Beneath these innumerable wheels the earth resounded and trembled, as if it had been moved by some convulsion of nature. To the chariots succeeded the battalions of infantry, marching in order, their shields on the left arm; in the right hand the lance, curved club, bow, sling, or ax, according as they were armed; the heads of these soldiers were covered with helmets, adorned with two horsehair tails, their bodies girded with a cuirass belt of crocodile-skin. Their impassible look, the perfect regularity of their movements, their reddish copper complexions, deepened by a recent expedition to the burning regions of Upper Ethiopia, their clothing powdered with the desert sand, they awoke admiration by their discipline and courage. With soldiers like those Egypt could conquer the world. After them came the allied troops, recognizable from the outlandish form of their headpieces, which looked like truncated miters, or were surmounted by crescents spitted on sharp points. Their wide-bladed swords and jagged axes must have produced wounds which could not be healed. Slaves carried on their shoulders or on barrows the spoils enumerated by the herald, and wild-beast tamers dragged behind them leashed panthers, cheetahs, crouching down as if trying to hide themselves, ostriches fluttering their wings, giraffes which overtopped the crowd by the entire length of their necks, and even brown bears--taken, they said, in the Mountains of the Moon. The procession was still passing, long after the King had entered his palace. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Born in 1821, died in 1880; traveled in the East; published in 1857 his best-known work, "Madame Bovary," which led to litigation as to the morality of the story: ultimately acquitted; published "Salâmmbo" in 1858; author of other novels and plays. YONGEVILLE AND ITS PEOPLE[4] Yonville-l'Abbaye--so called from an old Capuchin abbey of which not even the ruins remain--is a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the Andelle after turning three water-mills near its mouth, where there are a few trout that the lads amuse themselves by fishing for on Sundays. [Footnote 4: From Part II of "Madame Bovary." Translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Copyright, 1901, by George Munro's Sons.]