Daughter of Hamilcar of Carthage, Salammbo grows up in a time of such peril that she is raised in solitary seclusion; her only companions are an aged nurse and the eunuch who is chief priest in the temple of Tanit. She would like to become a “devotee,” but Hamilcar designs a politically profitable marriage for her, and forbids her initiation into the inner mysteries of the cult (which would involve ritual defloration, though Flaubert does not mention this fact). She had grown up in abstinence, in fastings and purifications, always surrounded by exquisite and solemn things, her body saturated with perfumes and her soul with prayers.... Of obscene symbols she knew nothing ... (she) worshipped the Goddess in her sidereal aspect. She says to the priest: It is a spirit that drives me to this love of mine.... [The other gods] are all too far away, too high, too insensible; while She—I feel her as a part of my life, she fills my soul.... I am devoured with eagerness to see her body. This may seem suggestive, but she denies physical interest when under the fires of spring and the full moon, she cries out to her nurse: Sometimes gusts of heat seem to rise from the depths of my being.... Voices call me ... fire rises in my breast; it stifles me, I feel that I am dying ... it is a caress folding about me and I feel crushed.... Oh! that I might lose myself in the night mists ... that I could _leave my body_ [author’s italics] and be but a breath, a ray, then float up to thee, O Mother [Tanit].[32] Her nurse, wise in the signs of physical ripening, does not take this for religious ecstasy. “‘You must choose a husband from the sons of the Elders, since it was [your father’s] wish,’ she says. ‘Your sorrow will vanish in the arms of a man.’ ‘Why?’ asked the young girl. All the men she had seen had horrified her with their wild bestial laughter and their coarse limbs.”[33] These men are her father’s barbarian mercenaries, and Flaubert’s picture of their drunken orgy after victory would revolt a stronger spirit than that of a sheltered girl. Her first direct encounter is with Matho the Libyan, “his great mouth agape, his necklet of silver moons tangled in the hairs on his chest.” Crazed with passion for her, he steals the Zaimph [sacred veil of Tanit] from the temple as a love charm, breaks into Salammbo’s chambers at midnight, and attempts to ravish and abduct her. Naturally terrified, she summons aid in time to save herself, but she does not understand what it is he wants of her. Later she tells him: “Your words I did not understand, but I knew you wished to drag me toward something horrible, to the bottom of some abyss....”[34]