ns death? The hermaphrodite Baals are
unveiled to us alone who are men in understanding and women in weakness.
Your desire is sacrilege; be satisfied with the knowledge that you
possess!"

She fell upon her knees placing two fingers against her ears in token of
repentance; and crushed by the priest's words, and filled at once with
anger against him, with terror and humiliation, she burst into sobs.
Schahabarim remained erect, and more insensible than the stones of the
terrace. He looked down upon her quivering at his feet, and felt a kind
of joy on seeing her suffer for his divinity whom he himself could not
wholly embrace. The birds were already singing, a cold wind was blowing,
and little clouds were drifting in the paling sky.

Suddenly he perceived on the horizon, behind Tunis, what looked like
slight mists trailing along the ground; then these became a great
curtain of dust extending perpendicularly, and, amid the whirlwinds of
the thronging mass, dromedaries' heads, lances and shields appeared. It
was the army of the Barbarians advancing upon Carthage.

CHAPTER IV

BENEATH THE WALLS OF CARTHAGE

Some country people, riding on asses or running on foot, arrived in the
town, pale, breathless, and mad with fear. They were flying before the
army. It had accomplished the journey from Sicca in three days, in order
to reach Carthage and wholly exterminate it.

The gates were shut. The Barbarians appeared almost immediately; but
they stopped in the middle of the isthmus, on the edge of the lake.

At first they made no hostile announcement. Several approached with palm
branches in their hands. They were driven back with arrows, so great was
the terror.

In the morning and at nightfall prowlers would sometimes wander along
the walls. A little man carefully wrapped in a cloak, and with his face
concealed beneath a very low visor, was especially noticed. He would
remain whole hours gazing at the aqueduct, and so persistently that he
doubtless wished to mislead the Carthaginians as to his real designs.
Another man, a sort of giant who walked bareheaded, used to accompany
him.

But Carthage was defended throughout the whole breadth of the isthmus:
first by a trench, then by a grassy rampart, and lastly by a wall thirty
cubits high, built of freestone, and in two storys. It contained stables
for three hundred elephants with stores for their caparisons, shackles,
and food; other stables again for four thousand horse