Part 7 (1/2)
”Enough! enough!”
He went on in a low voice so as to make himself the better listened to: ”Oh! that is true! I am wrong, lights of the Baals; there are intrepid men among you! Gisco, rise!” And surveying the step of the altar with half-closed eyelids, as if he sought for some one, he repeated: ”Rise, Gisco! You can accuse me; they will protect you! But where is he?” Then, as if he remembered himself: ”Ah! in his house, no doubt! surrounded by his sons, commanding his slaves, happy, and counting on the wall the necklaces of honour which his country has given to him!”
They moved about raising their shoulders as if they were being scourged with thongs. ”You do not even know whether he is living or dead!” And without giving any heed to their clamours he said that in deserting the Suffet they had deserted the Republic. So, too, the peace with Rome, however advantageous it might appear to them, was more fatal than twenty battles. A few-those who were the least rich of the Council and were suspected of perpetual leanings towards the people or towards tyranny-applauded. Their opponents, chiefs of the Syssitia and administrators, triumphed over them in point of numbers; and the more eminent of them had ranged themselves close to Hanno, who was sitting at the other end of the hall before the lofty door, which was closed by a hanging of hyacinth colour.
He had covered the ulcers on his face with paint. But the gold dust in his hair had fallen upon his shoulders, where it formed two brilliant sheets, so that his hair appeared whitish, fine, and frizzled like wool. His hands were enveloped in linen soaked in a greasy perfume, which dripped upon the pavement, and his disease had no doubt considerably increased, for his eyes were hidden beneath the folds of his eyelids. He had thrown back his head in order to see. His partisans urged him to speak. At last in a hoa.r.s.e and hideous voice he said: ”Less arrogance, Barca! We have all been vanquished! Each one supports his own misfortune! Be resigned!”
”Tell us rather,” said Hamilcar, smiling, ”how it was that you steered your galleys into the Roman fleet?”
”I was driven by the wind,” replied Hanno.
”You are like a rhinoceros trampling on his dung: you are displaying your own folly! be silent!” And they began to indulge in recriminations respecting the battle of the Aegatian islands.
Hanno accused him of not having come to meet him.
”But that would have left Eryx undefended. You ought to have stood out from the coast; what prevented you? Ah! I forgot! all elephants are afraid of the sea!”
Hamilcar's followers thought this jest so good that they burst out into loud laughter. The vault rang with it like the beating of tympanums.
Hanno denounced the unworthiness of such an insult; the disease had come upon him from a cold taken at the siege of Hecatompylos, and tears flowed down his face like winter rain on a ruined wall.
Hamilcar resumed: ”If you had loved me as much as him there would be great joy in Carthage now! How many times did I not call upon you! and you always refused me money!”
”We had need of it,” said the chiefs of the Syssitia.
”And when things were desperate with me-we drank mules' urine and ate the straps of our sandals; when I would fain have had the blades of gra.s.s soldiers and made battalions with the rottenness of our dead, you recalled the vessels that I had left!”
”We could not risk everything,” replied Baat-Baal, who possessed gold mines in Darytian Gaetulia.
”But what did you do here, at Carthage, in your houses, behind your walls? There are Gauls on the Erida.n.u.s, who ought to have been roused, Chanaanites at Cyrene who would have come, and while the Romans send amba.s.sadors to Ptolemaeus-”
”Now he is extolling the Romans to us!” Some one shouted out to him: ”How much have they paid you to defend them?”
”Ask that of the plains of Brutium, of the ruins of Locri, of Metapontum, and of Heraclea! I have burnt all their trees, I have pillaged all their temples, and even to the death of their grandchildren's grandchildren-”
”Why, you disclaim like a rhetor!” said Kapouras, a very ill.u.s.trious merchant. ”What is it that you want?”
”I say that we must be more ingenious or more terrible! If the whole of Africa rejects your yoke the reason is, my feeble masters, that you do not know how to fasten it to her shoulders! Agathocles, Regulus, Coepio, any bold man has only to land and capture her; and when the Libyans in the east concert with the Numidians in the west, and the Nomads come from the south, and the Romans from the north”-a cry of horror rose-”Oh! you will beat your b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and roll in the dust, and tear your cloaks! No matter! you will have to go and turn the mill-stone in the Suburra, and gather grapes on the hills of Latium.”
They smote their right thighs to mark their sense of the scandal, and the sleeves of their robes rose like large wings of startled birds. Hamilcar, carried away by a spirit, continued his speech, standing on the highest step of the altar, quivering and terrible; he raised his arms, and the rays from the candelabrum which burned behind him pa.s.sed between his fingers like javelins of gold.
”You will lose your s.h.i.+ps, your country seats, your chariots, your hanging beds, and the slaves who rub your feet! The jackal will crouch in your palaces, and the ploughshare will upturn your tombs. Nothing will be left but the eagles' scream and a heap of ruins. Carthage, thou wilt fall!”
The four pontiffs spread out their hands to avert the anathema. All had risen. But the marine Suffet, being a sacerdotal magistrate under the protection of the Sun, was inviolate so long as the a.s.sembly of the rich had not judged him. Terror was a.s.sociated with the altar. They drew back.
Hamilcar had ceased speaking, and was panting with eye fixed, his face as pale as the pearls of his tiara, almost frightened at himself, and his spirit lost in funereal visions. From the height on which he stood, all the torches on the bronze shafts seemed to him like a vast crown of fire laid level with the pavement; black smoke issuing from them mounted up into the darkness of the vault; and for some minutes the silence was so profound that they could hear in the distance the sound of the sea.
