country, spent their wages in drink or flung them generously into the
hands of the loose and wretched women who followed the army. Their
traditional customs amused the Saguntines. At their weddings, so said
those who had visited the islands, it was customary for all the guests
to embrace the bride in advance of the husband, and at funerals the
corpse was beaten until the bones were crushed and converted into a
shapeless mass which they forced into a narrow urn and buried under a
heap of stones. Their slings were terrible. They hurled to great
distances balls of sun-baked clay, conical at their ends, and bearing
grotesque inscriptions dedicated to the one who received the blow, and
in battle they flung stones weighing a pound with such force that the
highest tempered armor failed to resist them.

In the rear of this warlike crowd ragged women of all colors scattered
through the champaign; lean, naked children who did not know their
parents; the parasites of war, who marched at the tail of the army to
revel in the spoils of victory; females who at night lay down in one
extreme of the camp and arose on the opposite in the morning, and, aged
in the prime of their youth by fatigue and blows, died forsaken by the
roadside; youngsters who looked upon all the soldiers of their race as
their fathers, bearing on their backs on long marches the firewood or
the flesh-pot of the warriors, and, in moments of fiercest struggle,
when the fighting was hand to hand, they slipped between the
adversaries' legs and bit them like rabid cur-dogs.

Actaeon found Sonnica on the wall, gazing at the hostile camp in the
first streak of dawn. The beautiful Greek had taken refuge in Saguntum
the night before, followed by slaves and flocks, moving part of her
riches from the villa to her warehouse. She had left behind rooms filled
with paintings and mosaics; rich furniture, sumptuous table-service, all
which would fall into the hands of the victor. And she and her fellow
Greek saw peeping through the distant foliage the terrace of the villa
with its statues, the tower of the doves and the roofs of the houses of
the slaves, over which men, barely discernible, were running like
insects. The invaders were there; perhaps they would amuse themselves by
shooting their arrows at the brilliantly plumaged Asiatic birds, and by
beating the old and sick slaves abandoned in the flight. Between the
banana trees in the garden rose the smoke of a bonfire. The Greek