But they retraced their steps between two long galleries which ran
parallel to each other. There were small open cells along their sides,
and tabourines and cymbals hung against their cedar columns from top to
bottom. 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. She became confused with the
goddess herself, and his loved unfolded itself all the more, like the
great lotus-plants blooming upon the depths of the waters.
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