From the square of Khamon to the temple of Melkarth the streets were cumbered with corpses; and, as it was the end of the summer, the combatants were annoyed by great black flies.  Old men carried off the wounded, and the devout continued the fictitious funerals for their relatives and friends who had died far away during the war.  Waxen statues with clothes and hair were displayed across the gates.  They melted in the heat of the tapers burning beside them; the paint flowed down upon their shoulders, and tears streamed over the faces of the living, as they chanted mournful songs beside them.  The crowd meanwhile ran to and fro; armed bands passed; captains shouted orders, while the shock of the rams beating against the rampart was constantly heard.

The temperature became so heavy that the bodies swelled and would no longer fit into the coffins.  They were burned in the centre of the courts.  But the fires, being too much confined, kindled the neighbouring walls, and long flames suddenly burst from the houses like blood spurting from an artery.  Thus Moloch was in possession of Carthage; he clasped the ramparts, he rolled through the streets, he devoured the very corpses.

Men wearing cloaks made of collected rags in token of despair, stationed themselves at the corners of the cross-ways.  They declaimed against the Ancients and against Hamilcar, predicted complete ruin to the people, and invited them to universal destruction and license.  The most dangerous were the henbane-drinkers; in their crisis they believed themselves wild beasts, and leaped upon the passers-by to rend them.  Mobs formed around them, and the defence of Carthage was forgotten.  The Suffet devised the payment of others to support his policy.

In order to retain the genius of the gods within the town their images had been covered with chains.  Black veils were placed upon the Pataec gods, and hair-cloths around the altars; and attempts were made to excite the pride and jealousy of the Baals by singing in their ears:  “Thou art about to suffer thyself to be vanquished!  Are the others perchance more strong?  Show thyself! aid us! that the peoples may not say:  ‘Where are now their gods?’”

The colleges of the pontiffs were agitated by unceasing anxiety.  Those of Rabbetna were especially afraid—­the restoration of the zaimph having been of no avail.  They kept themselves shut up in the third enclosure which was as impregnable as a fortress.  Only one among them, the high priest Schahabarim, ventured to go out.

He used to visit Salammbo.  But he would either remain perfectly silent, gazing at her with fixed eyeballs, or else would be lavish of words, and the reproaches that he uttered were harder than ever.

With inconceivable inconsistency he could not forgive the young girl for carrying out his commands; Schahabarim had guessed all, and this haunting thought revived the jealousies of his impotence.  He accused her of being the cause of the war.  Matho, according to him, was besieging Carthage to recover the zaimph; and he poured out imprecations and sarcasms upon this Barbarian who pretended to the possession of holy things.  Yet it was not this that the priest wished to say.