standing upright on their keels, with
lofty poops and swelling prows, and covered with gildings and mystic
symbols. The chimaeras had lost their wings, the Pataec Gods their arms,
the bulls their silver horns;--and half-painted, motionless, and rotten
as they were, yet full of associations, and still emitting the scent
of voyages, they all seemed to say to him, like mutilated soldiers
on seeing their master again, "'Tis we! 'tis we! and YOU too are
vanquished!"

No one excepting the marine Suffet might enter the admiral's house. So
long as there was no proof of his death he was considered as still in
existence. In this way the Ancients avoided a master the more, and they
had not failed to comply with the custom in respect to Hamilcar.

The Suffet proceeded into the deserted apartments. At every step he
recognised armour and furniture--familiar objects which nevertheless
astonished him, and in a perfuming-pan in the vestibule there even
remained the ashes of the perfumes that had been kindled at his
departure for the conjuration of Melkarth. It was not thus that he had
hoped to return. Everything that he had done, everything that he had
seen, unfolded itself in his memory: assaults, conflagrations, legions,
tempests, Drepanum, Syracuse, Lilybaeum, Mount Etna, the plateau of
Eryx, five years of battles,--until the fatal day when arms had been
laid down and Sicily had been lost. Then he once more saw the woods of
citron-trees, and herdsmen with their goats on grey mountains; and his
heart leaped at the thought of the establishment of another Carthage
down yonder. His projects and his recollections buzzed through his
head, which was still dizzy from the pitching of the vessel; he was
overwhelmed with anguish, and, becoming suddenly weak, he felt the
necessity of drawing near to the gods.

Then he went up to the highest story of his house, and taking a
nail-studded staple from a golden shell, which hung on his arm, he
opened a small oval chamber.

It was softly lighted by means of delicate black discs let into the
wall and as transparent as glass. Between the rows of these equal discs,
holes, like those for the urns in columbaria, were hollowed out. Each of
them contained a round dark stone, which appeared to be very heavy.
Only people of superior understanding honoured these abaddirs, which had
fallen from the moon. By their fall they denoted the stars, the sky, and
fire; by their colour dark night, and by their density