The sounds followed one another hurried and deep, like the buzzing of bees, and with increasing sonorousness floated away into the night with the complaining of the waves, and the rustling of the great trees on the summit of the Acropolis.
“Hush!” cried Salammbô.
“What ails you, mistress? The blowing of the breeze, the passing of a cloud, everything disquiets you just now!”
“I do not know,” she said.
“You are wearied with too long prayers!”
“Oh! Tanaach, I would fain be dissolved in them like a flower in wine!”
“Perhaps it is the smoke of your perfumes?”
“No!” said Salammbô; “the spirit of the gods dwells in fragrant odours.”
Then the slave spoke to her of her father. It was thought that he had gone towards the amber country, behind the pillars of Melkarth. “But if he does not return,” she said, “you must nevertheless, since it was his will, choose a husband among the sons of the Ancients, and then your grief will pass away in a man’s arms.”
“Why?” asked the young girl. All those that she had seen had horrified her with their fallow-deer laughter and their coarse limbs.