The Greeks made the horses rear and fall back upon their masters by pricking their nostrils with the points of their lances.  The slaves who were to hurl stones had picked such as were too big, and they accordingly fell close to them.  The Punic foot-soldiers exposed the right side in cutting with their long swords.  The Barbarians broke their lines; they slaughtered them freely; they stumbled over the dying and dead, quite blinded by the blood that spurted into their faces.  The confused heap of pikes, helmets, cuirasses and swords turned round about, widening out and closing in with elastic contractions.  The gaps increased more and more in the Carthaginian cohorts, the engines could not get out of the sand; and finally the Suffet’s litter (his grand litter with crystal pendants), which from the beginning might have been seen tossing among the soldiers like a bark on the waves, suddenly foundered.  He was no doubt dead.  The Barbarians found themselves alone.

The dust around them fell and they were beginning to sing, when Hanno himself appeared on the top of an elephant.  He sat bare-headed beneath a parasol of byssus which was carried by a Negro behind him.  His necklace of blue plates flapped against the flowers on his black tunic; his huge arms were compressed within circles of diamonds, and with open mouth he brandished a pike of inordinate size, which spread out at the end like a lotus, and flashed more than a mirror.  Immediately the earth shook,—­and the Barbarians saw all the elephants of Carthage, with their gilt tusks and blue-painted ears, hastening up in single line, clothed with bronze and shaking the leathern towers which were placed above their scarlet caparisons, in each of which were three archers bending large bows.

The soldiers were barely in possession of their arms; they had taken up their positions at random.  They were frozen with terror; they stood undecided.

Javelins, arrows, phalaricas, and masses of lead were already being showered down upon them from the towers.  Some clung to the fringes of the caparisons in order to climb up, but their hands were struck off with cutlasses and they fell backwards upon the swords’ points.  The pikes were too weak and broke, and the elephants passed through the phalanxes like wild boars through tufts of grass; they plucked up the stakes of the camp with their trunks, and traversed it from one end to the other, overthrowing the tents with their breasts.  All the Barbarians had fled.  They were hiding themselves in the hills bordering the valley by which the Carthaginians had come.

The victorious Hanno presented himself before the gates of Utica.  He had a trumpet sounded.  The three Judges of the town appeared in the opening of the battlements on the summit of a tower.

But the people of Utica would not receive such well-armed guests.  Hanno was furious.  At last they consented to admit him with a feeble escort.

The streets were too narrow for the elephants.  They had to be left outside.