Not more than twenty perhaps remained, under shelter on the land,
leaning over on their sides or standing upright on their keels, with
lofty poops and swelling prows, and covered with gildings and mystic
symbols. The chimaeras had lost their wings, the Pataec Gods their arms,
the bulls their silver horns;--and half-painted, motionless, and rotten
as they were, yet full of associations, and still emitting the scent
of voyages, they all seemed to say to him, like mutilated soldiers
on seeing their master again, "'Tis we! 'tis we! and YOU too are
vanquished!"
No one excepting the marine Suffet might enter the admiral's house. So
long as there was no proof of his death he was considered as still in
existence. In this way the Ancients avoided a master the more, and they
had not failed to comply with the custom in respect to Hamilcar.
The Suffet proceeded into the deserted apartments. At every step he
recognised armour and furniture--familiar objects which nevertheless
astonished him, and in a perfuming-pan in the vestibule there even
remained the ashes of the perfumes that had been kindled at his
departure for the conjuration of Melkarth. It was not thus that he had
hoped to return. Everything that he had done, everything that he had
seen, unfolded itself in his memory: assaults, conflagrations, legions,
tempests, Drepanum, Syracuse, Lilybaeum, Mount Etna, the plateau of
Eryx, five years of battles,--until the fatal day when arms had been
laid down and Sicily had been lost.
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