Nomads from the table-lands of Barca, bandits from Cape Pluscus and the promontory of Dernah, from Phazzana and Marmarica, they had crossed the desert, drinking at the brackish wells walled in with camels’ bones; the Zuacces, with their covering of ostrich-feathers, had come on quadrigæ; the Garamantains, masked with black veils, rode behind on their painted mares; others were mounted on asses, onagers, zebras, and buffaloes; while some dragged after them the roofs of their sloop-shaped huts together with their families and idols. There were Ammonians, with limbs wrinkled by the hot water of the springs; Ataranians, who curse the sun; Troglodytes, who bury their dead with laughter beneath branches of trees; and the hideous Auseans, who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachidæ, who eat lice; and the vermilion-painted Gysantians, who eat apes. [Illustration: THEY SPEND THEIR HOLIDAYS AMONG THE DEAD On Saturdays the Jewish women of Tunis visit the cemetery And on Fridays the Moslem women do the same] Because of the stubbornness and incapacity of Hanno, disaster followed on disaster. Tunis was taken by the mutineers, and Carthage was threatened. At length the situation became so critical that Hanno was superseded and the command restored to Hamilcar, who, enlisting the aid of the Numidian sheikhs, drove the mercenaries back into the mountains to the east of Bou-Kornein, eventually hemming them in a narrow pass known as the Defile of the Hatchet. Here forty thousand of them were trapped like wolves, encircled by a ring of unrelenting steel. When their food was exhausted they warded off starvation for a time by eating their dead and their prisoners. But even cannibalism could not save them, and in the end the mutineers, too weak to offer further resistance, were trampled by the ponderous feet of Hamilcar’s war-elephants until all that remained of them was chunks of bloody pulp. * * * * * In the very nature of things, a peace made after so inconclusive a struggle as the First Punic War could not endure, for the Carthaginians still despised the Romans and thought only of obtaining revenge. Thus it came about that only three years after the conclusion of hostilities an expeditionary force under Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain with the avowed purpose of checking Roman penetration of the peninsula and of building up there an empire which should more than compensate Carthage for the insular territories which she had lost.