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MRAP Directory 13
Page 06
That day we went over eleven successive hill ranges and crossed as many little streamlets between them. My men were terribly downhearted. We had with us a Mauser and two hundred cartridges, but although we did nothing all day long but look for something to kill we never heard a sound of a living animal. Only one day at the beginning of our fast did I see a big _mutum_--larger than a big turkey. The bird had never seen a human being, and sat placidly perched on the branch of a tree, looking at us with curiosity, singing gaily. I tried to fire with the Mauser at the bird, which was only about seven or eight metres away, but cartridge after cartridge missed fire. I certainly spent not less than twenty minutes constantly replenishing the magazine, and not a single cartridge went off. They had evidently absorbed so much moisture on our many accidents in the river and in the heavy rain-storms we had had of late, that they had become useless.
The twelfth, the Purification, is absurdly bad, but I do not know whether the expression of strong personal dislike to the Virgin which the High Priest wears is intended as prophetic, or whether it is the result of incompetence, or whether it is merely a smile gone wrong in the baking. It is amusing to find Marocco, who has not been strict about archaeological accuracy hitherto, complain here that there is an anachronism, inasmuch as some young ecclesiastics are dressed as they would be at present, and one of them actually carries a wax candle. This is not as it should be; in works like those at Oropa, where implicit reliance is justly placed on the earnest endeavours that have been so successfully made to thoroughly and carefully and patiently ensure the accuracy of the minutest details, it is a pity that even a single error should have escaped detection; this, however, has most unfortunately happened here, and Marocco feels it his duty to put us on our guard. He explains that the mistake arose from the sculptor's having taken both his general arrangement and his details from some picture of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, when the value of the strictest historical accuracy was not yet so fully understood.
All the efforts of the Romans to dislodge him were unsuccessful; and he only quitted Hercte in order to seize Eryx, a town situated upon the mountain of this name, and only six miles from Drepanum. This position he held for two years longer; and the Romans, despairing of driving the Carthaginians out of Sicily so long as they were masters of the sea, resolved to build another fleet. In B.C. 242 the Consul Lutatius Catulus put to sea with a fleet of 200 ships, and in the following year he gained a decisive victory over the Carthaginian fleet, commanded by Hanno, off the group of islands called the AEgates.
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