“Swear to execute all my commands and to follow me like a shadow!”
Then Matho, raising his arm towards the planet of Chabar, exclaimed:
“By Tanith, I swear!”
Spendius resumed:
“To-morrow after sunset you will wait for me at the foot of the aqueduct between the ninth and tenth arcades. Bring with you an iron pick, a crestless helmet, and leathern sandals.”
The aqueduct of which he spoke crossed the entire isthmus obliquely,—a considerable work, afterwards enlarged by the Romans. In spite of her disdain of other nations, Carthage had awkwardly borrowed this novel invention from them, just as Rome herself had built Punic galleys; and five rows of superposed arches, of a dumpy kind of architecture, with buttresses at their foot and lions’ heads at the top, reached to the western part of the Acropolis, where they sank beneath the town to incline what was nearly a river into the cisterns of Megara.
Spendius met Matho here at the hour agreed upon. He fastened a sort of harpoon to the end of a cord and whirled it rapidly like a sling; the iron instrument caught fast, and they began to climb up the wall, the one after the other.
But when they had ascended to the first story the cramp fell back every time that they threw it, and in order to discover some fissure they had to walk along the edge of the cornice. At every row of arches they found that it became narrower. Then the cord relaxed. Several times it nearly broke.
At last they reached the upper platform. Spendius stooped down from time to time to feel the stones with his hand.
“Here it is,” he said; “let us begin!” And leaning on the pick which Matho had brought they succeeded in dislodging one of the flagstones.