The soldiers thronged about her without understanding what she said.  They wondered at her attire, but she turned a long frightened look upon them all, then sinking her head beneath her shoulders, and waving her arms, she repeated several times: 

“What have you done? what have you done?

“Yet you had bread, and meats and oil, and all the malobathrum of the granaries for your enjoyment!  I had brought oxen from Hecatompylos; I had sent hunters into the desert!” Her voice swelled; her cheeks purpled.  She added, “Where, pray, are you now?  In a conquered town, or in the palace of a master?  And what master?  Hamilcar the Suffet, my father, the servant of the Baals!  It was he who withheld from Lutatius those arms of yours, red now with the blood of his slaves!  Know you of any in your own lands more skilled in the conduct of battles?  Look! our palace steps are encumbered with our victories!  Ah! desist not! burn it!  I will carry away with me the genius of my house, my black serpent slumbering up yonder on lotus leaves!  I will whistle and he will follow me, and if I embark in a galley he will speed in the wake of my ship over the foam of the waves.”

Her delicate nostrils were quivering.  She crushed her nails against the gems on her bosom.  Her eyes drooped, and she resumed: 

“Ah! poor Carthage! lamentable city!  No longer hast thou for thy protection the strong men of former days who went beyond the oceans to build temples on their shores.  All the lands laboured about thee, and the sea-plains, ploughed by thine oars, rocked with thy harvests.”  Then she began to sing the adventures of Melkarth, the god of the Sidonians, and the father of her family.

She told of the ascent of the mountains of Ersiphonia, the journey to Tartessus, and the war against Masisabal to avenge the queen of the serpents: 

“He pursued the female monster, whose tail undulated over the dead leaves like a silver brook, into the forest, and came to a plain where women with dragon-croups were round a great fire, standing erect on the points of their tails.  The blood-coloured moon was shining within a pale circle, and their scarlet tongues, cloven like the harpoons of fishermen, reached curling forth to the very edge of the flame.”

Then Salammbo, without pausing, related how Melkarth, after vanquishing Masisabal, placed her severed head on the prow of his ship.  “At each throb of the waves it sank beneath the foam, but the sun embalmed it; it became harder than gold; nevertheless the eyes ceased not to weep, and the tears fell into the water continually.”

She sang all this in an old Chanaanite idiom, which the Barbarians did not understand.  They asked one another what she could be saying to them with those frightful gestures which accompanied her speech, and mounted round about her on the tables, beds, and sycamore boughs, they strove with open mouths and craned necks to grasp the vague stories hovering before their imaginations, through the dimness of the theogonies, like phantoms wrapped in cloud.