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 black
python, was drooping; and in the eyes of the Carthaginians, the
serpent was at once a national and a private fetish. It was believed
to be the offspring of the dust of the earth, since it emerges from
its depths and has no need of feet to traverse it; its mode of
progression called to mind the undulations of rivers, its temperature
the ancient, viscous, and fecund darkness, and the orbit which it
describes when biting its tail the harmony of the planets, and the
intelligence of Eschmoun.
Salammbo's serpent had several times already refused the four live
sparrows which were offered to it at the full moon and at every new
moon. Its handsome skin, covered like the firmament with golden spots
upon a perfectly black ground, was now yellow, relaxed, wrinkled, and
too large for its body. A cottony mouldiness extended round its head;
and in the corners of its eyelids might be seen little red specks
which appeared to move. Salammbo would approach its silver-wire basket
from time to time, and would draw aside the purple curtains, the lotus
leaves, and the bird's down; but it was continually rolled up upon
itself, more motionless than a withered bind-weed; and from looking at
it she at last came to feel a kind of spiral within her heart, another
serpent, as it were, mounting up to her throat by degrees and
strangling her.
She was in despair of having seen the zaimph, and yet she felt a sort
of joy, an intimate pride at having done so. A mystery shrank within
the splendour of its folds; it was the cloud that enveloped the gods,
and the secret of the universal existence, and Salammbo, horror-
stricken at herself, regretted that she had not raised it.
She was almost always crouching at the back of her apartment, holding
her bended left leg in her hands, her mouth half open, her chin sunk,
her eye fixed. She recollected her father's face with terror; she
wished to go away into the mountains of Phoenicia, on a pilgrimage to
the temple of Aphaka, where Tanith descended in the form of a star;
all kinds of imaginings attracted her and terrified her; moreover, a
solitude which every day became greater encompassed her. She did not
even know what Hamilcar was about.
Wearied at last with her thoughts she would rise, and trailing along
her little sandals whose soles clacked upon her heels at every step,
she would walk at random through the large silent room. The amethysts
and topazes of the ceiling made luminous spots quiver here and there,
and Salammbo as she walked would turn her head a little to see them.
She would go and take the hanging amphoras by the neck; she would cool
her bosom beneath the broad fans, or perhaps amuse herself by burning
cinnamomum in hollow pearls. At sunset Taanach would draw back the
black felt lozenges that closed the openings in the wall; then her
doves, rubbed with musk like the doves of Tanith, suddenly entered,
and their pink feet glided over the glass pavement, amid the grains of
barley which she threw to them in handfuls like a sower in a field.
But on a sudden she would burst into sobs and lie stretched on the
large bed of ox-leather straps without moving, repeating a word that
was ever the same, with open eyes, pale as one dead, insensible, cold;
and yet she could hear the cries of the apes in the tufts of the palm
trees, with the continuous grinding of the great wheel which brought a
flow of pure water through the stories into the porphyry centre-basin.
Sometimes for several days she would refuse to eat. She could see in a
dream troubled stars wandering beneath her feet. She would call
Schahabarim, and when he came she had nothing to say to him.
She could not live without the relief of his presence. But she
rebelled inwardly against this domination; her feeling towards the
priest was one at once of terror, jealousy, hatred, and a species of
love, in gratitude for the singular voluptuousness which she
experienced by his side.
He had recognised the influence of Rabbet, being skilful to discern
the gods who send diseases; and to cure Salammbo he had her apartment
watered with lotions of vervain, and maidenhair; she ate mandrakes
every morning; she slept with her head on a cushion filled with
aromatics blended by the pontiffs; he had even employed baaras, a
fiery-coloured root which drives back fatal geniuses into the North;
lastly, turning towards the polar star, he murmured thrice the
mysterious name of Tanith; but Salammbo still suffered and her anguish
deepened.
No one in Carthage was so learned as he. In his youth he had studied
at the College of the Mogbeds, at Borsippa, near Babylon; had then
visited Samothrace, Pessinus, Ephesus, Thessaly, Judaea, and the
temples of the Nabathae, which are lost in the sands; and had
travelled on foot along the banks of the Nile from the cataracts to
the sea. Shaking torches with veil-covered face, he had cast a black
cock upon a fire of sandarach before the breast of the Sphinx, the
Father of Terror. He had descended into the caverns of Proserpine; he
had seen the five hundred pillars of the labyrinth of Lemnos revolve,
and the candelabrum of Tarentum, which bore as many sconces on its
shaft as there are days in the year, shine in its splendour; at times
he received Greeks by night in order to question them. The
constitution of the world disquieted him no less than the nature of
the gods; he had observed the equinoxes with the armils placed in the
portico of Alexandria, and accompanied the bematists of Evergetes, who
measure the sky by calculating the number of their steps, as far as
Cyrene; so that there was now growing in his thoughts a religion of
his own, with no distinct formula, and on that very account full of
infatuation and fervour. He no longer believed that the earth was
formed like a fir-cone; he believed it to be round, and eternally
falling through immensity with such prodigious speed that its fall was
not perceived.
