CHAPTER X THE SERPENT
These clamourings of the populace did not alarm Hamilcar’s daughter.She was disturbed by loftier anxieties: her great serpent, the blackpython, was drooping; and in the eyes of the Carthaginians, the serpentwas at once a national and a private fetish. It was believed to be theoffspring of the dust of the earth, since it emerges from its depths andhas no need of feet to traverse it; its mode of progression called tomind the undulations of rivers, its temperature the ancient, viscous,and fecund darkness, and the orbit which it describes when biting itstail the harmony of the planets, and the intelligence of Eschmoun.
Salammbô’s serpent had several times already refused the four livesparrows which were offered to it at the full moon and at every newmoon. Its handsome skin, covered like the firmament with golden spotsupon a perfectly black ground, was now yellow, relaxed, wrinkled, andtoo large for its body. A cottony mouldiness extended round its head;and in the corners of its eyelids might be seen little red specks whichappeared to move. Salammbô would approach its silver-wire basketfrom time to time, and would draw aside the purple curtains, the lotusleaves, and the bird’s down; but it was continually rolled up uponitself, more motionless than a withered bind-weed; and from looking atit she at last came to feel a kind of spiral within her heart, anotherserpent, as it were, mounting up to her throat by degrees and stranglingher.
She was in despair of having seen the zaïmph, and yet she felt a sortof joy, an intimate pride at having done so. A mystery shrank within thesplendour of its folds; it was the cloud that enveloped the gods, andthe secret of the universal existence, and Salammbô, horror-stricken atherself, regretted that she had not raised it.
She was almost always crouching at the back of her apartment, holdingher bended left leg in her hands, her mouth half open, her chin sunk,her eye fixed. She recollected her father’s face with terror; shewished to go away into the mountains of Phonicia, on a pilgrimage tothe temple of Aphaka, where Tanith descended in the form of a star;all kinds of imaginings attracted her and terrified her; moreover, asolitude which every day became greater encompassed her. She did noteven know what Hamilcar was about.
Wearied at last with her thoughts she would rise, and trailing alongher little sandals whose soles clacked upon her heels at every step, shewould walk at random through the large silent room. The amethysts andtopazes of the ceiling made luminous spots quiver here and there, andSalammbô as she walked would turn her head a little to see them. Shewould go and take the hanging amphoras by the neck; she would coolher bosom beneath the broad fans, or perhaps amuse herself by burningcinnamomum in hollow pearls. At sunset Taanach would draw back the blackfelt lozenges that closed the openings in the wall; then her doves,rubbed with musk like the doves of Tanith, suddenly entered, and theirpink feet glided over the glass pavement, amid the grains of barleywhich she threw to them in handfuls like a sower in a field. But on asudden she would burst into sobs and lie stretched on the large bed ofox-leather straps without moving, repeating a word that was ever thesame, with open eyes, pale as one dead, insensible, cold; and yet shecould hear the cries of the apes in the tufts of the palm trees, withthe continuous grinding of the great wheel which brought a flow of purewater through the stories into the porphyry centre-basin.
Sometimes for several days she would refuse to eat. She could see ina dream troubled stars wandering beneath her feet. She would callSchahabarim, and when he came she had nothing to say to him.
She could not live without the relief of his presence. But she rebelledinwardly against this domination; her feeling towards the priest was oneat once of terror, jealousy, hatred, and a species of love, in gratitudefor the singular voluptuousness which she experienced by his side.
He had recognised the influence of Rabbet, being skilful to discernthe gods who send diseases; and to cure Salammbô he had her apartmentwatered with lotions of vervain, and maidenhair; she ate mandrakes everymorning; she slept with her head on a cushion filled with aromaticsblended by the pontiffs; he had even employed baaras, a fiery-colouredroot which drives back fatal geniuses into the North; lastly, turningtowards the polar star, he murmured thrice the mysterious name ofTanith; but Salammbô still suffered and her anguish deepened.
