“How beautiful you are! how beautiful you are!”

His eyes, which were continually fixed upon hers, pained her; and the uncomfortableness, the repugnance increased in so acute a fashion that Salammbo put a constraint upon herself not to cry out.  The thought of Schahabarim came back to her, and she resigned herself.

Matho still kept her little hands in his own; and from time to time, in spite of the priest’s command, she turned away her face and tried to thrust him off by jerking her arms.  He opened his nostrils the better to breathe in the perfume which exhaled from her person.  It was a fresh, indefinable emanation, which nevertheless made him dizzy, like the smoke from a perfuming-pan.  She smelt of honey, pepper, incense, roses, with another odour still.

But how was she thus with him in his tent, and at his disposal?  Some one no doubt had urged her.  She had not come for the zaimph.  His arms fell, and he bent his head whelmed in sudden reverie.

To soften him Salammbo said to him in a plaintive voice: 

“What have I done to you that you should desire my death?”

“Your death!”

She resumed: 

“I saw you one evening by the light of my burning gardens amid fuming cups and my slaughtered slaves, and your anger was so strong that you bounded towards me and I was obliged to fly!  Then terror entered into Carthage.  There were cries of the devastation of the towns, the burning of the country-seats, the massacre of the soldiery; it was you who had ruined them, it was you who had murdered them!  I hate you!  Your very name gnaws me like remorse!  You are execrated more than the plague, and the Roman war!  The provinces shudder at your fury, the furrows are full of corpses!  I have followed the traces of your fires as though I were travelling behind Moloch!”

Matho leaped up; his heart was swelling with colossal pride; he was raised to the stature of a god.

With quivering nostrils and clenched teeth she went on: 

“As if your sacrilege were not enough, you came to me in my sleep covered with the zaimph!  Your words I did not understand; but I could see that you wished to drag me to some terrible thing at the bottom of an abyss.”

Matho, writhing his arms, exclaimed: 

“No! no! it was to give it to you! to restore it to you!  It seemed to me that the goddess had left her garment for you, and that it belonged to you!  In her temple or in your house, what does it matter? are you not all-powerful, immaculate, radiant and beautiful even as Tanith?” And with a look of boundless adoration he added: 

“Unless perhaps you are Tanith?”

“I, Tanith!” said Salammbo to herself.

They left off speaking.  The thunder rolled in the distance.  Some sheep bleated, frightened by the storm.

“Oh! come near!” he went on, “come near! fear nothing!