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

CHAPTER XII
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The men of the North were puffed up with livid swellings, while the more nervous Africans looked as though they had been smoked, and were already drying up.

The Mercenaries might be recognised by the tattooing on their hands: the old soldiers of Antiochus displayed a sparrow-hawk; those who had served in Egypt, the head of the cynosephalus; those who had served with the princes of Asia, a hatchet, a pomegranate, or a hammer; those who had served in the Greek republics, the side-view of a citadel or the name of an archon; and some were to be seen whose arms were entirely covered with these multiplied symbols, which mingled with their scars and their recent wounds.
Four great funeral piles were erected for the men of Latin race, the Samnites, Etruscans, Campanians, and Bruttians.
The Greeks dug pits with the points of their swords.

The Spartans removed their red cloaks and wrapped them round the dead; the Athenians laid them out with their faces towards the rising sun; the Cantabrians buried them beneath a heap of pebbles; the Nasamonians bent them double with ox-leather thongs, and the Garamantians went and interred them on the shore so that they might be perpetually washed by the waves.

But the Latins were grieved that they could not collect the ashes in urns; the Nomads regretted the heat of the sands in which bodies were mummified, and the Celts, the three rude stones beneath a rainy sky at the end of an islet-covered gulf.
Vociferations arose, followed by the lengthened silence.

This was to oblige the souls to return.


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