Then the Ancients began to question one another. Their interests, their existence, were attacked by the Barbarians. But it was impossible to conquer them without the a.s.sistance of the Suffet, and in spite of their pride this consideration made them forget every other. His friends were taken aside. There were interested reconciliations, understandings, and promises. Hamilcar would not take any further part in any government. All conjured him. They besought him; and as the word treason occurred in their speech, he fell into a pa.s.sion. The sole traitor was the Great Council, for as the enlistment of the soldiers expired with the war, they became free as soon as the war was finished; he even exalted their bravery and all the advantages which might be derived from interesting them in the Republic by donations and privileges.
Then Magda.s.sin, a former provincial governor, said, as he rolled his yellow eyes: ”Truly Barca, with your travelling you have become a Greek, or a Latin, or something! Why speak you of rewards for these men? Rather let ten thousand Barbarians perish than a single one of us!”
The Ancients nodded approval, murmuring:-”Yes, is there need for so much trouble? They can always be had?”
”And they can be got rid of conveniently, can they not? They are deserted as they were by you in Sardinia. The enemy is apprised of the road which they are to take, as in the case of those Gauls in Sicily, or perhaps they are disembarked in the middle of the sea. As I was returning I saw the rock quite white with their bones!”
”What a misfortune!” said Kapouras impudently.
”Have they not gone over to the enemy a hundred times?” cried the others.
”Why, then,” exclaimed Hamilcar, ”did you recall them to Carthage, notwithstanding your laws? And when they are in your town, poor and numerous amid all your riches, it does not occur to you to weaken them by the slightest division! Afterwards you dismiss the whole of them with their women and children, without keeping a single hostage! Did you expect that they would murder themselves to spare you the pain of keeping your oaths? You hate them because they are strong! You hate me still more, who am their master! Oh! I felt it just now when you were kissing my hands and were all putting a constraint upon yourselves not to bite them!”
If the lions that were sleeping in the court had come howling in, the uproar could not have been more frightful. But the pontiff of Eschmoun rose, and, standing perfectly upright, with his knees close together, his elbows pressed to his body, and his hands half open, he said: ”Barca, Carthage has need that you should take the general command of the Punic forces against the Mercenaries!”
”I refuse,” replied Hamilcar.
”We will give you full authority,” cried the chiefs of the Syssitia.
”No!”
”With no control, no part.i.tion, all the money that you want, all the captives, all the booty, fifty zereths of land for every enemy's corpse.”
”No! no! because it is impossible to conquer with you!”
”He is afraid!”
”Because you are cowardly, greedy, ungrateful, pusillanimous and mad!”
”He is careful of them!”
”In order to put himself at their head,” said some one.
”And return against us,” said another; and from the bottom of the hall Hanno howled: ”He wants to make himself king!”
Then they bounded up, overturning the seats and the torches: the crowd of them rushed towards the altar; they brandished daggers. But Hamilcar dived into his sleeves and drew from them two broad cutla.s.ses; and half stooping, his left foot advanced, his eyes flaming and his teeth clenched, he defied them as he stood there beneath the golden candelabrum.
Thus they had brought weapons with them as a precaution; it was a crime; they looked with terror at one another. As all were guilty, every one became quickly rea.s.sured; and by degrees they turned their backs on the Suffet and came down again maddened with humiliation. For the second time they recoiled before him. They remained standing for some time. Several who had wounded their fingers put them to their mouths or rolled them gently in the hem of their mantles, and they were about to depart when Hamilcar heard these words: ”Why! it is a piece of delicacy to avoid distressing his daughter!”
A louder voice was raised: ”No doubt, since she takes her lovers from among the Mercenaries!”
At first he tottered, then his eye rapidly sought for Schahabarim. But the priest of Tanith had alone remained in his place; and Hamilcar could see only his lofty cap in the distance. All were sneering in his face. In proportion as his anguish increased their joy redoubled, and those who were behind shouted amid the hootings: ”He was seen coming out of her room!”
”One morning in the month of Tammouz!”
”It was the thief who stole the zaimph!”
”A very handsome man!”
”Taller than you!”
He s.n.a.t.c.hed off the tiara, the ensign of his rank-his tiara with its eight mystic rows, and with an emerald sh.e.l.l in the centre-and with both hands and with all his strength dashed it to the ground; the golden circles rebounded as they broke, and the pearls rang upon the pavement. Then they saw a long scar upon the whiteness of his brow; it moved like a serpent between his eyebrows; all his limbs trembled. He ascended one of the lateral staircases which led on to the altar, and walked upon the latter! This was to devote himself to the G.o.d, to offer himself as a holocaust. The motion of his mantle agitated the lights of the candelabrum, which was lower than his sandals, and the fine dust raised by his footsteps surrounded him like a cloud as high as the waist. He stopped between the legs of the bra.s.s colossus. He took up two handfuls of the dust, the mere sight of which made every Carthaginian shudder with horror, and said: ”By the hundred torches of your Intelligences! by the eight fires of the Kabiri! by the stars, the meteors, and the volcanoes! by everything that burns! by the thirst of the desert and the saltness of the ocean! by the cave of Hadrumetum and the empire of Souls! by extermination! by the ashes of your sons and the ashes of the brothers of your ancestors with which I now mingle my own!-you, the Hundred of the Council of Carthage, have lied in your accusation of my daughter! And I, Hamilcar Barca, marine Suffet, chief of the rich and ruler of the people, in the presence of bull-headed Moloch, I swear”-they expected something frightful, but he resumed in a loftier and calmer tone-”that I will not even speak to her about it!”