“Do you feel the heat?”
“Very much. And how suffocating it is here!”
“Shall we sit down?”
“No; I am beginning to feel interested in the cattle. Besides, I feel the sun broiling my shoulders. I would rather walk.”
“Here are the buffaloes,” explained Andrea. “You cannot have seen any before. They are of a nobler breed than these cows. Look at them; don’t you see how wild they look? They are shaking those heads with the twisted horns. They are of a powerful, sanguine temperament; their blood is black and smoking. Have you ever drunk blood?”
“No,” she replied, in amazement, yet sucking her lips with a kind of longing. “What is it like?”
“A potent drink that puts strength into your veins. A drink for soldiers, sportsmen, and brave men trained to corporal exercises. A cup of blood expands one’s life.”
By degrees, while he spoke, Lucia’s enthusiasm grew for the plenitude of strength expressed in Andrea’s whole personality for the vigour of his powerful frame and the plastic animalism that found in him its supreme and perfect development. A buffalo, in sudden rage, proceeded to bump its head against the wall. Lucia gazed in growing astonishment at the magnitude of these stalls built in the open air, and at the motley show of sturdy brutes.
“Are these buffaloes savage?” she inquired, timidly.
“Very: the blood goes to their heads, as it might to the brain of a strong man. They are subject to fits of sanguine madness. They loathe red, it sends incendiary fumes to their brain.”