From the position of the sun above the moon he inferred the predominance of Baal, of whom the planet itself is but the reflection and figure; moreover, all that he saw in terrestrial things compelled him to recognise the male exterminating principle as supreme.And then he secretly charged Rabbet with the misfortune of his life.Was it not for her 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 disappearing with the priestesses in the depths of the turpentine trees.
His days were spent in inspecting the censers, the gold vases, the tongs, the rakes for the ashes of the altar, and all the robes of the statues down to the bronze bodkin that served to curl the hair of an old Tanith in the third aedicule near the emerald vine.At the same hours he would raise the great hangings of the same swinging doors;would remain with his arms outspread in the same attitude; or prayed prostrate on the same flag-stones, while around him a people of priests moved barefooted through the passages filled with an eternal twilight.
But Salammbo was in the barrenness of his life like a flower in the cleft of a sepulchre.Nevertheless he was hard upon her, and spared her neither penances nor bitter words.His condition established, as it were, the equality of a common sex between them, and he was less angry with the girl for his inability to possess her than for finding her so beautiful, and above all so pure.Often he saw that she grew weary of following his thought.Then he would turn away sadder than before; he would feel himself more forsaken, more empty, more alone.
Strange words escaped him sometimes, which passed before Salammbo like broad lightnings illuminating the abysses.This would be at night on the terrace when, both alone, they gazed upon the stars, and Carthage spread below under their feet, with the gulf and the open sea dimly lost in the colour of the darkness.
He would set forth to her the theory of the souls that descend upon the earth, following the same route as the sun through the signs of the zodiac.With outstretched arm he showed the gate of human generation in the Ram, and that of the return to the gods in Capricorn; and Salammbo strove to see them, for she took these conceptions for realities; she accepted pure symbols and even manners of speech as being true in themselves, a distinction not always very clear even to the priest.
"The souls of the dead," said he, "resolve themselves into the moon, as their bodies do into the earth.Their tears compose its humidity;'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 the waves; and after more lengthened ordeals and agonies, you will pass into the forces of the sun, the very source of Intelligence!"He did not speak, however, of Rabbet.Salammbo imagined that it was through some shame for his vanquished goddess, and calling her by a common name which designated the moon, she launched into blessings upon the soft and fertile planet.At last he exclaimed:
"No! no! she draws all her fecundity from the other! Do you not see her hovering about him like an amorous woman running after a man in a field?" 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 the revelation of a pitiless doctrine.In spite of the pains of her love Salammbo threw herself upon it with transport.
But the more that Schahabarim felt himself in doubt about Tanith, the more he wished to believe in her.At the bottom of his soul he was arrested by remorse.He needed some proof, some manifestation from the gods, and in the hope of obtaining it the priest devised an enterprise which might save at once his country and his belief.
Thenceforward he set himself to deplore before Salammbo the sacrilege and the misfortunes which resulted from it even in the regions of the sky.Then he suddenly announced the peril of the Suffet, who was assailed by three armies under the command of Matho--for on account of the veil Matho was, in the eyes of the Carthaginians, the king, as it were, of the Barbarians,--and he added that the safety of the Republic and 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 zaimph!"She sank down upon the ebony stool, and remained with her arms stretched out between her knees and shivering in all her limbs, like a victim at the altar's foot awaiting the blow of the club.Her temples were ringing, she could see fiery circles revolving, and in her stupor she had lost the understanding of all things save one, that she was certainly going to die soon.
But if Rabbetna triumphed, if the zaimph were restored and Carthage delivered, 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 for him.
The better to inflame her heart he reported to her all the invectives howled against Hamilcar in open council; he told her that she had erred, that she owed reparation for her crime, and that Rabbetna commanded the sacrifice.
A great uproar came frequently across the Mappalian district to Megara.Schahabarim and Salammbo went out quickly, and gazed from the top of the galley staircase.
