The runner ferreted right and left.  Then he returned to her and demanded something to eat.  The old woman shook her head, and murmured with her eyes fixed upon the charcoal: 

“I was the hand.  The ten fingers are cut off.  The mouth eats no more.”

The slave showed her a handful of gold pieces.  She rushed upon them, but soon resumed her immobility.

At last he placed a dagger which he had in his girdle beneath her throat.  Then, trembling, she went and raised a large stone, and brought back an amphora of wine with fish from Hippo-Zarytus preserved in honey.

Salammbo turned away from this unclean food, and fell asleep on the horses’ caparisons which were spread in a corner of the hall.

He awoke her before daylight.

The dog was howling.  The slave went up to it quietly, and struck off its head with a single blow of his dagger.  Then he rubbed the horses’ nostrils with blood to revive them.  The old woman cast a malediction at him from behind.  Salammbo perceived this, and pressed the amulet which she wore above her heart.

They resumed their journey.

From time to time she asked whether they would not arrive soon.  The road undulated over little hills.  Nothing was to be heard but the grating of the grasshoppers.  The sun heated the yellowed grass; the ground was all chinked with crevices which in dividing formed, as it were, monstrous paving-stones.  Sometimes a viper passed, or eagles flew by; the slave still continued running.  Salammbo mused beneath her veils, and in spite of the heat did not lay them aside through fear of soiling her beautiful garments.

At regular distances stood towers built by the Carthaginians for the purpose of keeping watch upon the tribes.  They entered these for the sake of the shade, and then set out again.

For prudence sake they had made a wide detour the day before.  But they met with no one just now; the region being a sterile one, the Barbarians had not passed that way.

Gradually the devastation began again.  Sometimes a piece of mosaic would be displayed in the centre of a field, the sole remnant of a vanished mansion; and the leafless olive trees looked at a distance like large bushes of thorns.  They passed through a town in which houses were burnt to the ground.  Human skeletons might be seen along the walls.  There were some, too, of dromedaries and mules.  Half-gnawed carrion blocked the streets.

Night fell.  The sky was lowering and cloudy.

They ascended again for two hours in a westerly direction, when suddenly they perceived a quantity of little flames before them.

These were shining at the bottom of an ampitheatre.  Gold plates, as they displaced one another, glanced here and there.  These were the cuirasses of the Clinabarians in the Punic camp; then in the neighbourhood they distinguished other and more numerous lights, for the armies of the Mercenaries, now blended together, extended over a great space.