e wheel; sometimes a cloud of dust, rising
from the ground, enveloped them in its eddies; they burned with horrible
thirst, their tongues curled in their mouths, and they felt an icy sweat
flowing over them with their departing souls.

Nevertheless they had glimpses, at an infinite depth, of streets,
marching soldiers, and the swinging of swords; and the tumult of battle
reached them dimly like the noise of the sea to shipwrecked men dying
on the masts of a ship. The Italiotes, who were sturdier than the rest,
were still shrieking. The Lacedaemonians were silent, with eyelids
closed; Zarxas, once so vigorous, was bending like a broken reed; the
Ethiopian beside him had his head thrown back over the arms of the
cross; Autaritus was motionless, rolling his eyes; his great head of
hair, caught in a cleft in the wood, fell straight upon his forehead,
and his death-rattle seemed rather to be a roar of anger. As to
Spendius, a strange courage had come to him; he despised life now in
the certainty which he possessed of an almost immediate and an eternal
emancipation, and he awaited death with impassibility.

Amid their swooning, they sometimes started at the brushing of feathers
passing across their lips. Large wings swung shadows around them,
croakings sounded in the air; and as Spendius's cross was the highest,
it was upon his that the first vulture alighted. Then he turned his face
towards Autaritus, and said slowly to him with an unaccountable smile:

"Do you remember the lions on the road to Sicca?"

"They were our brothers!" replied the Gaul, as he expired.

The Suffet, meanwhile, had bored through the walls and reached
the citadel. The smoke suddenly disappeared before a gust of wind,
discovering the horizon as far as the walls of Carthage; he even thought
that he could distinguish people watching on the platform of Eschmoun;
then, bringing back his eyes, he perceived thirty crosses of extravagant
size on the shore of the Lake, to the left.

In fact, to render them still more frightful, they had been constructed
with tent-poles fastened end to end, and the thirty corpses of the
Ancients appeared high up in the sky. They had what looked like white
butterflies on their breasts; these were the feathers of the arrows
which had been shot at them from below.

A broad gold ribbon shone on the summit of the highest; it hung down
to the shoulder, there being no arm on that side, and Hamilcar had some
difficulty in recogni