ted for several minutes by the entire people. The walls would
vibrate with it from top to bottom, and both sides of the street would
seem to Matho to be coming against him, and carrying him off the ground,
like two immense arms stifling him in the air.

Nevertheless he remembered that he had experienced something like it
before. The same crowd was on the terraces, there were the same looks
and the same wrath; but then he had walked free, all had then dispersed,
for a god covered him;--and the recollection of this, gaining precision
by degrees, brought a crushing sadness upon him. Shadows passed before
his eyes; the town whirled round in his head, his blood streamed from a
wound in his hip, he felt that he was dying; his hams bent, and he sank
quite gently upon the pavement.

Some one went to the peristyle of the temple of Melkarth, took thence
the bar of a tripod, heated red hot in the coals, and, slipping it
beneath the first chain, pressed it against his wound. The flesh was
seen to smoke; the hootings of the people drowned his voice; he was
standing again.

Six paces further on, and he fell a third and again a fourth time; but
some new torture always made him rise. They discharged little drops of
boiling oil through tubes at him; they strewed pieces of broken glass
beneath his feet; still he walked on. At the corner of the street of
Satheb he leaned his back against the wall beneath the pent-house of a
shop, and advanced no further.

The slaves of the Council struck him with their whips of hippopotamus
leather, so furiously and long that the fringes of their tunics were
drenched with sweat. Matho appeared insensible; suddenly he started
off and began to run at random, making a noise with his lips like one
shivering with severe cold. He threaded the street of Boudes, and the
street of Soepo, crossed the Green Market, and reached the square of
Khamon.

He now belonged to the priests; the slaves had just dispersed the crowd,
and there was more room. Matho gazed round him and his eyes encountered
Salammbo.

At the first step that he had taken she had risen; then, as he
approached, she had involuntarily advanced by degrees to the edge of the
terrace; and soon all external things were blotted out, and she saw only
Matho. Silence fell in her soul,--one of those abysses wherein the whole
world disappears beneath the pressure of a single thought, a memory, a
look. This man who was walking towards her attracted her.