e eunuch, weakened with his macerations,
and angry laughter shook their black beards, which were displayed on
their breasts in the sun.

Schahabarim walked on, giving no reply, and, traversing the whole
enclosure with deliberation, reached the legs of the colossus; then,
spreading out both arms, he touched it on both sides, which was a solemn
form of adoration. For a long time Rabbet had been torturing him, and
in despair, or perhaps for lack of a god that completely satisfied his
ideas, he had at last decided for this one.

The crowd, terrified by this act of apostasy, uttered a lengthened
murmur. It was felt that the last tie which bound their souls to a
merciful divinity was breaking.

But owing to his mutilation, Schahabarim could take no part in the cult
of the Baal. The men in the red cloaks shut him out from the enclosure;
then, when he was outside, he went round all the colleges in succession,
and the priest, henceforth without a god, disappeared into the crowd. It
scattered at his approach.

Meanwhile a fire of aloes, cedar, and laurel was burning between the
legs of the colossus. The tips of its long wings dipped into the flame;
the unguents with which it had been rubbed flowed like sweat over its
brazen limbs. Around the circular flagstone on which its feet rested,
the children, wrapped in black veils, formed a motionless circle; and
its extravagantly long arms reached down their palms to them as though
to seize the crown that they formed and carry it to the sky.

The rich, the Ancients, the women, the whole multitude, thronged behind
the priests and on the terraces of the houses. The large painted stars
revolved no longer; the tabernacles were set upon the ground; and the
fumes from the censers ascended perpendicularly, spreading their bluish
branches through the azure like gigantic trees.

Many fainted; others became inert and petrified in their ecstasy.
Infinite anguish weighed upon the breasts of the beholders. The
last shouts died out one by one,--and the people of Carthage stood
breathless, and absorbed in the longing of their terror.

At last the high priest of Moloch passed his left hand beneath the
children's veils, plucked a lock of hair from their foreheads, and threw
it upon the flames. Then the men in the red cloaks chanted the sacred
hymn:

"Homage to thee, Sun! king of the two zones, self-generating Creator,
Father and Mother, Father and Son, God and Goddess, Goddess and God!"
And the