Hamilcar said to them: 

“Beat away at the swords!  I shall want them.”  And he drew the antelope’s skin that had been steeped in poisons from his bosom to have it cut into a cuirass more solid than one of brass and unassailable by steel or flame.

As soon as he approached the workmen, Abdalonim, to give his wrath another direction, tried to anger him against them by murmured disparagement of their work.  “What a performance!  It is a shame!  The Master is indeed too good.”  Hamilcar moved away without listening to him.

He slackened his pace, for the paths were barred by great trees calcined from one end to the other, such as may be met with in woods where shepherds have encamped; and the palings were broken, the water in the trenches was disappearing, while fragments of glass and the bones of apes were to be seen amid the miry puddles.  A scrap of cloth hung here and there from the bushes, and the rotten flowers formed a yellow muck-heap beneath the citron trees.  In fact, the servants had neglected everything, thinking that the master would never return.

At every step he discovered some new disaster, some further proof of the thing which he had forbidden himself to learn.  Here he was soiling his purple boots as he crushed the filth under-foot; and he had not all these men before him at the end of a catapult to make them fly into fragments!  He felt humiliated at having defended them; it was a delusion and a piece of treachery; and as he could not revenge himself upon the soldiers, or the Ancients, or Salammbo, or anybody, and his wrath required some victim, he condemned all the slaves of the gardens to the mines at a single stroke.

Abdalonim shuddered each time that he saw him approaching the parks.  But Hamilcar took the path towards the mill, from which there might be heard issuing a mournful melopoeia.

The heavy mill-stones were turning amid the dust.  They consisted of two cones of porphyry laid the one upon the other—­the upper one of the two, which carried a funnel, being made to revolve upon the second by means of strong bars.  Some men were pushing these with their breasts and arms, while others were yoked to them and were pulling them.  The friction of the straps had formed purulent scabs round about their armpits such as are seen on asses’ withers, and the end of the limp black rag, which scarcely covered their loins, hung down and flapped against their hams like a long tail.  Their eyes were red, the irons on their feet clanked, and all their breasts panted rhythmically.  On their mouths they had muzzles fastened by two little bronze chains to render it impossible for them to eat the flour, and their hands were enclosed in gauntlets without fingers, so as to prevent them from taking any.

At the master’s entrance the wooden bars creaked still more loudly.  The grain grated as it was being crushed.  Several fell upon their knees; the others, continuing their work, stepped across them.