Hamilcar said to them:
"Beat away at the swords! I shall want them." And he drew the antelope's
skin that had been steeped in poisons from his bosom to have it cut
into a cuirass more solid than one of brass and unassailable by steel or
flame.
As soon as he approached the workmen, Abdalonim, to give his wrath
another direction, tried to anger him against them by murmured
disparagement of their work. "What a performance! It is a shame! The
Master is indeed too good." Hamilcar moved away without listening to
him.
He slackened his pace, for the paths were barred by great trees calcined
from one end to the other, such as may be met with in woods where
shepherds have encamped; and the palings were broken, the water in the
trenches was disappearing, while fragments of glass and the bones of
apes were to be seen amid the miry puddles. A scrap of cloth hung
here and there from the bushes, and the rotten flowers formed a yellow
muck-heap beneath the citron trees. In fact, the servants had neglected
everything, thinking that the master would never return.
At every step he discovered some new disaster, some further proof of the
thing which he had forbidden himself to learn. Here he was soiling his
purple boots as he crushed the filth under-foot; and he had not all
these men before him at the end of a catapult to make them fly into
fragments! He felt humiliated at having defended them; it was a delusion
and a piece of treachery; and as he could not revenge himself upon
the soldiers, or the Ancients, or Salammbo, or anybody, and his wrath
required some victim, he condemned all the slaves of the gardens to the
mines at a single stroke.
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