[Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert]@TWC D-Link book
Salammbo

CHAPTER XI
12/34

There was shouting and calling; shackled horses formed long straight lines amid the tents; the latter were round and square, of leather or of canvas; there were huts of reeds, and holes in the sand such as are made by dogs.

Soldiers were carting faggots, resting on their elbows on the ground, or wrapping themselves up in mats and preparing to sleep; and Salammbo's horse sometimes stretched out a leg and jumped in order to pass over them.
She remembered that she had seen them before; but their beards were longer now, their faces still blacker, and their voices hoarser.

Matho, who walked before her, waved them off with a gesture of his arm which raised his red mantle.

Some kissed his hands; others bending their spines approached him to ask for orders, for he was now veritable and sole chief of the Barbarians; Spendius, Autaritus, and Narr' Havas had become disheartened, and he had displayed so much audacity and obstinacy that all obeyed him.
Salammbo followed him through the entire camp.

His tent was at the end, three hundred feet from Hamilcar's entrenchments.
She noticed a wide pit on the right, and it seemed to her that faces were resting against the edge of it on a level with the ground, as decapitated heads might have done.


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