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Everything seemed to go wrong that year. After the squalls and mists, the sky was covered with a white expanse of heat, like plates of sheet iron. In two days, without transition, a torrid heat, an atmosphere of frightful heaviness, succeeded the damp cold of foggy days and the streaming of the rains.

The mist still hovered on the valleys, and concealed a part of the landscape from their view; and the occasional sound of the fall of water was mingled with the twittering and chirping of the birds, as they flew from spray to spray. The air was fresh, even to keenness, and any one suddenly wafted to the scene would little have imagined that he was under the torrid zone.

Could he spring on them as they left the mountain chain and detain them in this torrid wilderness, nature might do even more than the Numidian arms to secure a victory; meanwhile measures might be taken to close the passage to the river, and to bring up fresh forces from the east to block the desired route while the ambushed army was harassed by attacks from the flank and rear.

M. Goldberry had seen the negroes in Africa, in the islands of Bunck and Los Idolos, eat an earth of which he had himself eaten, without being incommoded by it, and which also was a white and friable steatite. These examples of earth-eating in the torrid zone appear very strange.

"Thou glorious mirror, in all time, Calm or convulsed in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark heaving boundless, endless, and sublime, The image of Eternity the throne Of the Invisible."

The discovery and conquest of the Black nations, that might dwell beneath the torrid zone, could not tempt the rational ambition of Genseric; but he cast his eyes towards the sea; he resolved to create a naval power, and his bold resolution was executed with steady and active perseverance.

All through the torrid day the disquieting impulse warned her to be up and on her way just as the birds feel the urge of an irresistible voice to desert the land of their birth and to seek a foreign clime as the change of the season draws near, and, heeding it, run the gauntlet of long migrations through uncharted space.

During the final fifteen miles, in which is made an ascent of more than six thousand feet, one has the curious experience of passing, in a single hour, from the torrid to the temperate zone. In the earlier stages of the ascent the road zigzags upward through magnificent tropical forests, where troops of huge gray apes chatter in the upper branches and grass-green parrots flash from tree to tree.

They are not those alone of the strictly tropical level, but, owing to the height above the sea, the floral wealth of the temperate zone is embosomed in the torrid region itself, and adds the charm of an almost magical diversity to the intrinsic splendors of the scene. See small objects flitting about from flower to flower.

Custis had no insight nor variability of charity; her mind, bounded by the municipal republic of Baltimore, which esteems itself the world, particularly among its mercantile aristocracy, who live like the old Venetian nobility among their flat lagoons, and do commerce chiefly with the Turk in the more torrid and instinctive Indies and South.