d not obliterated. Viewed from
the heights of Achradina, whence all the vestiges of magnificence and
luxury have vanished, and only the hideous monument of "man's
inhumanity to man" remains, what a vast panorama stretched far as the
horizon on every side.

To the north, girding the fire-furrowed plain of Catania where olive,
lemon, oleander and orange springing out of black lava, mingled hues
like paints on an ebony palette--rose vast, lonely, purple at base,
snowy at summit, brooding Etna; dozing in the soft, sweet springtime,
with red, wrathful eyes veiled by a silvery haze. An unlimited expanse
of crinkling blue sea, shot like Persian silk with gleams of gold, and
laced here and there with foam scallops, bounded the east; smiling
treacherously above the ghastly wreck sepultured in its coral crypts,
that might have told of the crash of triremes, the flames of sinking
galleys, which twenty-two centuries ago lit the bloody waves that
closed over slaughtered hosts.

Westward lay green, wimpling vales, studded with laurel, arched with
vine-draped pergolas, dotted widi flocks, dimpled with reedy marshes
where red oxen browsed; and beyond the pale pink flush of almond
groves--

"A smoke of blue olives, a vision of towers."

Bucolic paradise of Battus and Bombyce, of Corydon and Daphnis, may it
please the hierophants of Sanskrit lore, of derivative Aryan philology,
of iconoclastic euhemerism, to spare us yet awhile the lovely myths
that dance across the asphodel meads of sunny Sicily.

On the verge of the parapet of the Latomia, where the breath of the
sirocco, the gnawing tooth of time, and the slow ravelling of rain had
serrated the ledge, stood Leo, gazing into the dizzying depths of the
charnel house that swarmed with the ghosts of nine thousand men, who
once were huddled within its stony embrace.

As if pitying nature had striven to appease the manes of the unburied
dead, a pall of luxuriant ivy and glossy acanthus covered the bottom
and sides of the quarry, one hundred feet below; but out of the dust of
centuries stared the rayless eyes of corpses, and the gaunt despairing
faces seemed still uplifted, now in invocation, anon in imprecation to
the overarching sky, where blistering suns mocked them by day, and
glittering moons and silver stars paused in their westward march
through dewy night, to tell them tantalizing tales of how musically
Aegean wavelets broke against the marbles at Piraeus; how loud the
nigh