ng man of medium height, with strong and well proportioned
limbs, without display of exaggerated muscles, but revealing in his body
the temper of steel, a vitality capable in supreme moments of the most
stupendous achievements. His face was slightly bronzed, and his hair lay
around his head in thick short curls like a black and lustrous turban,
completely covering his forehead, and leaving exposed the lobes of his
ears, from which hung great discs of bronze. His beard was thick and
curly; his nose straight and somewhat prominent, and his eyes, large and
imperious, always looked sidewise, with an expression of profound
astuteness and unapproachable reserve. His muscular neck was habitually
bent, inclining his head toward the right, as if to more clearly catch
the sounds around him.

He wore a simple, dirty, and threadbare sagum, like any one of those
Celtiberians who lay snoring in the tents roundabout, and, as a sign of
command, there shone on his wrists two broad golden bracelets, which
added strength by their confinement of the tendons and muscles of the
arm.

For more than a month he had been before the walls of Saguntum without
achieving any advantage. He had spent the whole of that afternoon
directing his engines of war without result, and now in his solitude
this want of success irritated his nerves, and dispelled his sleep. The
petted child of victory, he had conquered in open fight the most savage
tribes of Iberia; he had dragged his elephants over the crests of lofty
mountains, crossing rivers, breaking trails through forests, seeing
warlike hordes fall prostrate before him as if he were a god, but now,
for the first time in his life he encountered a stubborn enemy, which
behind sheltering walls mocked at him and would not suffer him to
advance a step.

The city of merchants and farmers which he had studied from within,
looking scornfully upon its opulence and effeminacy, threatened to break
the current of his good luck, and, finding it indomitable, and
reflecting upon his enemies in Carthage, upon the wrath of Rome, and
realizing that time was passing while he was making no headway, the
chieftain experienced a gust of anxiety.

He had chosen well the vulnerable point of Saguntum. His engines of war
were placed before the lower part of the city where the walls projected
into the valley, upon an open, level plain, which permitted the advance
of the battering-rams; but scarcely had the hundreds of naked men w