Finding themselves huddled together in a small space, filled with smoke from the lamps and with vapors from the food, they felt the necessity of communicating with each other, and between mouthfuls, each spoke to his neighbor, paying no heed to difference of idiom, making themselves understood finally by a language composed more of gestures than of words. A Carthaginian was telling a Greek about his last voyage to the islands of the Great Sea, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, through a gray body of water covered with fog, until they arrived at an abrupt coast known only to the pilots of his country, where tin was found. Farther down the bench a negro, with grotesque mimicry, was describing to a couple of Celtiberians an excursion down the Red Sea, until they reached mysterious shores, deserted by day, but covered by night with moving fires and inhabited by hairy men as agile as monkeys, the skins of some of whom they stuffed with straw and carried to the temples of Egypt to offer to the gods. The older Roman soldiers, paying no attention, in their insolence as conquerors, to the humiliated Carthaginians who were listening, told of their great victory on the Ægates islands which drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily, ending the first Punic War. The Iberian shepherds mixed in among the navigators wished to off-set the effect of these maritime adventures, and they bragged of the horses belonging to their tribe, and of their marvelous swiftness, while a little Greek, lively and keen, in order to overwhelm the barbarians and to demonstrate the superiority of his race, began to declaim fragments of some ode learned in the port of Piræus, or he intoned a lyric poem, slow and sweet, which was lost amid the noise of conversation, of crunching jaws, and of clattering plates.