No one in Carthage was so learned as he. In his youth he had studied atthe College of the Mogbeds, at Borsippa, near Babylon; had then visitedSamothrace, Pessinus, Ephesus, Thessaly, Judæa, and the temples of theNabathæ, which are lost in the sands; and had travelled on foot alongthe banks of the Nile from the cataracts to the sea. Shaking torcheswith veil-covered face, he had cast a black cock upon a fire ofsandarach before the breast of the Sphinx, the Father of Terror. He haddescended into the caverns of Proserpine; he had seen the five hundredpillars of the labyrinth of Lemnos revolve, and the candelabrum ofTarentum, which bore as many sconces on its shaft as there are days inthe year, shine in its splendour; at times he received Greeks by nightin order to question them. The constitution of the world disquieted himno less than the nature of the gods; he had observed the equinoxes withthe armils placed in the portico of Alexandria, and accompanied thebematists of Evergetes, who measure the sky by calculating the numberof their steps, as far as Cyrene; so that there was now growing in histhoughts a religion of his own, with no distinct formula, and on thatvery account full of infatuation and fervour. He no longer believed thatthe earth was formed like a fir-cone; he believed it to be round, andeternally falling through immensity with such prodigious speed that itsfall was not perceived.
From the position of the sun above the moon he inferred the predominanceof Baal, of whom the planet itself is but the reflection and figure;moreover, all that he saw in terrestrial things compelled him torecognise the male exterminating principle as supreme. And then hesecretly charged Rabbet with the misfortune of his life. Was it not forher that the grand-pontiff had once advanced amid the tumult of cymbals,and with a patera of boiling water taken from him his future virility?And he followed with a melancholy gaze the men who were disappearingwith the priestesses in the depths of the turpentine trees.
His days were spent in inspecting the censers, the gold vases, thetongs, the rakes for the ashes of the altar, and all the robes of thestatues down to the bronze bodkin that served to curl the hair of an oldTanith in the third aedicule near the emerald vine. At the same hours hewould raise the great hangings of the same swinging doors; would remainwith his arms outspread in the same attitude; or prayed prostrate on thesame flag-stones, while around him a people of priests moved barefootedthrough the passages filled with an eternal twilight.
But Salammbô was in the barrenness of his life like a flower in thecleft of a sepulchre. Nevertheless he was hard upon her, and sparedher neither penances nor bitter words. His condition established, as itwere, the equality of a common sex between them, and he was less angrywith the girl for his inability to possess her than for finding her sobeautiful, and above all so pure. Often he saw that she grew weary offollowing his thought. Then he would turn away sadder than before; hewould feel himself more forsaken, more empty, more alone.
Strange words escaped him sometimes, which passed before Salammbô likebroad lightnings illuminating the abysses. This would be at night on theterrace when, both alone, they gazed upon the stars, and Carthage spreadbelow under their feet, with the gulf and the open sea dimly lost in thecolour of the darkness.
He would set forth to her the theory of the souls that descend uponthe earth, following the same route as the sun through the signs of thezodiac. With outstretched arm he showed the gate of human generation inthe Ram, and that of the return to the gods in Capricorn; and Salammbôstrove to see them, for she took these conceptions for realities;she accepted pure symbols and even manners of speech as being true inthemselves, a distinction not always very clear even to the priest.
“The souls of the dead,” said he, “resolve themselves intothe moon, as their bodies do into the earth. Their tears compose itshumidity; ’Tis a dark abode full of mire, and wreck, and tempest.”
She asked what would become of her then.
“At first you will languish as light as a vapour hovering upon thewaves; and after more lengthened ordeals and agonies, you will pass intothe forces of the sun, the very source of Intelligence!”
He did not speak, however, of Rabbet. Salammbô imagined that it wasthrough some shame for his vanquished goddess, and calling her by acommon name which designated the moon, she launched into blessings uponthe soft and fertile planet. At last he exclaimed:
“No! no! she draws all her fecundity from the other! Do you not seeher hovering about him like an amorous woman running after a man in afield?” And he exalted the virtue of light unceasingly.
Far from depressing her mystic desires, he sought, on the contrary,to excite them, and he even seemed to take joy in grieving her by therevelation of a pitiless doctrine. In spite of the pains of her loveSalammbô threw herself upon it with transport.
But the more that Schahabarim felt himself in doubt about Tanith, themore he wished to believe in her. At the bottom of his soul he wasarrested by remorse. He needed some proof, some manifestation from thegods, and in the hope of obtaining it the priest devised an enterprisewhich might save at once his country and his belief.
