y confronted with the irreparable, abruptly sees
the future spread out before him bathed in a flash of crude light, the
future transformed in a second by that act of his as a landscape is
transformed by an earthquake or a calm sea by a hurricane.

And when the watercourse came in sight, with its crowd, its voices, and
its multitude of beasts, he looked at it dully for a moment, hardly
realizing it.

In Sicily the animal fairs are often held in the great watercourses that
stretch down from the foot of the mountains to the sea, and that resemble
huge highroads in the making, roads upon which the stones have been
dumped ready for the steam-roller. In winter there is sometimes a torrent
of water rushing through them, but in summer they are dry, and look like
wounds gashed in the thickly growing lemon and orange groves. The
trampling feet of beasts can do no harm to the stones, and these
watercourses in the summer season are of no use to anybody. They are,
therefore, often utilized at fair time. Cattle, donkeys, mules are driven
down to them in squadrons. Painted Sicilian carts are ranged upon their
banks, with sets of harness, and the auctioneers, whose business it is to
sell miscellaneous articles, household furniture, stuffs, clocks,
ornaments, frequently descend into them, and mount a heap of stones to
gain command of their gaping audience of contadini and the shrewder
buyers from the towns.

The watercourse of San Felice was traversed at its mouth by the railway
line from Catania to Messina, which crossed it on a long bridge supported
by stone pillars and buttresses, the bridge which, as Gaspare had said,
had recently collapsed and was now nearly built up again. It was already
in use, but the trains were obliged to crawl over it at a snail's pace in
order not to shake the unfinished masonry, and men were stationed at each
end to signal to the driver whether he was to stop or whether he might
venture to go on. Beyond the watercourse, upon the side opposite to the
town of San Felice, was a series of dense lemon groves, gained by a
sloping bank of bare, crumbling earth, on the top of which, close to the
line and exactly where it came to the bridge, was a group of four old
olive-trees with gnarled, twisted trunks. These trees cast a patch of
pleasant shade, from which all the bustle of the fair was visible, but at
a distance, and as Maurice and his party came out of the village on the
opposite bank, he whispered to Maddal