The shining mirage of steel above the green isle sinks.

The afternoon sun was behind them; but far, far to the eastward the noble river wound through masses of dark, deep green until it was lost in a glow of shimmering mirage in the low horizon.

Leaving Prinkipo, we made for Constantinople, whose long array of marble domes and gilded spires gleamed like a far mirage over the waveless sea.

For him, as at a magic touch, the walls of the heated city melted like a mirage into the sands of the salt lagoon, and he wandered once more amid the green woods and pastures of Trinacria, the noonday sun tempered by the shade of the chestnuts and the babbling of the brook, and by the cool airs that glide down from the white cliffs of Aetna.

At infrequent intervals our motor passed a train of laden mules, or a group of peasants about a well, and sometimes, far off, a fortified farm profiled its thick-set angle-towers against the sky, or a white koubba floated like a mirage above the brush, but these rare signs of life intensified the solitude of the long miles between.

At the same time, due south of us, dark lines of stratus were appearing, miraged on the horizon, and while we were camping after our A.M. march, these were obscured by banks of white fog (or drift?), and the wind increasing the whole time.

The high bold coast did not appear, in that clear atmosphere, to be fifteen miles away, and it seemed to have risen suddenly like a beautiful mirage out of the sea.