He was now sure that she had erred in
the embrace of a Barbarian; he shuddered and raised both his fists. She
uttered a shriek and fell down among her women, who crowded around her.
Hamilcar turned on his heel. All the stewards followed him.
The door of the emporiums was opened, and he entered a vast round hall
form which long passages leading to other halls branched off like the
spokes from the nave of a wheel. A stone disc stood in the centre with
balustrades to support the cushions that were heaped up upon carpets.
The Suffet walked at first with rapid strides; he breathed noisily, he
struck the ground with his heel, and drew his hand across his forehead
like a man annoyed by flies. But he shook his head, and as he perceived
the accumulation of his riches he became calm; his thoughts, which were
attracted by the vistas in the passages, wandered to the other halls
that were full of still rarer treasures. Bronze plates, silver ingots,
and iron bars alternated with pigs of tin brought from the Cassiterides
over the Dark Sea; gums from the country of the Blacks were running over
their bags of palm bark; and gold dust heaped up in leathern bottles was
insensibly creeping out through the worn-out seams. Delicate filaments
drawn from marine plants hung amid flax from Egypt, Greece, Taprobane
and Judaea; mandrepores bristled like large bushes at the foot of the
walls; and an indefinable odour--the exhalation from perfumes, leather,
spices, and ostrich feathers, the latter tied in great bunches at the
very top of the vault--floated through the air.
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