Out-streams with all these dread effluvia And breathes them out into the open world And into the visible regions under heaven. Thus, too, those Birdless places must up-send An essence bearing death to winged things, Which from the earth rises into the breezes To poison part of skiey space, and when Thither the winged is on pennons borne, There, seized by the unseen poison, 'tis ensnared, And from the horizontal of its flight Drops to the spot whence sprang the effluvium. And when 'thas there collapsed, then the same power Of that effluvium takes from all its limbs The relics of its life. That power first strikes The creatures with a wildering dizziness, And then thereafter, when they're once down-fallen Into the poison's very fountains, then Life, too, they vomit out perforce, because So thick the stores of bane around them fume. Again, at times it happens that this power, This exhalation of the Birdless places, Dispels the air betwixt the ground and birds, Leaving well-nigh a void. And thither when In horizontal flight the birds have come, Forthwith their buoyancy of pennons limps, All useless, and each effort of both wings Falls out in vain. Here, when without all power To buoy themselves and on their wings to lean, Lo, nature constrains them by their weight to slip Down to the earth, and lying prostrate there Along the well-nigh empty void, they spend Their souls through all the openings of their frame. ***** Further, the water of wells is colder then At summer time, because the earth by heat Is rarefied, and sends abroad in air Whatever seeds it peradventure have Of its own fiery exhalations. The more, then, the telluric ground is drained Of heat, the colder grows the water hid Within the earth. Further, when all the earth Is by the cold compressed, and thus contracts And, so to say, concretes, it happens, lo, That by contracting it expresses then Into the wells what heat it bears itself.