s with supplies
of barley and harness, and barracks for twenty thousand soldiers with
armour and all materials of war. Towers rose from the second story, all
provided with battlements, and having bronze bucklers hung on cramps on
the outside.

This first line of wall gave immediate shelter to Malqua, the sailors'
and dyers' quarter. Masts might be seen whereon purple sails were
drying, and on the highest terraces clay furnaces for heating the pickle
were visible.

Behind, the lofty houses of the city rose in an ampitheatre of cubical
form. They were built of stone, planks, shingle, reeds, shells, and
beaten earth. The woods belonging to the temples were like lakes of
verdure in this mountain of diversely-coloured blocks. It was levelled
at unequal distances by the public squares, and was cut from top to
bottom by countless intersecting lanes. The enclosures of the three old
quarters which are now lost might be distinguished; they rose here
and there like great reefs, or extended in enormous fronts, blackened,
half-covered with flowers, and broadly striped by the casting of filth,
while streets passed through their yawning apertures like rivers beneath
bridges.

The hill of the Acropolis, in the centre of Byrsa, was hidden beneath a
disordered array of monuments. There were temples with wreathed columns
bearing bronze capitals and metal chains, cones of dry stones with bands
of azure, copper cupolas, marble architraves, Babylonian buttresses,
obelisks poised on their points like inverted torches. Peristyles
reached to pediments; volutes were displayed through colonnades; granite
walls supported tile partitions; the whole mounting, half-hidden, the
one above the other in a marvellous and incomprehensible fashion. In it
might be felt the succession of the ages, and, as it were, the memorials
of forgotten fatherlands.

Behind the Acropolis the Mappalian road, which was lined with tombs,
extended through red lands in a straight line from the shore to the
catacombs; then spacious dwellings occurred at intervals in the gardens,
and this third quarter, Megara, which was the new town, reached as far
as the edge of the cliff, where rose a giant pharos that blazed forth
every night.

In this fashion was Carthage displayed before the soldiers quartered in
the plain.

They could recognise the markets and crossways in the distance, and
disputed with one another as to the sites of the temples. Khamon's,
fronting the Syssitia,