Rolled in heavy masses by the winds that drive them on, they move peacefully in the sunlight like a fleet of sombre ships, with prows of solid gold. Now bunched together in small and graceful groups, thin and sleek like birds of passage, they fly swiftly with the breeze, iridescent and translucent, like huge opals picked from the treasures of heaven, or sparkling with immaculate candor, like the snow the winds harvest on the crest of inaccessible sierras, and carry off on their invisible wings.
They have seen, perhaps in a single day, the countries and the homes we love, and cherish in remembrance or in hope. They have passed over spots that have beaten time to our happiest hours; they have looked down upon places that have witnessed our deepest sorrows.
Up to their glittering realm we rise, and cutting through the impalpable vapor, we reach the upper spheres of everlasting starlight and sunshine, where the limits of the empyrean begin, that mysterious zone, visited only by the queen bee, once in her lifetime, on the day of her “nuptial flight.”
Followed by ten thousand lovers, each with ten thousand eyes to watch her, she ascends like a prayer in the sweet-scented freshness of the morning.
The amorous horde, like the moving tail of a comet, devours the space beneath her.
Never before has she breathed the dew-laden breeze, never has she felt the blinding rays of the sun.
But she has heard the eternal voice of nature; and drunk with the perfume of a million flowers, staggered by the riotous cries and plaintive wails of her wooing drones, transfixed by the ocean of divine light above her, she rises to heights unknown. One by one, her exhausted lovers have given up the chase and fallen like so many stones in the depths of the abyss below: strange and mystic manifestation of the survival of the fittest.
Now a mere handful, with throbbing flanks and starting eyeballs, strives to follow her to the mysterious sacrifice of royal love and death.