Dry tears 8
Curiously, Ibanez also used bones for a stark description, but he was referring to the tower and the shore:
He was in his solitary tower again. The gloomy fortress was no longer constructed of stone; it was formed of skulls joined like blocks of stone by a mortar of bonedust. Of bones also were the hill and the cliffs along the coast; white skeletons the lines of foam which crowned the breakers from the sea.
— Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Dead Command
Perhaps Syd sees the flies shimmering in the same way Opal Whiteley sees the dew:
And on the grass
Through which I pass
Glimmer and shimmer the jewels of dew.
I see them glisten as I listen
To the Earth-folk talking along the way –
So begins my day.
- — Opal Whiteley, "In the Early Morning"
But Syd also sees the shimmers in a way that we don't find in the above authors: the "empty way".
Whiteley, Opal Stanley. "In the Early Morning." The Fairyland Around Us. Los Angeles: private publication, 1918. Print. http://members.efn.org/~caruso/fairyland/canvas-morning-01-center.htm