woman
and her lover guessed the destruction and rapine that were taking
place. Sonnica grew sad, not at the loss of a part of her riches, but
because they were rending her heart through destroying a place which had
been witness to her first outbursts of love for the Athenian.

Some time after sunrise the Saguntine people cried out with indignation.
Along the Road of the Serpent appeared groups of drunken and shouting
women embracing soldiers. They were the _lupas_ of the port, the
miserable harlots who thronged around the temple of Aphrodite by night,
and who were denied entrance to the city. When the first Carthaginian
horsemen passed through the port these creatures had followed them with
enthusiasm. Accustomed to the coarse blandishments of men of all
countries, the presence of these soldiers, so different in dress and
nationality, did not seem strange to them. The 'wolves' of the land were
the same as those of the sea. They adored strong men, birds of prey
which could destroy them with their talons, and they followed the
Carthaginians to their camp, rejoicing in their hearts at the chance to
approach the city without fear of punishment, and at being able to mock
the besieged inhabitants with the concentrated odium of long years of
humiliation.

They sang like mad women, flitting from one pair of greedy and trembling
hands to the next which disputed for them as if in their eagerness they
would tear them to pieces. They drank to intoxication from amphorae of
rich wines sacked from the villas; around their shoulders they flung
cloths with threads of gold, stolen but a moment before; the Numidians
with their moist gazelle-like eyes, looked upon them admiringly,
bedecking them with crowns of grass, and they in turn bursting into
bacchanal laughter, petted the kinky hair of the Ethiopians, who giggled
like children, displaying their sharp cannibal teeth.

They gave themselves up to all manner of ribaldry near the long line of
horses staked out in front of the tents, displaying their wantonness as
a shameless insult to the besieged city, and the Saguntines who had
witnessed undaunted the approach of the long defile of the enemy
trembled with ire behind their merlons as they witnessed this offense of
their courtesans.

"The wretches! _Caninae!_"

The women of the city hissed and reviled them, pale with fury, leaning
over the walls ready to spring into the camp to lay hold upon the
strumpets, while they, as if the ang