to the scales
on his skin, made it look pink in the light of the torches.

He resumed:

“For four days we suffered greatly from the sun. Some mules were lost
in crossing the Macaras. In spite of their position, the extraordinary
courage—Ah! Demonades! how I suffer! Have the bricks reheated, and let
them be red-hot!”

A noise of rakes and furnaces was heard. The incense smoked more
strongly in the large perfuming pans, and the shampooers, who were quite
naked and were sweating like sponges, crushed a paste composed of wheat,
sulphur, black wine, bitch’s milk, myrrh, galbanum and storax upon his
joints. He was consumed with incessant thirst, but the yellow-robed man
did not yield to this inclination, and held out to him a golden cup in
which viper broth was smoking.

“Drink!” said he, “that strength of sun-born serpents may
penetrate into the marrow of your bones, and take courage, O reflection
of the gods! You know, moreover, that a priest of Eschmoun watches those
cruel stars round the Dog from which your malady is derived. They are
growing pale like the spots on your skin, and you are not to die from
them.”

“Oh! yes, that is so, is it not?” repeated the Suffet, “I am not
to die from them!” And his violaceous lips gave forth a breath more
nauseous than the exhalation from a corpse. Two coals seemed to burn in
the place of his eyes, which had lost their eyebrows; a mass of wrinkled
skin hung over his forehead; both his ears stood out from his head
and were beginning to increase in size; and the deep lines forming
semicircles round his nostrils gave him a strange and terrifying
appearance, the look of a wild beast. His unnatural voice was like a
roar; he said:

“Perhaps you are right, Demonades. In fact there are many ulcers here
which have closed. I feel robust. Here! look how I am eating!”

And less from greediness than from ostentation, and the desire to prove
to himself that he was in good health, he cut into the forcemeats
of cheese and marjoram, the boned fish, gourds, oysters with eggs,
horse-radishes, truffles, and brochettes of small birds. As he looked
at the prisoners he revelled in the imagination of their tortures.
Nevertheless he remembered Sicca, and the rage caused by all his woes
found vent in the abuse of these three men.

“Ah! traitors! ah! wretches! infamous, accursed creatures! And you
outraged me!—me! the Suffet! Their services, the price of their
blood, say they! Ah! yes! their blood! their blood!” Then speaking
to himself:—“All shall perish! not one shall be sold! It would be
better to bring them to Carthage! I should be seen—but doubtless, I
have not brought chains enough? Write: Send me—How many of them are
there? go and ask Muthumbal! Go! no pity! and let all their hands be cut
off and brought to me in baskets!”

But strange cries at once hoarse and shrill penetrated into the hall
above Hanno’s voice and the rattling of the dishes that were being
placed around him. They increased, and suddenly the furious trumpeting
of the elephants burst forth as if the battle were beginning again. A
great tumult was going on around the town.

The Carthaginians had not attempted to pursue the Barbarians. They had
taken up their quarters at the foot of the walls with their baggage,
mules, serving men, and all their train of satraps; and they made
merry in their beautiful pearl-bordered tents, while the camp of the
Mercenaries was now nothing but a heap of ruins in the plain. Spendius
had recovered his courage. He dispatched Zarxas to Matho, scoured the
woods, rallied his men (the losses had been inconsiderable),—and they
were re-forming their lines enraged at having been conquered without a
fight, when they discovered a vat of petroleum which had no doubt been
abandoned by the Carthaginians. Then Spendius had some pigs carried off
from the farms, smeared them with bitumen, set them on fire, and drove
them towards Utica.

The elephants were terrified by the flames and fled. The ground sloped
upwards, javelins were thrown at them, and they turned back;—and
with great blows of ivory and trampling feet they ripped up the
Carthaginians, stifled them, flattened them. The Barbarians descended
the hill behind them; the Punic camp, which was without entrenchments
was sacked at the first rush, and the Carthaginians were crushed against
the gates, which were not opened through fear of the Mercenaries.

Day broke, and Matho’s foot-soldiers were seen coming up from the
west. At the same time horsemen appeared; they were Narr’ Havas with
his Numidians. Leaping ravines and bushes they ran down the fugitives
like greyhounds pursuing hares. This change of fortune interrupted the
Suffet. He called out to be assisted to leave the vapour bath.

The three captives were still before him. Then a Negro (the same who had
carried his parasol in the battle) leaned over to his ear.

“Well?” replied the Suffet slowly. “Ah! kill them!” he added in
an abrupt tone.

The Ethiopian drew a long dagger from his girdle and the three heads
fell. One of them rebounded among the remains of the feast, and leaped
into the basin, where it floated for some time with open mouth and
staring eyes. The morning light entered through the chinks in the wall;
the three bodies streamed with great bubbles like three fountains, and
a sheet of blood flowed over the mosaics with their powdering of blue
dust. The Suffet dipped his hand into this hot mire and rubbed his knees
with it: it was a cure.

When evening had come he stole away from the town with his escort, and
made his way into the mountain to rejoin his army.

He succeeded in finding the remains of it.

Four days afterward he was on the top of a defile at Gorza, when the
troops under Spendius appeared below. Twenty stout lances might easily
have checked them by attacking the head of their column, but the
Carthaginians watched them pass by in a state of stupefaction. Hanno
recognised the king of the Numidians in the rearguard; Narr’
Havas bowed to him, at the same time making a sign which he did not
understand.

The return to Carthage took place amid all kinds of terrors. They
marched only at night, hiding in the olive woods during the day.
There were deaths at every halting-place; several times they believed
themselves lost. At last they reached Cape Hermæum, where vessels came
to receive them.

Hanno was so fatigued, so desperate—the loss of the elephants in
particular overwhelmed him—that he demanded poison from Demonades in
order to put an end to it all. Moreover he could already feel himself
stretched upon the cross.

Carthage had not strength enough to be indignant with him. Its losses
had amounted to one hundred thousand nine hundred and seventy-two
shekels of silver, fifteen thousand six hundred and twenty-three shekels
of gold, eighteen elephants, fourteen members of the Great Council,
three hundred of the rich, eight thousand citizens, corn enough for
three moons, a considerable quantity of baggage, and all the engines of
war! The defection of Narr’ Havas was certain, and both sieges were
beginning again. The army under Autaritus now extended from Tunis to
Rhades. From the top of the Acropolis long columns of smoke might be
seen in the country ascending to the sky; they were the mansions of the
rich, which were o

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