Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/223

 wheels turned, the springless waggon rolled upon its road.

The old man and one other came with her; the rest of the men stayed to guard the tomb and hew out the sculptures in the rock.

The way they went was not towards santa Tarsilla, but southward to the marshes which, where the moors sloped to the south, replaced it and made all the earth like a sponge, now white with cotton-grass and billowy water-reeds.

Turning her burning eyes from side to side, she saw the places she had roamed over, hunting for cactus-fruit, and the wild prickly pear, and the blue bilberries of the thickets. She saw the little pools where she had splashed and bathed; the fringes of cane where reluctant she had searched for the eggs of the fluttering water-hen; she saw the broad blue sky above her head, a green ibis on its voyage was the only speck upon it; it flew high above her, straight above her, and winged its wise way eastward, to the lands of sunrise. She envied it.

She lay face upward on the bottom of the waggon, her hands tied so that she could not brush away a gnat or fly. The