cleft of a sepulchre. Nevertheless he was hard upon her, and spared
her neither penances nor bitter words. His condition established, as it
were, the equality of a common sex between them, and he was less angry
with the girl for his inability to possess her than for finding her so
beautiful, and above all so pure. Often he saw that she grew weary of
following his thought. Then he would turn away sadder than before; he
would feel himself more forsaken, more empty, more alone.

Strange words escaped him sometimes, which passed before Salammbo like
broad lightnings illuminating the abysses. This would be at night on the
terrace when, both alone, they gazed upon the stars, and Carthage spread
below under their feet, with the gulf and the open sea dimly lost in the
colour of the darkness.

He would set forth to her the theory of the souls that descend upon
the earth, following the same route as the sun through the signs of the
zodiac. With outstretched arm he showed the gate of human generation in
the Ram, and that of the return to the gods in Capricorn; and Salammbo
strove to see them, for she took these conceptions for realities;
she accepted pure symbols and even manners of speech as being true in
themselves, a distinction not always very clear even to the priest.

"The souls of the dead," said he, "resolve themselves into the moon, as
their bodies do into the earth. Their tears compose its humidity; 'tis a
dark abode full of mire, and wreck, and tempest."

She asked what would become of her then.

"At first you will languish as light as a vapour hovering upon the
waves; and after more lengthened ordeals and agonies, you will pass into
the forces of the sun, the very source of Intelligence!"

He did not speak, however, of Rabbet. Salammbo imagined that it was
through some shame for his vanquished goddess, and calling her by a
common name which designated the moon, she launched into blessings upon
the soft and fertile planet. At last he exclaimed:

"No! no! she draws all her fecundity from the other! Do you not see
her hovering about him like an amorous woman running after a man in a
field?" And he exalted the virtue of light unceasingly.

Far from depressing her mystic desires, he sought, on the contrary,
to excite them, and he even seemed to take joy in grieving her by the
revelation of a pitiless doctrine. In spite of the pains of her love
Salammbo threw herself upon it with transport.

But the more that Scha