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Updated: June 23, 2025
Yonder, as if slumbering under a blue veil, lay the Calabrian coast, while nearer and more distant, but always noiselessly, ships and boats, with gently swelling sails, glided over the water. Even the cicadas seemed to sleep, and everything around was as still, as horribly still, as if the breath of the world, blooming and sparkling about her, was ready to fail.
Yonder, as if slumbering under a blue veil, lay the Calabrian coast, while nearer and more distant, but always noiselessly, ships and boats, with gently swelling sails, glided over the water. Even the cicadas seemed to sleep, and everything around was as still, as horribly still, as if the breath of the world, blooming and sparkling about her, was ready to fail.
Now and again a stick cracked in the fires, and the cicadas cried aloud in the tree stems; but except where the solitary paced up and down before the little flat-topped tree in front of the captain's tent, not a creature stirred in the whole camp; and the snores of the trooper under the bushes might be heard half across the camp. The intense midday heat had settled down.
They killed everything that did not pay for its eating. They shot the blackbirds, because they pecked the fruit; and killed the hedgehogs, lest they should suck the cows; they poisoned the crickets for eating the crumbs in the kitchen; and smothered the cicadas, which used to sing all summer in the lime trees.
There was a summer warmth in the air; the little forest birds came to the spring and preened their feathers in the pale sunshine. Two cicadas, high in the tree-tops, droned an endless harmony; hemlock cones dropped at intervals on the dead leaves.
After eleven years he died in the middle of a May night, when the scent of the syringa hung upon the window-sill and a breeze wafted in the shrillings of the frogs and cicadas outside. Roxanne awoke at two, and realized with a start she was alone in the house at last.
My clothes were quite wet with the dew. The birds were astir, the cicadas had begun their music, and the Urania Leilus, a strange and beautiful tailed and gilded moth, whose habits are those of a butterfly, commenced to fly in flocks over the tree- tops. Raimundo exclaimed "Clareia o dia!" "The day brightens!"
Possibly they had been choked with soot, or had fallen a prey to London cats; but my own theory is that they succumbed to the after-effects of a rough Channel passage, to which, of course, they would not have been accustomed. Anyhow, for the first time in the history of the world, the purlieus of Grosvenor Square rang with the shrill chirping of cicadas for twenty-four hours on end.
Shortly after hatching, the young cicadas leap for the ground, and burrowing beneath the surface, remain for a period varying from three to seventeen years, according to the species, to complete their transformations. Now the habits of my little tree-hopper are somewhat modelled after its big cousin.
If we possessed any sense of grim, sardonic humor, we would appreciate how ridiculous is the life we lead, how utterly absurd is our waste of time, our dissipation of the few days and hours vouchsafed us. We are just so many cicadas drumming out the hours and disappearing.
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