The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 289: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXI THE JUNGLE THE scene changes to a far distant country. In a cloud- less sky the noonday sun was set like a huge ball of fire, its torrid beams pouring down with a sultriness from which it would almost appear that every living thing would shrink to the nearest shade. Nota breath of air fanned the leaves; motionless they hung, as if all artificial, with stems of iron wires. Upon the pools there was not the slightest ruffle; the streams flowed so languidly that they seemed to be of quicksilver, a fluid too heavy to permit the slightest agitation upon the surface. All was likewise silent, as if the scene which we are describing was utterly untenanted by a living thing. It was one vast wilderness of verdure, broken only by the places where the pools existed or the streams were sluggishly and almost imperceptibly gliding. Masses of underwood were interspersed with trees, in many spots appearing singly, in others forming small groups, in others again, congregating into the extent of woods, but in the distance so thickly aggregated as to expand into the magnificence of forests. Though the atmosphere was so clear and so fully illuminated with the golden effulgence of the sun, yet was it not merely heavy with its intense sultriness, but in its stagnation there was a sense of noisomeness and disease. To breathe it was fraught with a profound oppressiveness; it seemed impos- sible that the lungs could become expanded with such inhalation. Breathing itself was gasping. There was no vitality in that air; it afforded not the sense of active vigorous life. All was silent, and no evidence of the existence of any living thing met the eye of the observer, if an observer 260 CORNIELYOOLKKS (E(0)