Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/198

 sitting in the twilight of the tombs, studying the figures on the walls till they seemed alive to her, and thinking, not clearly, but dreamily; as the ox thinks in the meadow-heats of noon, as the deer thinks, and the dog, and the great eagle, when he sways on an oak-bough, and looks down through ten fathom deep of azure air and mist of sunbeam in the gorge below.

The summer was very hot and full of mist and of disease as summer on those shores is always; the moorland grew full of dangerous gases, the broad oak foliage sicklied and looked parched; the sea was grey and hazy with the horrible haze of heat; pestilential vapours rose in steam from the marshes; clouds hung on the windless air that were clouds, not of rain, but of mosquitoes; all animal life grew feeble, languid and inert; the time was come for the curse of Maremma, the midsummer that elsewhere is the year's crown of rejoicing.

In this oppressive weather, when the heavens looked a vault of copper, and the sea a breathless noxious oily plain, and all the marshes and the moors were as though a destroying wind of fire had passed over and