“O Rabetna!—Baalet!—Tanith!” and her voice was lengthened in a plaintive fashion as if calling to someone. “Anaïtis! Astarte! Derceto! Astoreth! Mylitta! Athara! Elissa! Tiratha!—By the hidden symbols, by the resounding sistra—by the furrows of the earth—by the eternal silence and by the eternal fruitfulness—mistress of the gloomy sea and of the azure shores, O Queen of the watery world, all hail!”
She swayed her whole body twice or thrice, and then cast herself face downwards in the dust with both arms outstretched.
But the slave nimbly raised her, for according to the rites someone must catch the suppliant at the moment of his prostration; this told him that the gods accepted him, and Salammbô’s nurse never failed in this pious duty.
Some merchants from Darytian Gaetulia had brought her to Carthage when quite young, and after her enfranchisement she would not forsake her old masters, as was shown by her right ear, which was pierced with a large hole. A petticoat of many-coloured stripes fitted closely on her hips, and fell to her ankles, where two tin rings clashed together. Her somewhat flat face was yellow like her tunic. Silver bodkins of great length formed a sun behind her head. She wore a coral button on the nostril, and she stood beside the bed more erect than a Hermes, and with her eyelids cast down.
Salammbô walked to the edge of the terrace; her eyes swept the horizon for an instant, and then were lowered upon the sleeping town, while the sigh that she heaved swelled her bosom, and gave an undulating movement to the whole length of the long white simar which hung without clasp or girdle about her. Her curved and painted sandals were hidden beneath a heap of emeralds, and a net of purple thread was filled with her disordered hair.
But she raised her head to gaze upon the moon, and murmured, mingling her speech with fragments of hymns:
“How lightly turnest thou, supported by the impalpable ether! It brightens about thee, and ’tis the stir of thine agitation that distributes the winds and fruitful dews. According as thou dost wax and wane the eyes of cats and spots of panthers lengthen or grow short. Wives shriek thy name in the pangs of childbirth! Thou makest the shells to swell, the wine to bubble, and the corpse to putrefy! Thou formest the pearls at the bottom of the sea!
“And every germ, O goddess! ferments in the dark depths of thy moisture.
“When thou appearest, quietness is spread abroad upon the earth; the flowers close, the waves are soothed, wearied man stretches his breast toward thee, and the world with its oceans and mountains looks at itself in thy face as in a mirror. Thou art white, gentle, luminous, immaculate, helping, purifying, serene!”
The crescent of the moon was then over the mountain of the Hot Springs, in the hollow formed by its two summits, on the other side of the gulf. Below it there was a little star, and all around it a pale circle. Salammbô went on:
“But thou art a terrible mistress!—Monsters, terrifying phantoms, and lying dreams come from thee; thine eyes devour the stones of buildings, and the apes are ever ill each time thou growest young again.
“Whither goest thou? Why dost thou change thy forms continually? Now, slender and curved thou glidest through space like a mastless galley; and then, amid the stars, thou art like a shepherd keeping his flock. Shining and round, thou dost graze the mountain-tops like the wheel of a chariot.
“O Tanith! thou dost love me? I have looked so much on thee! But no! thou sailest through thine azure, and I—I remain on the motionless earth.
“Taanach, take your nebel and play softly on the silver string, for my heart is sad!”
The slave lifted a sort of harp of ebony wood, taller than herself, and triangular in shape like a delta; she fixed the point in a crystal globe, and with both hands began to play.
The sounds followed one another hurried and deep, like the buzzing of bees, and with increasing sonorousness floated away into the night with the complaining of the waves, and the rustling of the great trees on the summit of the Acropolis.
“Hush!” cried Salammbô.
“What ails you, mistress? The blowing of the breeze, the passing of a cloud, everything disquiets you just now!”
“I do not know,” she said.
“You are wearied with too long prayers!”
“Oh! Tanaach, I would fain be dissolved in them like a flower in wine!”
“Perhaps it is the smoke of your perfumes?”
“No!” said Salammbô; “the spirit of the gods dwells in fragrant odours.”
Then the slave spoke to her of her father. It was thought that he had gone towards the amber country, behind the pillars of Melkarth. “But if he does not return,” she said, “you must nevertheless, since it was his will, choose a husband among the sons of the Ancients, and then your grief will pass away in a man’s arms.”
“Why?” asked the young girl. All those that she had seen had horrified her with their fallow-deer laughter and their coarse limbs.
“Sometimes, Tanaach, from the depths of my being there exhale as it were hot fumes heavier than the vapours from a volcano. Voices call me, a globe of fire rolls and mounts within my bosom, it stifles me, I am at the point of death; and then, something sweet, flowing from my brow to my feet, passes through my flesh—it is a caress enfolding me, and I feel myself crushed as if some god were stretched upon me. Oh! would that I
