Kabanata Kabanata 4 · BENEATH THE WALLS OF CARTHAGE

. BENEATH THE WALLS OF CARTHAGE

Some country people, riding on asses or running on foot, arrived in the

town, pale, breathless, and mad with fear. They were flying before the

army. It had accomplished the journey from Sicca in three days, in order

to reach Carthage and wholly exterminate it.

The gates were shut. The Barbarians appeared almost immediately; but

they stopped in the middle of the isthmus, on the edge of the lake.

At first they made no hostile announcement. Several approached with palm

branches in their hands. They were driven back with arrows, so great was

the terror.

In the morning and at nightfall prowlers would sometimes wander along

the walls. A little man carefully wrapped in a cloak, and with his face

concealed beneath a very low visor, was especially noticed. He would

remain whole hours gazing at the aqueduct, and so persistently that he

doubtless wished to mislead the Carthaginians as to his real designs.

Another man, a sort of giant who walked bareheaded, used to accompany

him.

But Carthage was defended throughout the whole breadth of the isthmus:

first by a trench, then by a grassy rampart, and lastly by a wall thirty

cubits high, built of freestone, and in two storys. It contained stables

for three hundred elephants with stores for their caparisons, shackles,

and food; other stables again for four thousand horses with supplies

of barley and harness, and barracks for twenty thousand soldiers with

armour and all materials of war. Towers rose from the second story, all

provided with battlements, and having bronze bucklers hung on cramps on

the outside.

This first line of wall gave immediate shelter to Malqua, the sailors’

and dyers’ quarter. Masts might be seen whereon purple sails were

drying, and on the highest terraces clay furnaces for heating the pickle

were visible.

Behind, the lofty houses of the city rose in an ampitheatre of cubical

form. They were built of stone, planks, shingle, reeds, shells, and

beaten earth. The woods belonging to the temples were like lakes of

verdure in this mountain of diversely-coloured blocks. It was levelled

at unequal distances by the public squares, and was cut from top to

bottom by countless intersecting lanes. The enclosures of the three old

quarters which are now lost might be distinguished; they rose here

and there like great reefs, or extended in enormous fronts, blackened,

half-covered with flowers, and broadly striped by the casting of filth,

while streets passed through their yawning apertures like rivers beneath

bridges.

The hill of the Acropolis, in the centre of Byrsa, was hidden beneath a

disordered array of monuments. There were temples with wreathed columns

bearing bronze capitals and metal chains, cones of dry stones with bands

of azure, copper cupolas, marble architraves, Babylonian buttresses,

obelisks poised on their points like inverted torches. Peristyles

reached to pediments; volutes were displayed through colonnades; granite

walls supported tile partitions; the whole mounting, half-hidden, the

one above the other in a marvellous and incomprehensible fashion. In it

might be felt the succession of the ages, and, as it were, the memorials

of forgotten fatherlands.

Behind the Acropolis the Mappalian road, which was lined with tombs,

extended through red lands in a straight line from the shore to the

catacombs; then spacious dwellings occurred at intervals in the gardens,

and this third quarter, Megara, which was the new town, reached as far

as the edge of the cliff, where rose a giant pharos that blazed forth

every night.

In this fashion was Carthage displayed before the soldiers quartered in

the plain.

They could recognise the markets and crossways in the distance, and

disputed with one another as to the sites of the temples. Khamon’s,

fronting the Syssitia, had golden tiles; Melkarth, to the left of

Eschmoun, had branches of coral on its roofing; beyond,