Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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THE SIROCCO
129
the famine, the heavy, weakening wind from the
Sahara came over from Africa, and brought with it
dust and exhalations that darkened the sky.
Never, as long as that autumn lasted, was there a
fresh mountain breeze. The baleful Sirocco blew
incessantly.
Sometimes it came dry and heavy with sand, and
so hot that they had to shut doors and windows, and
keep in their rooms, not to faint away.
But oftener it came warm and damp and
enervating. And the people felt no rest; trouble left them
neither by day nor by night, and cares piled upon
them like snow-drifts on the high mountains.
And the restlessness reached Donna Micaela as
she sat and watched with her old husband, Don
Ferrante.
During that autumn she never heard any one laugh,
nor heard a song. People crept by one another, so
full of anger and despair that they were almost
choked. And she said to herself that they were
certainly dreaming of an insurrection. She saw
that they had to revolt. It would help no one, but
they had no other resource.
In the beginning of the autumn, sitting on her
balcony, she heard the people talk in the street.
They always talked of the famine: We have blight
in wheat and wine; there is a crisis in sulphur and
oranges; all Sicily’s yellow gold has failed. How
shall we live?
And Donna Micaela understood that it was terrible.
Wheat, wine, oranges, and sulphur, all their yellow
gold!
She began to understand, too, that the misery
was greater than men could bear long, and she
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