would cry out for hours against her like dogs baying at the moon.

CHAPTER X

THE SERPENT

These clamourings of the populace did not alarm Hamilcar's daughter. She
was disturbed by loftier anxieties: her great serpent, the black python,
was drooping; and in the eyes of the Carthaginians, the serpent was
at once a national and a private fetish. It was believed to be the
offspring of the dust of the earth, since it emerges from its depths and
has no need of feet to traverse it; its mode of progression called to
mind the undulations of rivers, its temperature the ancient, viscous,
and fecund darkness, and the orbit which it describes when biting its
tail the harmony of the planets, and the intelligence of Eschmoun.

Salammbo's serpent had several times already refused the four live
sparrows which were offered to it at the full moon and at every new
moon. Its handsome skin, covered like the firmament with golden spots
upon a perfectly black ground, was now yellow, relaxed, wrinkled, and
too large for its body. A cottony mouldiness extended round its head;
and in the corners of its eyelids might be seen little red specks which
appeared to move. Salammbo would approach its silver-wire basket from
time to time, and would draw aside the purple curtains, the lotus
leaves, and the bird's down; but it was continually rolled up upon
itself, more motionless than a withered bind-weed; and from looking at
it she at last came to feel a kind of spiral within her heart, another
serpent, as it were, mounting up to her throat by degrees and strangling
her.

She was in despair of having seen the zaimph, and yet she felt a sort
of joy, an intimate pride at having done so. A mystery shrank within the
splendour of its folds; it was the cloud that enveloped the gods, and
the secret of the universal existence, and Salammbo, horror-stricken at
herself, regretted that she had not raised it.

She was almost always crouching at the back of her apartment, holding
her bended left leg in her hands, her mouth half open, her chin sunk,
her eye fixed. She recollected her father's face with terror; she wished
to go away into the mountains of Phoenicia, on a pilgrimage to the
temple of Aphaka, where Tanith descended in the form of a star; all
kinds of imaginings attracted her and terrified her; moreover, a
solitude which every day became greater encompassed her. She did not
even know what Hamilcar was about.

Wearied at last with her thoughts sh