"Ah, young man," yawned out Hannibal, "you should put your fine speeches in Ionian; the lady does not understand you."
The lady, however, bent her head gracefully, and raised a laugh by saying in good Phœnician that she perfectly understood what had passed.
"Trust a woman for understanding a compliment," was Hannibal's remark.
"I should like to see the effect," said Himilco, "of one of Hanno's pretty speeches upon Gisgo's wife; her Celtic dialect is something like the croaking of Bodmilcar's ravens."
It was now getting dark, and as he spoke, Himilco moved off to his post upon the prow, and I took up my watch upon the stern. All that night, and all the following day, the wind freshened till it blew a gale; being all in our favour, its violence caused me no alarm, but well-nigh all on board, conscious of being far away from land, and beholding nothing but sea and sky, were filled with terror; and as the ship at one moment was carried high upon the crests of the enormous waves, and at another was sunk low in what seemed an unfathomable abyss, they became almost paralysed with alarm; they lost their appetites entirely, and were incessant in their invocations to their gods. The gale next night increased to a hurricane, and on the morning shifted to the south, driving us to the north at the rate of 1800 stadia in a day.
Happily, although our ships were thus flying over the sea, they kept well together. Towards evening the wind dropped a little, and on the morning of the fourth day it was comparatively calm; the sky was very clear, and, to our vast delight, the man on watch at the top of the mast announced that land was in sight. I joined Himilco on the prow, and both of us could plainly distinguish in the sunlight the peaks of some snow-capped mountains. By the afternoon the view of land was plain to every one on board, and before the stars had risen, we were skirting a coast that seemed so rocky as to be inaccessible.
It was long past midnight before we could discover any anchorage at all; at last we found a small exposed bay where a river coursing along a bottom of white sand entered the sea. Towards the east, masses of thick woods could be made out, with snowy peaks of higher ridges rising up behind them. The Cabiros was hauled up on shore close to the river's mouth, and, the water in the bay being found sufficiently deep, the two galleys were moored to some of the great boulder-stones upon the beach. The coast was quite desolate, and there was no sign of human habitation.