But a cry, a terrible cry broke forth, a roar of pain and wrath: it came
from the seventy-two elephants which were rushing on in double line,
Hamilcar having waited until the Mercenaries were massed together in
one spot to let them loose against them; the Indians had goaded them so
vigorously that blood was trickling down their broad ears. Their trunks,
which were smeared with mimium, were stretched straight out in the air
like red serpents; their breasts were furnished with spears and their
backs with cuirasses; their tusks were lengthened with steel blades
curved like sabres,--and to make them more ferocious they had been
intoxicated with a mixture of pepper, wine, and incense. They shook
their necklaces of bells, and shrieked; and the elephantarchs bent their
heads beneath the stream of phalaricas which was beginning to fly from
the tops of the towers.
In order to resist them the better the Barbarians rushed forward in
a compact crowd; the elephants flung themselves impetuously upon the
centre of it. The spurs on their breasts, like ships' prows, clove
through the cohorts, which flowed surging back. They stifled the men
with their trunks, or else snatching them up from the ground delivered
them over their heads to the soldiers in the towers; with their tusks
they disembowelled them, and hurled them into the air, and long entrails
hung from their ivory fangs like bundles of rope from a mast.
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