The Barbarians, as though
abandoning him, pressed close together; and there was not a word, not a
complaint.
Their companions, who were waiting for them, not seeing them return,
believed themselves betrayed. The envoys had no doubt given themselves
up to the Suffet.
They waited for two days longer; then on the morning of the third, their
resolution was taken. With ropes, picks, and arrows, arranged like
rungs between strips of canvas, they succeeded in scaling the rocks; and
leaving the weakest, about three thousand in number, behind them, they
began their march to rejoin the army at Tunis.
Above the gorge there stretched a meadow thinly sown with shrubs; the
Barbarians devoured the buds. Afterwards they found a field of beans;
and everything disappeared as though a cloud of grasshoppers had passed
that way. Three hours later they reached a second plateau bordered by a
belt of green hills.
Among the undulations of these hillocks, silvery sheaves shone at
intervals from one another; the Barbarians, who were dazzled by the
sun, could perceive confusedly below great black masses supporting them;
these rose, as though they were expanding. They were lances in towers on
elephants terribly armed.
Besides the spears on their breasts, the bodkin tusks, the brass plates
which covered their sides, and the daggers fastened to their knee-caps,
they had at the extremity of their tusks a leathern bracelet, in
which the handle of a broad cutlass was inserted; they had set out
simultaneously from the back part of the plain, and were advancing on
both sides in parallel lines.
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