One of Cleopatra's Nights and Other Fantastic Romances

The noonday sun shot his arrows perpendicularly from above; the ashen-hued slime of the river banks reflected the fiery glow; a raw light, glaring and blinding in its intensity, poured down in torrents of flame; the azure of the sky whitened in the heat as a metal whitens in the furnace; an ardent and lurid fog smoked in the horizon. Not a cloud appeared in the sky-a sky mournful and changeless as Eternity. The water of the Nile, sluggish and wan, seemed to slumber in its course, and slowly extend itself in sheets of molten tin.