They took up their march toward the camp. The troops who had rushed to the entrance of the port slowly returned, while the ship fast dropped the land, spreading her glowing sails. On the Acropolis the smoke had dissipated, leaving only a few light clouds floating in the breeze. From afar one could guess the disappointment felt in the city by the unexpected flight of the Roman ship. With her seemed to vanish the last hope of the besieged. Hannibal's troops, as they retired, commented on the scene at the entrance to the port between their chief and the envoys from Rome. They did not understand the words which had been exchanged; but the energetic accent of the Roman as he spoke to Hannibal seemed to them a threat. Some, pretending that they had understood the ambassador, repeated an imaginary discourse in which the threat was made in the name of Rome to cut the throats of the whole army and to stretch Hannibal on a cross. They repeated these threats, each swelling them with inventions of his own, and when the troops met other detachments on the Road of the Serpent or in different parts of the valley, all declared they had seen the chains which the Roman legates displayed from the ship, and in which they expected to take their chieftain prisoner, and a howl of rage arose from the hosts of Hannibal.
The African was flattered at the flood-tide of indignation surging around him. The soldiers, barring his way, acclaimed him with greater enthusiasm; he heard voices in every tongue crying death to Rome, calling upon the chieftain to make the final assault upon the city, to take possession of it before the ambassadors should reach Carthage and plot the downfall of the youthful hero.
"Take care of yourself, Hannibal!" said an old Celtiberian planting himself before his horse. "Your enemies in Carthage, Hanno's faction, will unite with Rome to work your ruin."
"The people love me," said the chieftain, arrogantly. "Before the Carthaginian Senate hears the Romans, Saguntum will be ours, and the Carthaginians will acclaim our triumph."
With saddened heart Actæon beheld the desolation of the fields which used to be so joyous and so fertile. There were no other ships in the port but men-of-war from New Carthage. The seamen slept in the fane of Aphrodite after having rifled the temple of its valuables. The warehouses had been pillaged and destroyed; the wharves covered with filth; in the fields not a vestige of the ancient villas remained. The ferocity of the barbarian tribes from the interior, their hatred for the Greeks of the coast, had incited them to even tear up the multicolor pavements and to scatter the fragments. The whole valley was an immense, desolated plain. Not a tree was standing. To combat the cold of winter they had felled the groves of fig trees, the broad plantations of olives, the stocks of the grapevines of the vineyards, destroying even the houses to warm themselves with the rafters from the roofs. Nothing remained standing but ruined walls and low shrubbery. A fungoid vegetation which grew rapidly, fertilized by bodies of men and animals, extended over the valley, obliterating the ancient roads, creeping up the ruins, and choking the beds of the streams which, their irrigating ditches broken, scattered their waters until the low fields were converted into ponds.
It was the devastating work of a continually swelling army composed of a hundred and eighty thousand men and of many thousands of horses. In a short time they had devoured the Saguntine domain. The soldiers after destroying all that was not of immediate use, extended their rapacity to surrounding zones, constantly broadening their radius of destruction as the siege was prolonged.
Supplies now came from a distance of many days' journey; sent by remote tribes in the hope of a reward of booty which Hannibal knew how to instill into their minds, telling them of the riches of Saguntum. The elephants had been sent to New Carthage some months before, as they were useless in the siege and difficult to maintain in this devastated region.
Over the domain flew crows in undulating black clouds. From the thicket rose the stench of rotting horses and mules. By the roadsides, their members pinned to the ground by rocks, lay the bodies of barbarians put to death because of hopeless wounds, and whose bodies their compatriots, according to the customs of their race, left abandoned to the birds of prey. The immense agglomeration had vitiated the atmosphere of the valley. They lived in the open, and yet, the filth of the multitude, and the vapors of death, seemed disseminated between the mountains and the sea as a heavy atmosphere replete with sickness and death.
Actæon, coming from a distance, was the more sensitive to this stench of the camp, and he thought of the beleaguered people with sadness. Looking toward the city he guessed the horrors hidden behind those reddish walls after a resistance of seven months.
They approached the camp. The Greek saw that this concentration of military forces had assumed the aspect of a permanent city. Few tents of canvas or of skins were left. The winter, which now was drawing to a close, had compelled the besiegers to construct stone huts with thatched roofs, and wooden houses which looked like towers and served as supports to the earthworks thrown up roundabout the camp.