[Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert]@TWC D-Link bookSalammbo CHAPTER IX 22/28
Sometimes horrible barkings would be heard and the man would not come up again. Three phalangites, in the fourth dilochia of the twelfth syntagmata, killed one another with knives in a dispute about a rat. All regretted their families, and their houses; the poor their hive-shaped huts, with the shells on the threshold and the hanging net, and the patricians their large halls filled with bluish shadows, where at the most indolent hour of the day they used to rest listening to the vague noise of the streets mingled with the rustling of the leaves as they stirred in their gardens;--to go deeper into the thought of this, and to enjoy it more, they would half close their eyelids, only to be roused by the shock of a wound.
Every minute there was some engagement, some fresh alarm; the towers were burning, the Eaters of Uncleanness were leaping across the palisades; their hands would be struck off with axes; others would hasten up; an iron hail would fall upon the tents. Galleries of rushen hurdles were raised as a protection against the projectiles.
The Carthaginians shut themselves up within them and stirred out no more. Every day the sun coming over the hill used, after the early hours, to forsake the bottom of the gorge and leave them in the shade.
The grey slopes of the ground, covered with flints spotted with scanty lichen, ascended in front and in the rear, and above their summits stretched the sky in its perpetual purity, smoother and colder to the eye than a metal cupola.
Hamilcar was so indignant with Carthage that he felt inclined to throw himself among the Barbarians and lead them against her.
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