e would rise, and trailing along
her little sandals whose soles clacked upon her heels at every step, she
would walk at random through the large silent room. The amethysts and
topazes of the ceiling made luminous spots quiver here and there, and
Salammbo as she walked would turn her head a little to see them. She
would go and take the hanging amphoras by the neck; she would cool
her bosom beneath the broad fans, or perhaps amuse herself by burning
cinnamomum in hollow pearls. At sunset Taanach would draw back the black
felt lozenges that closed the openings in the wall; then her doves,
rubbed with musk like the doves of Tanith, suddenly entered, and their
pink feet glided over the glass pavement, amid the grains of barley
which she threw to them in handfuls like a sower in a field. But on a
sudden she would burst into sobs and lie stretched on the large bed of
ox-leather straps without moving, repeating a word that was ever the
same, with open eyes, pale as one dead, insensible, cold; and yet she
could hear the cries of the apes in the tufts of the palm trees, with
the continuous grinding of the great wheel which brought a flow of pure
water through the stories into the porphyry centre-basin.

Sometimes for several days she would refuse to eat. She could see in
a dream troubled stars wandering beneath her feet. She would call
Schahabarim, and when he came she had nothing to say to him.

She could not live without the relief of his presence. But she rebelled
inwardly against this domination; her feeling towards the priest was one
at once of terror, jealousy, hatred, and a species of love, in gratitude
for the singular voluptuousness which she experienced by his side.

He had recognised the influence of Rabbet, being skilful to discern
the gods who send diseases; and to cure Salammbo he had her apartment
watered with lotions of vervain, and maidenhair; she ate mandrakes every
morning; she slept with her head on a cushion filled with aromatics
blended by the pontiffs; he had even employed baaras, a fiery-coloured
root which drives back fatal geniuses into the North; lastly, turning
towards the polar star, he murmured thrice the mysterious name of
Tanith; but Salammbo still suffered and her anguish deepened.

No one in Carthage was so learned as he. In his youth he had studied at
the College of the Mogbeds, at Borsippa, near Babylon; had then visited
Samothrace, Pessinus, Ephesus, Thessaly, Judaea, and the temples of the