r sharp teeth as they smiled,
making one think of frightful cannibalistic scenes; Celtiberians and
Iberians with gloomy dress and tangled hair, looking suspiciously in all
directions, and instinctively raising their hands to their broad knives;
some redmen from Gaul, with long mustaches and coarse red hair tied
behind and falling down their necks; people, in fine, who had come, or
had been flung by the hazards of war and the sea, from one point of the
known world to another, one day victorious warriors, and slaves the
next, now sailors and anon pirates, acknowledging no law nor
nationality; with no other respect than the fear of the master of the
vessel who was quick to order them to the whip or the cross; with no
other religion than that of the sword and the strong arm; testifying by
the wounds which covered their bodies, in the long cicatrices which
furrowed their muscles, by cuts on their ears covered by matted hair, to
a past mysterious with horrors.

Some ate standing by the counter, behind which were ranged the amphorae
corked with fresh leaves; others seated on the stone benches along the
walls held earthenware plates on their knees. Most had thrown themselves
down on the floor upon their bellies, like wild beasts devouring their
prey, reaching into their plates with their hairy claws, crunching the
food in their jaws as they talked. They had not yet upset their wine
nor asked for the women. They ate and drank with the appetite of ogres
tormented by the deprivations of the long voyages, and morally starved
by the brutal discipline on shipboard.

Finding themselves huddled together in a small space, filled with smoke
from the lamps and with vapors from the food, they felt the necessity of
communicating with each other, and between mouthfuls, each spoke to his
neighbor, paying no heed to difference of idiom, making themselves
understood finally by a language composed more of gestures than of
words. A Carthaginian was telling a Greek about his last voyage to the
islands of the Great Sea, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, through a gray
body of water covered with fog, until they arrived at an abrupt coast
known only to the pilots of his country, where tin was found. Farther
down the bench a negro, with grotesque mimicry, was describing to a
couple of Celtiberians an excursion down the Red Sea, until they reached
mysterious shores, deserted by day, but covered by night with moving
fires and inhabited by hairy men as ag