Women were sleeping stretched on mats outside the cells.

Their bodies were greasy with unguents, and exhaled an odour of spices and extinguished perfuming-pans; while they were so covered with tattooings, necklaces, rings, vermilion, and antimony that, but for the motion of their breasts, they might have been taken for idols as they lay thus on the ground.

There were lotus-trees encircling a fountain in which fish like Salammbo's were swimming; and then in the background, against the wall of the temple, spread a vine, the branches of which were of glass and the grape-bunches of emerald, the rays from the precious stones making a play of light through the painted columns upon the sleeping faces.
Matho felt suffocated in the warm atmosphere pressed down upon him by the cedar partitions.

All these symbols of fecundation, these perfumes, radiations, and breathings overwhelmed him.

Through all the mystic dazzling he kept thinking of Salammbo.