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Updated: June 6, 2025
Up the slope toiled and nodded the pack-animals, the little burros going easily where the horses labored. Their packs, like the humps of camels, bobbed from side to side. Stones rattled down; the heat-waves wavered black; the dust puffed up and sailed. The sky was a pale blue, like heated steel, except where dark clouds peeped over the mountain crests.
I stood beneath the familiar cashew trees, which had yielded for me so bountifully of their crops of blossoms and hummingbirds, of fruit and of tanagers, and looked out toward the distant jungle, which trembled through the expanse of palpitating heat-waves; and I knew how a hermit crab feels when its home pinches, or is out of gear with the world.
The day passed slowly, and it was hot. The heat-waves rose in dark, wavering lines and veils from the valley. The wind blew almost a gale. Thin, curling sheets of sand blew up over the crests of the slopes, and the sound it made was a soft, silken rustling, very low. The sky was a steely blue above and copper close over the distant walls.
It was thus in the instance of the tract bounded by the North and South Downs, which were formerly entirely covered by chalk, and in the instance of the uprising of the carboniferous limestone between the coal-fields of Lancashire, Staffordshire, and Derbyshire. How the heat-waves act, and the laws, if any, which they obey in their subterranean movements, we are unable to judge.
The day passed slowly, and it was hot. The heat-waves rose in dark, wavering lines and veils from the valley. The wind blew almost a gale. Thin, curling sheets of sand blew up over the crests of the slopes, and the sound it made was a soft, silken rustling, very low. The sky was a steely blue above and copper close over the distant walls.
We ran up the Via Vecchietta without disturbance or alarm, and reached the church of San Lorenzo. We entered the cloister, which breathed the full summer, late as it was in the year. Bees hummed about the tree; the glossy leaves of the great magnolia seemed to radiate heat and glitter; above us the sky was of almost midsummer whiteness, and I could see the heat-waves flicker above the dome.
The grass, especially, gives out these heat-waves very quickly, because the blades, being very thin, are almost all surface. In consequence of this they part with their heat more quickly than they can draw it up from the ground, and become cold.
The steady swing of the grasshopper's song like the wavering hum of a telegraph pole pitched in a high, shrill key came through the hot air on all sides, until it seemed to spring from the ground in answer to the heat-rays that beat upon it a response from the great dusty parched crust to the ceaseless throb of the heat-waves pulsing and splashing upon it, like the ripple and rattle of shingle stones at the rush of retreating tides.
In the noonday silence no cricket chirped nor locust raised its lorn monotone; the tree shadows mottled the road with blue, and the level fields seemed to pant out a dazzling breath, the transparent "heat-waves" that danced above the low corn and green wheat. He was stooping very much as they walked; he wanted to be told that he could look at her for a thousand years.
He had been up late the night before at a poker game. His head fell forward with a jerk. Aroused by the shock, he glanced drowsily about him. Heat-waves danced before the open window. Deep silence hung over his little world. Again his eyelids closed; his head dropped, and slowly he slipped into sleep. Tragedy was approaching him now, but not along the wire.
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