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With small steps, she carried the fumigant closely by all four walls, which were covered by a huge number of flies and gnats. "Get yourself away from there, you scoundrels," she said, "you bloodsuckers, worse than lawyers and doctors! Would you also like to eat figs before bedtime and enjoy a sip of Cypriot wine?
It lay low, like a bog with the land sloping down to it on all sides, and all water running into it. Its luminous mist seemed to reach to the uttermost borders of the land; everything came this way. Large dragon-flies hovered over the bog in metallic splendor; gnats danced above it like careless shadows.
'The hideous, gray, eight-legged spider! I exclaimed to myself, when I raised my arms and saw my shadow on the sunlit ground. 'The spider! I thought, when I shook the distaff to draw threads from the flax in leisure hours. 'Your image! I said, when I saw spiders hanging in dusty corners, and catching flies and gnats. All these things made me a horror to myself.
Knee deep in yellow swamp water the squire squatted, with his shotgun cocked and loaded and ready, waiting to kill the bird that now typified for him guilt and danger and an abiding great fear. Gnats plagued him and about him frogs croaked. Almost overhead a log-cock clung lengthwise to a snag, watching him.
He slept a long time, and when he awoke he found himself in the most beautiful bed that could be, such as he had never seen the like of in his father's house, and it was in the prettiest chamber in the world, and his servant was beside him with a fan to keep away the flies and gnats.
They looked like men, but were better proportioned: they called themselves elves, and had delicate clothes on, of flower leaves trimmed with the wings of flies and gnats, which had a very good appearance.
They are simuliums of the family Nemocera of the system of Latreille. Their sting is as painful as that of the genus Stomox. It leaves a little reddish brown spot, which is extravased and coagulated blood, where their proboscis has pierced the skin. An hour before sunset a species of small gnats, called tempraneros,* because they appear also at sunrise, take the place of the mosquitos.
Take notice that this "paladin" is a macaroni-seller, strongly suspected of trying to hoodwink the French courts. Amid the awful heat which penetrated the windows, the doors, even the sun-baked walls, we had to listen to, read, and compare documents. Gnats of a ferocious kind, hatched by thousands in the hangings of this hothouse, flew around our perspiring heads.
They were quite tiny, and their horses were about the size of flies. They had hunting falcons and dogs about as large as gnats and fleas. They came to his bed in the corner of the room, and there they held a great hunt, with bows and arrows: one could see it all quite plainly. They caught a tremendous quantity of birds and game, and all this game was no larger than little grains of rice.
The bearded bulrushes were round them; the light played on the broad leaves of the docks and the red spikes of great beds of willow-herb; the water reflected the glowing sky, and close to its surface numbers of newly-come swallows whirled and dipped and darted, chasing gnats, whilst near at hand on a spray a little woodlark sang. The scene was fair, peaceful, full of placid and tender loveliness.