while streets passed through their yawning apertures like rivers beneath
bridges.

The hill of the Acropolis, in the centre of Byrsa, was hidden beneath a
disordered array of monuments. There were temples with wreathed columns
bearing bronze capitals and metal chains, cones of dry stones with bands
of azure, copper cupolas, marble architraves, Babylonian buttresses,
obelisks poised on their points like inverted torches. Peristyles
reached to pediments; volutes were displayed through colonnades; granite
walls supported tile partitions; the whole mounting, half-hidden, the
one above the other in a marvellous and incomprehensible fashion. In it
might be felt the succession of the ages, and, as it were, the memorials
of forgotten fatherlands.

Behind the Acropolis the Mappalian road, which was lined with tombs,
extended through red lands in a straight line from the shore to the
catacombs; then spacious dwellings occurred at intervals in the gardens,
and this third quarter, Megara, which was the new town, reached as far
as the edge of the cliff, where rose a giant pharos that blazed forth
every night.

In this fashion was Carthage displayed before the soldiers quartered in
the plain.

They could recognise the markets and crossways in the distance, and
disputed with one another as to the sites of the temples. Khamon's,
fronting the Syssitia, had golden tiles; Melkarth, to the left of
Eschmoun, had branches of coral on its roofing; beyond, Tanith's copper
cupola swelled among the palm trees; the dark Moloch was below
the cisterns, in the direction of the pharos. At the angles of the