Behind all the bushes they met with ambushed sentries, who prostrated themselves before the sword-belt which Spendius had placed over his shoulder.

When they reached the Punic camp the crowd flocked around them, and they thought that they could hear whisperings and laughter.  The door of a tent opened.

Hamilcar was at the very back of it seated on a stool beside a table on which there shone a naked sword.  He was surrounded by captains, who were standing.

He started back on perceiving these men, and then bent over to examine them.

Their pupils were strangely dilated, and there was a great black circle round their eyes, which extended to the lower parts of their ears; their bluish noses stood out between their hollow cheeks, which were chinked with deep wrinkles; the skin of their bodies was too large for their muscles, and was hidden beneath a slate-coloured dust; their lips were glued to their yellow teeth; they exhaled an infectious odour; they might have been taken for half-opened tombs, for living sepulchres.

In the centre of the tent, on a mat on which the captains were about to sit down, there was a dish of smoking gourds.  The Barbarians fastened their eyes upon it with a shivering in all their limbs, and tears came to their eyelids; nevertheless they restrained themselves.

Hamilcar turned away to speak to some one.  Then they all flung themselves upon it, flat on the ground.  Their faces were soaked in the fat, and the noise of their deglutition was mingled with the sobs of joy which they uttered.  Through astonishment, doubtless, rather than pity, they were allowed to finish the mess.  Then when they had risen Hamilcar with a sign commanded the man who bore the sword-belt to speak.  Spendius was afraid; he stammered.

Hamilcar, while listening to him, kept turning round on his finger a big gold ring, the same which had stamped the seal of Carthage upon the sword-belt.  He let it fall to the ground; Spendius immediately picked it up; his servile habits came back to him in the presence of his master.  The others quivered with indignation at such baseness.

But the Greek raised his voice and spoke for a long time in rapid, insidious, and even violent fashion, setting forth the crimes of Hanno, whom he knew to be Barca’s enemy, and striving to move Hamilcar’s pity by the details of their miseries and the recollection of their devotion; in the end he became forgetful of himself, being carried away by the warmth of his temper.

Hamilcar replied that he accepted their excuses.  Peace, then, was about to be concluded, and now it would be a definitive one!  But he required that ten Mercenaries, chosen by himself, should be delivered up to him without weapons or tunics.

They had not expected such clemency; Spendius exclaimed:  “Ah! twenty if you wish, master!”

“No! ten will suffice,” replied Hamilcar quietly.