Spendius found it again.
But most frequently Matho would go off at sunrise, as melancholy as an augur, to wander about the country.

He would stretch himself on the sand, and remain there motionless until the evening.
He consulted all the soothsayers in the army one after the other,--those who watch the trail of serpents, those who read the stars, and those who breathe upon the ashes of the dead.

He swallowed galbanum, seseli, and viper's venom which freezes the heart; Negro women, singing barbarous words in the moonlight, pricked the skin of his forehead with golden stylets; he loaded himself with necklaces and charms; he invoked in turn Baal-Khamon, Moloch, the seven Kabiri, Tanith, and the Venus of the Greeks.

He engraved a name upon a copper plate, and buried it in the sand at the threshold of his tent.

Spendius used to hear him groaning and talking to himself.
One night he went in.
Matho, as naked as a corpse, was lying on a lion's skin flat on his stomach, with his face in both his hands; a hanging lamp lit up his armour, which was hooked on to the tent-pole above his head.
"You are suffering ?" said the slave to him.