One morning when all three went out lion-hunting, Narr’ Havas concealed a dagger in his cloak.  Spendius kept continually behind him, and when they returned the dagger had not been drawn.

Another time Narr’ Havas took them a long way off, as far as the boundaries of his kingdom.  They came to a narrow gorge, and Narr’ Havas smiled as he declared that he had forgotten the way.  Spendius found it again.

But most frequently Matho would go off at sunrise, as melancholy as an augur, to wander about the country.  He would stretch himself on the sand, and remain there motionless until the evening.

He consulted all the soothsayers in the army one after the other,—­those who watch the trail of serpents, those who read the stars, and those who breathe upon the ashes of the dead.  He swallowed galbanum, seseli, and viper’s venom which freezes the heart; Negro women, singing barbarous words in the moonlight, pricked the skin of his forehead with golden stylets; he loaded himself with necklaces and charms; he invoked in turn Baal-Khamon, Moloch, the seven Kabiri, Tanith, and the Venus of the Greeks.  He engraved a name upon a copper plate, and buried it in the sand at the threshold of his tent.  Spendius used to hear him groaning and talking to himself.

One night he went in.

Matho, as naked as a corpse, was lying on a lion’s skin flat on his stomach, with his face in both his hands; a hanging lamp lit up his armour, which was hooked on to the tent-pole above his head.

“You are suffering?” said the slave to him.  “What is the matter with you?  Answer me?” And he shook him by the shoulder calling him several times, “Master! master!”

At last Matho lifted large troubled eyes towards him.

“Listen!” he said in a low voice, and with a finger on his lips.  “It is the wrath of the Gods!  Hamilcar’s daughter pursues me!  I am afraid of her, Spendius!” He pressed himself close against his breast like a child terrified by a phantom.  “Speak to me!  I am sick!  I want to get well!  I have tried everything!  But you, you perhaps know some stronger gods, or some resistless invocation?”

“For what purpose?” asked Spendius.

Striking his head with both his fists, he replied: 

“To rid me of her!”

Then speaking to himself with long pauses he said: 

“I am no doubt the victim of some holocaust which she has promised to the gods?—­She holds me fast by a chain which people cannot see.  If I walk, it is she that is advancing; when I stop, she is resting!  Her eyes burn me, I hear her voice.  She encompasses me, she penetrates me.  It seems to me that she has become my soul!

“And yet between us there are, as it were, the invisible billows of a boundless ocean!  She is far away and quite inaccessible!  The splendour of her beauty forms a cloud of light around her, and at times I think that I have never seen her—­that she does not exist—­and that it is all a dream!”