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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300 THE MIRACLES OF ANTICHRIST ’
that on the bottom of the quarry grow more magnifi.
cent flowers than in a conservatory. There it is no
longer Sicily; it is India.
In the quarry are mandarin trees, so yellow with
fruit that they look like gigantic sun-flowers; the
camellias are as big as tambourines; and on the
ground between the trees lie masses of magnificent
figs and downy peaches embedded in fallen
rose-leaves.
One evening Falco is sitting alone in the quarry.
Falco is busy making a wreath, and he has beside
him a mass of flowers. The string he is using is as
thick as a rope; he holds his foot on the ball so
that it shall not roll away from him. He wears
spectacles, which continually slip too far down his
hooked nose.
Falco is swearing horribly, for his hands are stiff
and callous from incessantly handling a gun, and
cannot readily hold flowers. The fingers squeeze
them together like steel tongs. Falco swears because
the lilies and anemones fall into little pieces if he
merely looks at them.
Falco sits in his leather breeches and in the long,
buttoned-up coat, buried in flowers like a saint on a
feast-day. Biagio and his nephew, Passafiore, have
gathered them for him. They have piled up in
front of him an Etna of the most beautiful flowers of
the quarry. Falco can choose among lilies and
cactus-flowers and roses and pelargoniums. He
roars at the flowers that he will trample them to
dust under his leather sandals if they do not submit
themselves to his will.
Never before has Falco Falcone had to do with
flowers. In the whole course of his life he has never
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