Chapter Chapter 10 · THE SERPENT

. 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.

Salammbô’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. Salammbô 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 zaïmph, 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 Salammbô, 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 Phonicia, 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

Salammbô 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 Salammbô 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 Salammbô 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, Judæa, and the temples of the

Nabathæ, 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 Salammbô 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 Salammbô 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 Salammbô

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. Salammbô 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

Salammbô 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 Salammbô 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 zaïmph!”

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 zaïmph 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 Salammbô 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 zaïmph,

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;

Salammbô 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 Salammbô 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 Salammbô.

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 zaïmph 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. Salammbô, 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 Salammbô 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 cardamomum in the

corners of the apartment; then she unfolded large Babylonian hangings,

and stretched them on cords all around the room, for Salammbô 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.

Salammbô 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.

Salammbô 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; Salammbô, 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 Salammbô.

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. Salammbô 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. Salammbô 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.

Salammbô 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 Salammbô, 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 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 remain

away—”

But Salammbô 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 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 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 Salammbô; 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 Salammbô, 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.

Salammbô 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

Salammbô, 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.