Nabathae, which are lost in the sands; and had travelled on foot along
the banks of the Nile from the cataracts to the sea. Shaking torches
with veil-covered face, he had cast a black cock upon a fire of
sandarach before the breast of the Sphinx, the Father of Terror. He had
descended into the caverns of Proserpine; he had seen the five hundred
pillars of the labyrinth of Lemnos revolve, and the candelabrum of
Tarentum, which bore as many sconces on its shaft as there are days in
the year, shine in its splendour; at times he received Greeks by night
in order to question them. The constitution of the world disquieted him
no less than the nature of the gods; he had observed the equinoxes with
the armils placed in the portico of Alexandria, and accompanied the
bematists of Evergetes, who measure the sky by calculating the number
of their steps, as far as Cyrene; so that there was now growing in his
thoughts a religion of his own, with no distinct formula, and on that
very account full of infatuation and fervour. He no longer believed that
the earth was formed like a fir-cone; he believed it to be round, and
eternally falling through immensity with such prodigious speed that its
fall was not perceived.

From the position of the sun above the moon he inferred the predominance
of Baal, of whom the planet itself is but the reflection and figure;
moreover, all that he saw in terrestrial things compelled him to
recognise the male exterminating principle as supreme. And then he
secretly charged Rabbet with the misfortune of his life. Was it not for
her that the grand-pontiff had once advanced amid the tumult of cymbals,
and with a patera of boiling water taken from him his future virility?
And he followed with a melancholy gaze the men who were disappearing
with the priestesses in the depths of the turpentine trees.

His days were spent in inspecting the censers, the gold vases, the
tongs, the rakes for the ashes of the altar, and all the robes of the
statues down to the bronze bodkin that served to curl the hair of an old
Tanith in the third aedicule near the emerald vine. At the same hours he
would raise the great hangings of the same swinging doors; would remain
with his arms outspread in the same attitude; or prayed prostrate on the
same flag-stones, while around him a people of priests moved barefooted
through the passages filled with an eternal twilight.

But Salammbo was in the barrenness of his life like a flower in the