zon like yourself, who
have made many warriors fall beneath your charger."

"Then why do you flee from me? Why do you abandon me, why forget the
sweetness of our early love? See that nightingale, at which a moment ago
you aimed your arrow! In the midst of an army camp, before a besieged
city, it sings and sings, calling to its mate, heedless of the horrors
of war, unconscious of the stench of blood which rises from these
fields. Let us be like him! Let us make war; but let us also love each
other, and let us ride through the battles with our bodies thrilled with
love!"

"No, Asbyte," said the African gloomily. "That felicity is impossible; I
love you, but we cannot understand each other. You complain because I
see in you only an Amazon, when you are a woman; you, in return, see in
me only a man, and I am more than man. I am not the demigod you imagine;
I am something more; I am a formidable machine of war, without heart or
sense of pity, created only to crush men and nations who obstruct my
passage."

Hannibal said this with conviction, beating his firm chest,
straightening his figure with sombre majesty as he declared his
destructive power.

"I would love you if I were a man capable of wasting my time in such
sweet folly, but when have you seen the eagle spend all his time in the
nest caressing his mate, without desire to soar aloft and fall upon the
quarry? Those who have talons cannot caress, and I was born to make prey
of the world, or else for the world to crush me. Love? A sweet
occupation, I grant you! In the past, full of blood and of battles, the
only oases of my joy were those days in New Carthage when I believed
that Tanith herself, with all her divine beauty, had deigned to come
down to my arms. But that is over; Hannibal has other loves that attract
him and dominate him; he loves his sword, he loves all that the enemy
possesses, and he cannot sleep with tranquility for thinking of Rome,
whom he desires to crush within these arms! How far away she is!"

The Amazon made a gesture of despair at the passion with which the
chieftain declared his ambitions.

"You might complain," continued Hannibal, "if you saw that my thoughts
were filled with the image of another woman. Whom have I loved but you?
To draw to me those barbarians who follow me, to league them by ties of
blood to my enterprises, I took to wife the daughter of an Iberian
kinglet. Yes, and where is she? Does she follow me as do you? She
remai