Thenceforward he set himself to deplore before Salammbô the sacrilegeand the misfortunes which resulted from it even in the regions ofthe sky. Then he suddenly announced the peril of the Suffet, who wasassailed by three armies under the command of Matho—for on account ofthe veil Matho was, in the eyes of the Carthaginians, the king, as itwere, of the Barbarians,—and he added that the safety of the Republicand of her father depended upon her alone.
“Upon me!” she exclaimed. “How can I—?”
But the priest, with a smile of disdain said:
“You will never consent!”
She entreated him. At last Schahabarim said to her:
“You must go to the Barbarians and recover the zaïmph!”
She sank down upon the ebony stool, and remained with her arms stretchedout between her knees and shivering in all her limbs, like a victimat the altar’s foot awaiting the blow of the club. Her temples wereringing, she could see fiery circles revolving, and in her stuporshe had lost the understanding of all things save one, that she wascertainly going to die soon.
But if Rabbetna triumphed, if the zaïmph were restored and Carthagedelivered, what mattered a woman’s life? thought Schahabarim.Moreover, she would perhaps obtain the veil and not perish.
He stayed away for three days; on the evening of the fourth she sent forhim.
The better to inflame her heart he reported to her all the invectiveshowled against Hamilcar in open council; he told her that she had erred,that she owed reparation for her crime, and that Rabbetna commanded thesacrifice.
A great uproar came frequently across the Mappalian district to Megara.Schahabarim and Salammbô went out quickly, and gazed from the top ofthe galley staircase.
There were people in the square of Khamon shouting for arms. TheAncients would not provide them, esteeming such an effort useless;others who had set out without a general had been massacred. At lastthey were permitted to depart, and as a sort of homage to Moloch, orfrom a vague need of destruction, they tore up tall cypress trees inthe woods of the temples, and having kindled them at the torches of theKabiri, were carrying them through the streets singing. These monstrousflames advanced swaying gently; they transmitted fires to the glassballs on the crests of the temples, to the ornaments of the colossusesand the beaks of the ships, passed beyond the terraces and formed sunsas it were, which rolled through the town. They descended the Acropolis.The gate of Malqua opened.
“Are you ready?” exclaimed Schahabarim, “or have you asked themto tell your father that you abandoned him?” She hid her face in herveils, and the great lights retired, sinking gradually the while to theedge of the waves.
An indeterminate dread restrained her; she was afraid of Moloch and ofMatho. This man, with his giant stature, who was master of the zaïmph,ruled Rabbetna as much as did Baal, and seemed to her to be surroundedby the same fulgurations; and then the souls of the gods sometimesvisited the bodies of men. Did not Schahabarim in speaking of him saythat she was to vanquish Moloch? They were mingled with each other; sheconfused them together; both of them were pursuing her.
She wished to learn the future, and approached the serpent, for augurieswere drawn from the attitudes of serpents. But the basket was empty;Salammbô was disturbed.
She found him with his tail rolled round one of the silver balustradesbeside the hanging bed, which he was rubbing in order to free himselffrom his old yellowish skin, while his body stretched forth gleaming andclear like a sword half out of the sheath.
Then on the days following, in proportion as she allowed herself to beconvinced, and was more disposed to succour Tanith, the python recoveredand grew; he seemed to be reviving.
The certainty that Salammbô was giving expression to the will of thegods then became established in her conscience. One morning she awokeresolved, and she asked what was necessary to make Matho restore theveil.
“To claim it,” said Schahabarim.
“But if he refuses?” she rejoined.
The priest scanned her fixedly with a smile such as she had never seen.
“Yes, what is to be done?” repeated Salammbô.
He rolled between his fingers the extremities of the bands which fellfrom his tiara upon his shoulders, standing motionless with eyes castdown. At last seeing that she did not understand:
“You will be alone with him.”
“Well?” she said.
“Alone in his tent.”
“What then?”
Schahabarim bit his lips. He sought for some phrase, somecircumlocution.
“If you are to die, that will be later,” he said; “later! fearnothing! and whatever he may undertake to do, do not call out! do notbe frightened! You will be humble, you understand, and submissive to hisdesire, which is ordained of heaven!”
“But the veil?”
“The gods will take thought for it,” replied Schahabarim.
“Suppose you were to accompany me, O father?” she added.
“No!”
