Salammbo

G >> Gustave Flaubert >> Salammbo


It was atrocious, filthy abuse mingled with ironical encouragements and
imprecations; and, his present tortures not being enough for them, they
foretold to him others that should be still more terrible in eternity.

This vast baying filled Carthage with stupid continuity. Frequently
a single syllable--a hoarse, deep, and frantic intonation--would be
repeated for several minutes by the entire people. The walls would
vibrate with it from top to bottom, and both sides of the street would
seem to Matho to be coming against him, and carrying him off the ground,
like two immense arms stifling him in the air.

Nevertheless he remembered that he had experienced something like it
before. The same crowd was on the terraces, there were the same looks
and the same wrath; but then he had walked free, all had then dispersed,
for a god covered him;--and the recollection of this, gaining precision
by degrees, brought a crushing sadness upon him. Shadows passed before
his eyes; the town whirled round in his head, his blood streamed from a
wound in his hip, he felt that he was dying; his hams bent, and he sank
quite gently upon the pavement.

Some one went to the peristyle of the temple of Melkarth, took thence
the bar of a tripod, heated red hot in the coals, and, slipping it
beneath the first chain, pressed it against his wound. The flesh was
seen to smoke; the hootings of the people drowned his voice; he was
standing again.

Six paces further on, and he fell a third and again a fourth time; but
some new torture always made him rise. They discharged little drops of
boiling oil through tubes at him; they strewed pieces of broken glass
beneath his feet; still he walked on. At the corner of the street of
Satheb he leaned his back against the wall beneath the pent-house of a
shop, and advanced no further.

The slaves of the Council struck him with their whips of hippopotamus
leather, so furiously and long that the fringes of their tunics were
drenched with sweat. Matho appeared insensible; suddenly he started
off and began to run at random, making a noise with his lips like one
shivering with severe cold. He threaded the street of Boudes, and the
street of Soepo, crossed the Green Market, and reached the square of
Khamon.

He now belonged to the priests; the slaves had just dispersed the crowd,
and there was more room. Matho gazed round him and his eyes encountered
Salammbo.

At the first step that he had taken she had risen; then, as he
approached, she had involuntarily advanced by degrees to the edge of the
terrace; and soon all external things were blotted out, and she saw only
Matho. Silence fell in her soul,--one of those abysses wherein the whole
world disappears beneath the pressure of a single thought, a memory, a
look. This man who was walking towards her attracted her.

Excepting his eyes he had no appearance of humanity left; he was a long,
perfectly red shape; his broken bonds hung down his thighs, but they
could not be distinguished from the tendons of his wrists, which were
laid quite bare; his mouth remained wide open; from his eye-sockets
there darted flames which seemed to rise up to his hair;--and the wretch
still walked on!

He reached the foot of the terrace. Salammbo was leaning over the
balustrade; those frightful eyeballs were scanning her, and there rose
within her a consciousness of all that he had suffered for her. Although
he was in his death agony she could see him once more kneeling in his
tent, encircling her waist with his arms, and stammering out gentle
words; she thirsted to feel them and hear them again; she did not want
him to die! At this moment Matho gave a great start; she was on the
point of shrieking aloud. He fell backwards and did not stir again.

Salammbo was borne back, nearly swooning, to her throne by the priests
who flocked about her. They congratulated her; it was her work. All
clapped their hands and stamped their feet, howling her name.

A man darted upon the corpse. Although he had no beard he had the cloak
of a priest of Moloch on his shoulder, and in his belt that species
of knife which they employed for cutting up the sacred meat, and which
terminated, at the end of the handle, in a golden spatula. He cleft
Matho's breast with a single blow, then snatched out the heart and laid
it upon the spoon; and Schahabarim, uplifting his arm, offered it to the
sun.

The sun sank behind the waves; his rays fell like long arrows upon the
red heart. As the beatings diminished the planet sank into the sea; and
at the last palpitation it disappeared.

Then from the gulf to the lagoon, and from the isthmus to the pharos, in
all the streets, on all the houses, and on all the temples, there was
a single shout; sometimes it paused, to be again renewed; the buildings
shook with it; Carthage was convulsed, as it were, in the spasm of
Titanic joy and boundless hope.

Narr' Havas, drunk with pride, passed his left arm beneath Salammbo's
waist in token of possession; and taking a gold patera in his right
hand, he drank to the Genius of Carthage.

Salammbo rose like her husband, with a cup in her hand, to drink
also. She fell down again with her head lying over the back of the
throne,--pale, stiff, with parted lips,--and her loosened hair hung to
the ground.

Thus died Hamilcar's daughter for having touched the mantle of Tanith.