“You are like a rhinoceros trampling on his dung: you are displaying your own folly! be silent!” And they began to indulge in recriminations respecting the battle of the Ægatian islands.
Hanno accused him of not having come to meet him.
“But that would have left Eryx undefended. You ought to have stood out from the coast; what prevented you? Ah! I forgot! all elephants are afraid of the sea!”
Hamilcar’s followers thought this jest so good that they burst out into loud laughter. The vault rang with it like the beating of tympanums.
Hanno denounced the unworthiness of such an insult; the disease had come upon him from a cold taken at the siege of Hecatompylos, and tears flowed down his face like winter rain on a ruined wall.
Hamilcar resumed:
“If you had loved me as much as him there would be great joy in Carthage now! How many times did I not call upon you! and you always refused me money!”
“We had need of it,” said the chiefs of the Syssitia.
“And when things were desperate with me—we drank mules’ urine and ate the straps of our sandals; when I would fain have had the blades of grass soldiers and made battalions with the rottenness of our dead, you recalled the vessels that I had left!”
“We could not risk everything,” replied Baat-Baal, who possessed gold mines in Darytian Gætulia.