He made her kneel down, and keeping his left hand raised and his rightextended, he swore in her behalf to bring back the mantle of Tanith intoCarthage. With terrible imprecations she devoted herself to the gods,and each time that Schahabarim pronounced a word she falteringlyrepeated it.
He indicated to her all the purifications and fastings that she was toobserve, and how she was to reach Matho. Moreover, a man acquainted withthe routes would accompany her.
She felt as if she had been set free. She thought only of the happinessof seeing the zaïmph again, and she now blessed Schahabarim for hisexhortations.
It was the period at which the doves of Carthage migrated to Sicily tothe mountain of Eryx and the temple of Venus. For several days beforetheir departure they sought out and called to one another so as tocollect together; at last one evening they flew away; the wind blew themalong, and the big white cloud glided across the sky high above the sea.
The horizon was filled with the colour of blood. They seemed to descendgradually to the waves; then they disappeared as though swallowed up,and falling of themselves into the jaws of the sun. Salammbô, whowatched them retiring, bent her head, and then Taanach, believing thatshe guessed her sorrow, said gently to her:
“But they will come back, Mistress.”
“Yes! I know.”
“And you will see them again.”
“Perhaps!” she said, sighing.
She had not confided her resolve to any one; in order to carry it outwith the greater discretion she sent Taanach to the suburb of Kinisdo tobuy all the things that she required instead of requesting them from thestewards: vermilion, aromatics, a linen girdle, and new garments. Theold slave was amazed at these preparations, without daring, however,to ask any questions; and the day, which had been fixed by Schahabarim,ar
rived when Salammbô was to set out.
About the twelfth hour she perceived, in the depths of the sycamoretrees, a blind old man with one hand resting on the shoulder of a childwho walked before him, while with the other he carried a kind of citharaof black wood against his hip. The eunuchs, slaves, and women hadbeen scrupulously sent away; no one might know the mystery that waspreparing.
Taanach kindled four tripods filled with strobus and cadamomum in thecorners of the apartment; then she unfolded large Babylonian hangings,and stretched them on cords all around the room, for Salammbô did notwish to be seen even by the walls. The kinnor-player squatted behindthe door and the young boy standing upright applied a reed flute tohis lips. In the distance the roar of the streets was growing feebler,violet shadows were lengthening before the peristyles of the temples,and on the other side of the gulf the mountain bases, the fields ofolive-trees, and the vague yellow lands undulated indefinitely, and wereblended together in a bluish haze; not a sound was to be heard, and anunspeakable depression weighed in the air.
Salammbô crouched down upon the onyx step on the edge of the basin; sheraised her ample sleeves, fastening them behind her shoulders, and beganher ablutions in methodical fashion, according to the sacred rites.
Next Taanach brought her something liquid and coagulated in an alabasterphial; it was the blood of a black dog slaughtered by barren women on awinter’s night amid the rubbish of a sepulchre. She rubbed it uponher ears, her heels, and the thumb of her right hand, and even her nailremained somewhat red, as if she had crushed a fruit.
The moon rose; then the cithara and the flute began to play together.
Salammbô unfastened her earrings, her necklace, her bracelets, and herlong white simar; she unknotted the band in her hair, shaking the latterfor a few minutes softly over her shoulders to cool herself by thusscattering it. The music went on outside; it consisted of three notesever the same, hurried and frenzied; the strings grated, the flute blew;Taanach kept time by striking her hands; Salammbô, with a swaying ofher whole body, chanted prayers, and her garments fell one after anotheraround her.
The heavy tapestry trembled, and the python’s head appeared abovethe cord that supported it. The serpent descended slowly like a dropof water flowing along a wall, crawled among the scattered stuffs, andthen, gluing its tail to the ground, rose perfectly erect; and his eyes,more brilliant than carbuncles, darted upon Salammbô.
A horror of cold, or perhaps a feeling of shame, at first made herhesitate. But she recalled Schahabarim’s orders and advanced; thepython turned downwards, and resting the centre of its body upon thenape of her neck, allowed its head and tail to hang like a brokennecklace with both ends trailing to the ground. Salammbô rolled itaround her sides, under her arms and between her knees; then taking itby the jaw she brought the little triangular mouth to the edge of herteeth, and half shutting her eyes, threw herself back beneath the raysof the moon. The white light seemed to envelop her in a silver mist, theprints of her humid steps shone upon the flag-stones, stars quivered inthe depth of the water; it tightened upon her its black rings that werespotted with scales of gold. Salammbô panted beneath the excessiveweight, her loins yielded, she felt herself dying, and with the tipof its tail the serpent gently beat her thigh; then the music becomingstill it fell off again.
