July — Oppressive Heat. 221 



night without a breath in the motionless hot air. The 

 day dawns just like yesterday and the unnumbered 

 days before it. Will there ever be any change, or has 

 the sea forgotten to send her clouds for the refreshment 

 of the land ? Is the sea dry like the rivers ? 



1 Tout est morne, brtilant, tranquille j et la lumiere 

 Est seule en mouvement dans la nature entiere.' 



Suddenly in the fiery sky rolled a black cloud, like 

 volumes of smoke from a mine, and out of the cloud 

 came a ball of fire that struck an ash-tree close to the 

 house and split it, and sent fragments of the wood in 

 every direction like scattered lucifer-matches. Half a 

 second afterwards came a sound, not like thunder with 

 its reverberations, but like a deafening explosion. The 

 next day every leaf on that ash-tree was shrivelled and 

 brown, and the tree died. Then began the usual series 

 of thunderstorms, and every night the landscape was 

 illuminated by the flames of farm-buildings in the dis- 

 tance, and every morning brought news of loss or ruin, 

 of crops destroyed or animals too frightened to move 

 burnt together in their stalls. So after the steady flame 

 of the sunshine comes the far more terrible flame of the 

 unavoidable lightning, and all night long the peasant, 

 awake and anxious, goes watching about his barns. 



