noon
Here , like a colony of ants , the generations had crowded one on another , now swept away by the stamp of a conqueror 's heel and now succeeded by another toiling swarm , building anew each time out of ruin , undaunted by the certainty of destruction , taught nothing by the fate of their precursors . From the profound sense of despair which the contemplation of the uselessness of human effort , and the waste of human life , produces on the scholar 's mind , it was a relief to him to watch the gladness of its river , the buoyancy of its currents , the foam of white blossom on its acacia and syringa thickets , the gold sceptres and green lances of its iris-pseudacorus , the sweep of the winds through its bulrushes and canebreaks , the glory of colour in the blue stars of its veronica , the bright rosy spikes of its epilobium . The river seemed always happy , even when the great rainfall of autumn churned it into froth and the lightnings illumined its ink-black pools . It was on the river that he had first made friends with Adone , then a child of six , playing and splashing in the stream , on a midsummer noon . Don Silverio also was bathing . Adone , a little nude figure , as white as alabaster in the hot light , for he was very fair of skin , sprang suddenly out of the water on to the turf above where his breeches and shirt had been left ; he was in haste , for he had heard his mother calling to him from their fields ; an adder started out of a coil of bindweed and would itself round his ankle as he stooped for his clothes . The priest , standing waist-deep in the river a few yards away , saw it before the child did , and cried out to him : `` Stand still till I come !