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.
There were people in the square of Khamon shouting for arms. The
Ancients would not provide them, esteeming such an effort useless;
others who had set out without a general had been massacred. At last
they were permitted to depart, and as a sort of homage to Moloch, or
from a vague need of destruction, they tore up tall cypress trees in
the woods of the temples, and having kindled them at the torches of
the Kabiri, were carrying them through the streets singing. These
monstrous flames advanced swaying gently; they transmitted fires to
the glass balls on the crests of the temples, to the ornaments of the
colossuses and the beaks of the ships, passed beyond the terraces and
formed suns as 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 them to
tell your father that you abandoned him?" She hid her face in her
veils, and the great lights retired, sinking gradually the while to
the edge of the waves.
An indeterminate dread restrained her; she was afraid of Moloch and of
Matho. This man, with his giant stature, who was master of the zaimph,
ruled Rabbetna as much as did Baal, and seemed to her to be surrounded
by the same fulgurations; and then the souls of the gods sometimes
visited the bodies of men. Did not Schahabarim in speaking of him say
that she was to vanquish Moloch? They were mingled with each other;
she confused them together; both of them were pursuing her.
She wished to learn the future, and approached the serpent, for
auguries were drawn from the attitudes of serpents. But the basket was
empty; Salammbo was disturbed.
She found him with his tail rolled round one of the silver balustrades
beside the hanging bed, which he was rubbing in order to free himself
from his old yellowish skin, while his body stretched forth gleaming
and clear like a sword half out of the sheath.
Then on the days following, in proportion as she allowed herself to be
convinced, and was more disposed to succour Tanith, the python
recovered and grew; he seemed to be reviving.
The certainty that Salammbo was giving expression to the will of the
gods then became established in her conscience. One morning she awoke
resolved, and she asked what was necessary to make Matho restore the
veil.
"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 Salammbo.
He rolled between his fingers the extremities of the bands which fell
from his tiara upon his shoulders, standing motionless with eyes cast
down. 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, some
circumlocution.
"If you are to die, that will be later," he said; "later! fear
nothing! and whatever he may undertake to do, do not call out! do not
be frightened! You will be humble, you understand, and submissive to
his desire, 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 right
extended, he swore in her behalf to bring back the mantle of Tanith
into Carthage. With terrible imprecations she devoted herself to the
gods, and each time that Schahabarim pronounced a word she falteringly
repeated it.
He indicated to her all the purifications and fastings that she was to
observe, and how she was to reach Matho. Moreover, a man acquainted
with the routes would accompany her.
She felt as if she had been set free. She thought only of the
happiness of seeing the zaimph again, and she now blessed Schahabarim
for his exhortations.
It was the period at which the doves of Carthage migrated to Sicily to
the mountain of Eryx and the temple of Venus. For several days before
their departure they sought out and called to one another so as to
collect together; at last one evening they flew away; the wind blew
them along, 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
descend gradually to the waves; then they disappeared as though
swallowed up, and falling of themselves into the jaws of the sun.
Salammbo, who watched them retiring, bent her head, and then Taanach,
believing that she 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 out
with the greater discretion she sent Taanach to the suburb of Kinisdo
to buy all the things that she required instead of requesting them
from the stewards: vermilion, aromatics, a linen girdle, and new
garments. The old slave was amazed at these preparations, without
daring, however, to ask any questions; and the day, which had been
fixed by Schahabarim, arrived when Salammbo was to set out.
About the twelfth hour she perceived, in the depths of the sycamore
trees, a blind old man with one hand resting on the shoulder of a
child who walked before him, while with the other he carried a kind of
cithara of black wood against his hip. The eunuchs, slaves, and women
had been scrupulously sent away; no one might know the mystery that
was preparing.
Taanach kindled four tripods filled with strobus and cadamomum in the
corners of the apartment; then she unfolded large Babylonian hangings,
and stretched them on cords all around the room, for Salammbo did not
wish to be seen even by the walls. The kinnor-player squatted behind
the door and the young boy standing upright applied a reed flute to
his 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 of
olive-trees, and the vague yellow lands undulated indefinitely, and
were blended together in a bluish haze; not a sound was to be heard,
and an unspeakable depression weighed in the air.
Salammbo crouched down upon the onyx step on the edge of the basin;
she raised her ample sleeves, fastening them behind her shoulders, and
began her ablutions in methodical fashion, according to the sacred
rites.
Next Taanach brought her something liquid and coagulated in an
alabaster phial; it was the blood of a black dog slaughtered by barren
women on a winter's night amid the rubbish of a sepulchre. She rubbed
it upon her ears, her heels, and the thumb of her right hand, and even
her nail remained somewhat red, as if she had crushed a fruit.
The moon rose; then the cithara and the flute began to play together.
