Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/156

 fresh water would always manage to meet, all engineers notwithstanding, and that they would repent ever having meddled with the ways of God and the course of the Ombrone, and that he for his part should be glad to see the houses of the Pescaja sink down into the swamp, for he liked not such meddling with the shape of the earth and the run of the rivers; and he expected heaven's vengeance yet.

Musa listened inattentively, though his views were her own, for she too hated 'the meddling' with the streams and the waves, the dykes and the locks that shut out the sea, the drainage that killed the little fish and the reeds and the brilliant marsh flora, and the men who would fain make a dry place, and build a factory, or a foundry, where the bulrushes now nodded to their own reflection in the water and the birds from the north found food and shelter.

Almost as quickly as a storm-gull could have flown there, the felucca sailed over the ten odd miles that part Telamone from Monte Argentaro, and, drawing so little water, ran easily in over the sandy bottom and through the submerged fields of algæ into the stagno, and lay to underneath the huge block of the Pelasgic sea-wall.