Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/597

23, 1863.]

“ cursedly hot it is,” muttered the Centurion Septimius, to his lieutenant, grave old Lepidus, as he lay half stripped in the shade of his tent, longing for the Northern wind.

And he might well say so. The place was Syene, the time the month of August, and the almost vertical sun was pouring down his rays with a fierceness such as the Roman officer had never felt before.

Septimius and his cohort had been marched up to Syene to hold in check the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who, servile in general, and little