Fabius said they would travel north along the coast roads. He wanted to see again where the Hatti had first landed, he said – and where they were landing still, according to his scouts – and then they would come upon the city the Hatti were building on African soil. And, he told Nelo, he wanted his artist to see it too, for even the landing was an exercise on a scale never before seen in the history of the world.

The march was easy. The weather was cold but calm, and the breeze fluctuated between a wash off the sea and a drier breath from the interior. The little traffic on the road cleared at the advance of Fabius’ party under its banner; there wasn’t much, a few mean carts pulled by skinny donkeys or bullocks. The road was lined by farms, but the ground was parched and lifeless. And as they passed the people would come out and run alongside, skinny wretches in rags, hands out, begging. Fabius allowed his troops to give them bits of silver, but none of the party’s own rations. This was the breadbasket of the city, Nelo reminded himself. These starving beggars were supposed to be supplying Carthage with its food, not the other way around.

Then the wind shifted again, coming from the south, whipping up grains of hard sand. The soldiers muttered complaints and covered their faces with their cloaks. Nelo had heard the soldiers talk of vast empty deserts to the south, nothing but bone-dry sand. If the country kept drying out, maybe the desert would wash up and cover Carthage itself.

The march was made in good order, the overnight camps efficiently set up and struck. And on the third day out of Carthage, they came upon the Hatti’s landing site.

Guided by scouts, Fabius took a small group forward to a headland, for a first view. Nelo went with them, his pouch at his side. From the headland the view to the north opened up, a vista of shore and sea. They were close to a river estuary, a sprawl of mudflats and braided waterways. A Carthaginian city called Utica lay a little way up the river; it had been abandoned and burned on the approach of the Hatti. Before the landing there had only been a scatter of fishing villages here, all now obliterated in the battle at the first landing site. Now the country had been transformed.