United States or Cocos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


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.

The important matter was to take Tunis. He advanced by forced marches upon it. He had sent Narr' Havas to Carthage with the news of his victory; and the King of the Numidians, proud of his success, visited Salammbo. She received him in her gardens under a large sycamore tree, amid pillows of yellow leather, and with Taanach beside her.

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.

And as we saw, he was incurious enough not to read the narrative of what had been done by his own American colleagues even after the Havas Agency announced it. To President Wilson, on the other hand, the League was the magnum opus of his life.

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.

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.

Narr' Havas had held a great battue, and after tying goats at intervals had run upon them and so driven them towards the Pass of the Hatchet; and they were now all living in it when a man arrived who had been sent by the Ancients to find out what there was left of the Barbarians. Lions and corpses were lying over the tract of the plain, and the dead were mingled with clothes and armour.

Salammbo started, and bent her head. But Narr' Havas, pursuing the subject, compared his longings to flowers languishing for rain, or to lost travellers waiting for the day. He told her, further, that she was more beautiful than the moon, better than the wind of morning or than the face of a guest.

Here, Carthage, Hamilcar, Hannibal, Narr' Havas, the Numidian hero, and Spendius, the Greek slave, the lions in bondage, the pomegranate trees which they sprinkled with silphium, the whole a strange and barbaric world; then Charles Bovary, the chemist Homais, his son Napoléon and his daughter Athalie, provincial life in the time of the Second Empire; bourgeois adultery, diligences and notaries' clerks.

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.