The Foundation of the City 
and raise, as high as we may, a fold of the 
festooned curtain in whose midst a strange 
sweat, white as snow and airier than the 
down of a wing, is beginning to break over 
the swarm. For the wax that is now being 
born is not like the wax that we know; it 
is immaculate, it has no weight; seeming 
truly to be the soul of the honey, that itself 
is the spirit of flowers. And this motionless 
incantation has called it forth that it may 
serve us, later—in memory of its origin, 
doubtless, wherein it is one with the azure 
sky, and heavy with perfumes of magnifi- 
cence and purity—as the fragrant light of the 
last of our altars. 
Le: 
To follow the various phases of the 
secretion and employment of wax by a 
swarm that is beginning to build, is a 
matter of very great difficulty. All comes 
to pass in the blackest depths of the crowd, 
whose agglomeration, growing denser and 
denser, produces the temperature needful 
for this exudation, which is the privi- 
lege of the youngest bees. Huber, who 
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