Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 3.djvu/297

286 felt by one whom the smoke and flame of a burning pile is consuming.

Yet they had chained him to a martyrdom.

The intense heat poured upon bis brain; the scorching light quivered about him; his veins swelled till it seemed, with every fresh pulse of the blood, they must burst; the innumerable winged insects, humming through the summer hours, attracted one by another, settled on his naked; breast, and thrust their antennæ into the bruised skin, and pierced their stings into the opening of the wound. He could not free his hands to brush one of them away. His throat was dry as leather; his tongue was swollen and black; his thirst was unbearable; and at his feet the shallow water stole, to madden him with the murmur of the cool ripples he could not touch. The moments were as hours; the minutes as years. The earth, the air, the sky, were as one vast furnace that enclosed him; where the jagged and beating nerves had been laid open by the hatchet-stroke, the buzzing gnats alit, and clove, and stung, and feasted. Weaklier men would have had the mercy of insensibility;—with him the vital strength, the indestructible force of life within him, kept every nerve and every sense strung to their keenest under the torture.