第96章

An individual sacrifice was necessary, a perfectly voluntary oblation, which was considered as carrying the others along with it.But no one had appeared up to the present, and the seven passages leading from the barriers to the colossus were completely empty.Then the priests, to encourage the people, drew bodkins from their girdles and gashed their faces.The Devotees, who were stretched on the ground outside, were brought within the enclosure.A bundle of horrible irons was thrown to them, and each chose his own torture.They drove in spits between their breasts; they split their cheeks; they put crowns of thorns upon their heads; then they twined their arms together, and surrounded the children in another large circle which widened and contracted in turns.They reached to the balustrade, they threw themselves back again, and then began once more, attracting the crowd to them by the dizziness of their motion with its accompanying blood and shrieks.

By degrees people came into the end of the passages; they flung into the flames pearls, gold vases, cups, torches, all their wealth; the offerings became constantly more numerous and more splendid.At last a man who tottered, a man pale and hideous with terror, thrust forward a child; then a little black mass was seen between the hands of the colossus, and sank into the dark opening.The priests bent over the edge of the great flagstone,--and a new song burst forth celebrating the joys of death and of new birth into eternity.

The children ascended slowly, and as the smoke formed lofty eddies as it escaped, they seemed at a distance to disappear in a cloud.Not one stirred.Their wrists and ankles were tied, and the dark drapery prevented them from seeing anything and from being recognised.

Hamilcar, in a red cloak, like the priests of Moloch, was beside the Baal, standing upright in front of the great toe of its right foot.

When the fourteenth child was brought every one could see him make a great gesture of horror.But he soon resumed his former attitude, folded his arms, and looked upon the ground.The high pontiff stood on the other side of the statue as motionless as he.His head, laden with an Assyrian mitre, was bent, and he was watching the gold plate on his breast; it was covered with fatidical stones, and the flame mirrored in it formed irisated lights.He grew pale and dismayed.Hamilcar bent his brow; and they were both so near the funeral-pile that the hems of their cloaks brushed it as they rose from time to time.

The brazen arms were working more quickly.They paused no longer.

Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! eat!"and the priests of Proserpine, complying through terror with the needs of Carthage, muttered the Eleusinian formula: "Pour out rain! bring forth!"The victims, when scarcely at the edge of the opening, disappeared like a drop of water on a red-hot plate, and white smoke rose amid the great scarlet colour.

Nevertheless, the appetite of the god was not appeased.He ever wished for more.In order to furnish him with a larger supply, the victims were piled up on his hands with a big chain above them which kept them in their place.Some devout persons had at the beginning wished to count them, to see whether their number corresponded with the days of the solar year; but others were brought, and it was impossible to distinguish them in the giddy motion of the horrible arms.This lasted for a long, indefinite time until the evening.Then the partitions inside assumed a darker glow, and burning flesh could be seen.Some even believed that they could descry hair, limbs, and whole bodies.

Night fell; clouds accumulated above the Baal.The funeral-pile, which was flameless now, formed a pyramid of coals up to his knees;completely red like a giant covered with blood, he looked, with his head thrown back, as though he were staggering beneath the weight of his intoxication.

In proportion as the priests made haste, the frenzy of the people increased; as the number of the victims was diminishing, some cried out to spare them, others that still more were needful.The walls, with their burden of people, seemed to be giving way beneath the howlings of terror and mystic voluptuousness.Then the faithful came into the passages, dragging their children, who clung to them; and they beat them in order to make them let go, and handed them over to the men in red.The instrument-players sometimes stopped through exhaustion; then the cries of the mothers might be heard, and the frizzling of the fat as it fell upon the coals.The henbane-drinkers crawled on all fours around the colossus, roaring like tigers; the Yidonim vaticinated, the Devotees sang with their cloven lips; the trellis-work had been broken through, all wished for a share in the sacrifice;--and fathers, whose children had died previously, cast their effigies, their playthings, their preserved bones into the fire.

Some who had knives rushed upon the rest.They slaughtered one another.The hierodules took the fallen ashes at the edge of the flagstone in bronze fans, and cast them into the air that the sacrifice might be scattered over the town and even to the region of the stars.

The loud noise and great light had attracted the Barbarians to the foot of the walls; they clung to the wreck of the helepolis to have a better view, and gazed open-mouthed in horror.