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Salammbo was borne back, nearly swooning, to her throne by the priests who flocked about her. They congratulated her; it was her work. All clapped their hands and stamped their feet, howling her name. A man darted upon the corpse.
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 Salammbo. "Speak!" he said. "What will you?"
The maidens of the great families were accustomed to respect these shackles as something that was almost religious, and Salammbo, blushing, rolled the two pieces of the golden chain around her ankles. Carthage, Megara, her house, her room, and the country that she had passed through, whirled in tumultuous yet distinct images through her memory.
He had recognised the influence of Rabbet, being skilful to discern the gods who send diseases; and to cure Salammbo he had her apartment watered with lotions of vervain, and maidenhair; she ate mandrakes every morning; she slept with her head on a cushion filled with aromatics blended by the pontiffs; he had even employed baaras, a fiery-coloured root which drives back fatal geniuses into the North; lastly, turning towards the polar star, he murmured thrice the mysterious name of Tanith; but Salammbo still suffered and her anguish deepened.
Sweat flowed down his breast between his square muscles; and his breathing shook his sides with his bronze girdle all garnished with thongs hanging down to his knees, which were firmer than marble. Salammbo, who was accustomed to eunuchs, yielded to amazement at the strength of this man. It was the chastisement of the goddess or the influence of Moloch in motion around her in the five armies.
Courage! exterminate them!" And Narr' Havas was rushing away when Salammbo appeared. She leaped down quickly from her horse. She opened her ample cloak and spreading out her arms displayed the zaimph. The leathern tent, which was raised at the corners, left visible the entire circuit of the mountain with its thronging soldiers, and as it was in the centre Salammbo could be seen on all sides.
Heavens! there was a fine quarrel about Salammbo; some one whom you do not know, went so far as not to like it, Maurice called him BOURGEOIS, and to settle the affair, little Lina, who is high tempered, declared that her husband was wrong to use such a word, for he ought to have said IMBECILE. There you are. I am well as a Turk. I love you and I embrace you. Your old Troubadour, G. Sand
Only the beardless priests understood Salammbo; 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.
A breach became visible in it, and the slave disappeared. A sentry was walking upon the top of the entrenchment with a bow in his hand and a pike on his shoulder. Salammbo drew still nearer; the Barbarian knelt and a long arrow pierced the hem of her cloak. Then as she stood motionless and shrieking, he asked her what she wanted. "To speak to Matho," she replied. "I am a fugitive from Carthage."
In his time there were ten other writers, none of whom equalled him, Parnassians in poetry, positivists in criticism, realists in romance or in dramatic writing, who laboured at the same work. His æstheticism is not his alone, yet Madame Bovary and Salammbô shot like unexpected meteors out of a grey sky, the dull, low sky of the Second Empire.
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