It made the sand flow perpetually in cascades over the portcullis; and the cloaks and hair of the Barbarians were being covered with it as though the earth were rising upon them and desirous of burying them.

Nothing stirred; the eternal mountain seemed still higher to them every morning.
Sometimes flights of birds darted past beneath the blue sky in the freedom of the air.

The men closed their eyes that they might not see them.
At first they felt a buzzing in their ears, their nails grew black, the cold reached to their breasts; they lay upon their sides and expired without a cry.
On the nineteenth day two thousand Asiatics were dead, with fifteen hundred from the Archipelago, eight thousand from Libya, the youngest of the Mercenaries and whole tribes--in all twenty thousand soldiers, or half of the army.
Autaritus, who had only fifty Gauls left, was going to kill himself in order to put an end to this state of things, when he thought he saw a man on the top of the mountain in front of him.
Owing to his elevation this man did not appear taller than a dwarf.
However, Autaritus recognised a shield shaped like a trefoil on his left arm.

"A Carthaginian!" he exclaimed, and immediately throughout the plain, before the portcullis and beneath the rocks, all rose.

The soldier was walking along the edge of the precipice; the Barbarians gazed at him from below.
Spendius picked up the head of an ox; then having formed a diadem with two belts, he fixed it on the horns at the end of a pole in token of pacific intentions.