Salammbo unfastened her earrings, her necklace, her bracelets, and her
long white simar; she unknotted the band in her hair, shaking the
latter for a few minutes softly over her shoulders to cool herself by
thus scattering it. The music went on outside; it consisted of three
notes ever the same, hurried and frenzied; the strings grated, the
flute blew; Taanach kept time by striking her hands; Salammbo, with a
swaying of her whole body, chanted prayers, and her garments fell one
after another around her.
The heavy tapestry trembled, and the python's head appeared above the
cord that supported it. The serpent descended slowly like a drop of
water flowing along a wall, crawled among the scattered stuffs, and
then, gluing its tail to the ground, rose perfectly erect; and his
eyes, more brilliant than carbuncles, darted upon Salammbo.
A horror of cold, or perhaps a feeling of shame, at first made her
hesitate. But she recalled Schahabarim's orders and advanced; the
python turned downwards, and resting the centre of its body upon the
nape of her neck, allowed its head and tail to hang like a broken
necklace with both ends trailing to the ground. Salammbo rolled it
around her sides, under her arms and between her knees; then taking it
by the jaw she brought the little triangular mouth to the edge of her
teeth, and half shutting her eyes, threw herself back beneath the rays
of the moon. The white light seemed to envelop her in a silver mist,
the prints of her humid steps shone upon the flag-stones, stars
quivered in the depth of the water; it tightened upon her its black
rings that were spotted with scales of gold. Salammbo panted beneath
the excessive weight, her loins yielded, she felt herself dying, and
with the tip of its tail the serpent gently beat her thigh; then the
music becoming still it fell off again.
Taanach came back to her; and after arranging two candelabra, the
lights of which burned in crystal balls filled with water, she tinged
the inside of her hands with Lawsonia, spread vermilion upon her
cheeks, and antimony along the edge of her eyelids, and lengthened her
eyebrows with a mixture of gum, musk, ebony, and crushed legs of
flies.
Salammbo seated on a chair with ivory uprights, gave herself up to the
attentions of the slave. But the touchings, the odour of the
aromatics, and the fasts that she had undergone, were enervating her.
She became so pale that Taanach stopped.
"Go on!" said Salammbo, and bearing up against herself, she suddenly
revived. Then she was seized with impatience; she urged Taanach to
make haste, and the old slave grumbled:
"Well! well! Mistress!--Besides, you have no one waiting for you!"
"Yes!" said Salammbo, "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 remain
away--"
But Salammbo was sobbing; the slave exclaimed:
"You are suffering! what is the matter? Do not go away! take me! When
you were quite little and used to cry, I took you to my heart and made
you laugh with the points of my breasts; you have drained them,
Mistress!" She struck herself upon her dried-up bosom. "Now I am old!
I can do nothing for you! you no longer love me! you hide your griefs
from me, you despise the nurse!" And tears of tenderness and vexation
flowed down her cheeks in the gashes of her tattooing.
"No!" said Salammbo, "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, Salammbo had ordered
the slave to make her magnificent; and she was obeying her mistress
with barbaric taste full at once of refinement and ingenuity.
Over a first delicate and vinous-coloured tunic she passed a second
embroidered with birds' feathers. Golden scales clung to her hips, and
from this broad girdle descended her blue flowing silver-starred
trousers. Next Taanach put upon her a long robe made of the cloth of
the country of Seres, white and streaked with green lines. On the edge
of her shoulder she fastened a square of purple weighted at the hem
with grains of sandastrum; and above all these garments she placed a
black mantle with a flowing train; then she gazed at her, and proud of
her work could not help saying:
"You will not be more beautiful on the day of your bridal!"
"My bridal!" repeated Salammbo; she was musing with her elbow resting
upon the ivory chair.
But Taanach set up before her a copper mirror, which was so broad and
high that she could see herself completely in it. Then she rose, and
with a light touch of her finger raised a lock of her hair which was
falling too low.
Her hair was covered with gold dust, was crisped in front, and hung
down behind over her back in long twists ending in pearls. The
brightness of the candelabra heightened the paint on her cheeks, the
gold on her garments, and the whiteness of her skin; around her waist,
and on her arms, hands and toes, she had such a wealth of gems that
the mirror sent back rays upon her like a sun;--and Salammbo, standing
by the side of Taanach, 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
yellow veil upon her hair, passed a scarf around her neck, thrust her
feet into blue leather boots, and said to Taanach:
"Go and see whether there is not a man with two horses beneath the
myrtles."
Taanach had scarcely re-entered when she was descending the galley
staircase.
"Mistress!" cried the nurse.
Salammbo turned round with one finger on her mouth as a sign for
discretion 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 a
gigantic shadow walking obliquely in the cypress avenue to the left of
Salammbo, a sign which presaged death.
Taanach went up again into the chamber. She threw herself upon the
ground tearing her face with her nails; she plucked out her hair, and
uttered 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 the
pavement.
