rses, 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