Taanach came back to her; and after arranging two candelabra, the lightsof which burned in crystal balls filled with water, she tinged theinside of her hands with Lawsonia, spread vermilion upon her cheeks, andantimony along the edge of her eyelids, and lengthened her eyebrows witha mixture of gum, musk, ebony, and crushed legs of flies.
Salammbô seated on a chair with ivory uprights, gave herself up to theattentions of the slave. But the touchings, the odour of the aromatics,and the fasts that she had undergone, were enervating her. She became sopale that Taanach stopped.
“Go on!” said Salammbô, and bearing up against herself, shesuddenly revived. Then she was seized with impatience; she urged Taanachto make haste, and the old slave grumbled:
“Well! well! Mistress!—Besides, you have no one waiting for you!”
“Yes!” said Salammbô, “some one is waiting for me.”
Taanach drew back in surprise, and in order to learn more about it,said:
“What orders to you give me, Mistress? for if you are to remainaway—”
But Salammbô was sobbing; the slave exclaimed:
“You are suffering! what is the matter? Do not go away! take me! Whenyou were quite little and used to cry, I took you to my heart andmade you laugh with the points of my breasts; you have drained them,Mistress!” She struck herself upon her dried-up bosom. “Now I amold! I can do nothing for you! you no longer love me! you hide yourgriefs from me, you despise the nurse!” And tears of tenderness andvexation flowed down her cheeks in the gashes of her tattooing.
“No!” said Salammbô, “no, I love you! be comforted!”
With a smile like the grimace of an old ape, Taanach resumed her task.In accordance with Schahabarim’s recommendations, Salammbô hadordered the slave to make her magnificent; and she was obeying hermistress with barbaric taste full at once of refinement and ingenuity.
Over a first delicate and vinous-coloured tunic she passed a secondembroidered with birds’ feathers. Golden scales clung to her hips,and from this broad girdle descended her blue flowing silver-starredtrousers. Next Taanach put upon her a long robe made of the cloth of thecountry of Seres, white and streaked with green lines. On the edge ofher shoulder she fastened a square of purple weighted at the hem withgrains of sandastrum; and above all these garments she placed a blackmantle with a flowing train; then she gazed at her, and proud of herwork could not help saying:
“You will not be more beautiful on the day of your bridal!”
“My bridal!” repeated Salammbô; she was musing with her elbowresting upon the ivory chair.
But Taanach set up before her a copper mirror, which was so broad andhigh that she could see herself completely in it. Then she rose, andwith a light touch of her finger raised a lock of her hair which wasfalling too low.
Her hair was covered with gold dust, was crisped in front, and hung downbehind over her back in long twists ending in pearls. The brightnessof the candelabra heightened the paint on her cheeks, the gold on hergarments, and the whiteness of her skin; around her waist, and on herarms, hands and toes, she had such a wealth of gems that the mirror sentback rays upon her like a sun;—and Salammbô, standing by the side ofTaanach, who leaned over to see her, smiled amid this dazzling display.
Then she walked to and fro embarrassed by the time that was still left.
Suddenly the crow of a cock resounded. She quickly pinned a long yellowveil upon her hair, passed a scarf around her neck, thrust her feet intoblue leather boots, and said to Taanach:
“Go and see whether there is not a man with two horses beneath themyrtles.”
Taanach had scarcely re-entered when she was descending the galleystaircase.
“Mistress!” cried the nurse.
Salammbô turned round with one finger on her mouth as a sign fordiscretion and immobility.
Taanach stole softly along the prows to the foot of the terrace,and from a distance she could distinguish by the light of the moon agigantic shadow walking obliquely in the cypress avenue to the left ofSalammbô, a sign which presaged death.
Taanach went up again into the chamber. She threw herself upon theground tearing her face with her nails; she plucked out her hair, anduttered piercing shrieks with all her might.
It occurred to her that they might be heard; then she became silent,sobbing quite softly with her head in the hands and her face on thepavement.