ints upon their ground of ebony,
or to realise the blueness of the Mediterranean except in contrast
with the lava where it breaks into the sea. Copses of frail oak and
ash, undergrown with ferns of every sort; cactus-hedges,
orange-trees grafted with lemons and laden with both fruits; olives
of scarce two centuries' growth, and fig-trees knobbed with their
sweet produce, overrun the sombre soil, and spread their boughs
against the deep blue sea and the translucent amethyst of the
Calabrian mountains. Underfoot, a convolvulus with large white
blossoms, binding dingy stone to stone, might be compared to a rope
of Desdemona's pearls upon the neck of Othello.

The villages are perhaps the most curious feature of this scenery.
Their houses, rarely more than one story high, are walled, paved,
and often roofed with the inflexible material which once was ruinous
fire, and is now the servant of the men it threatened to destroy.
The churches are such as might be raised in Hades to implacable
Proserpine, such as one might dream of in a vision of the world
turned into hell, such as Baudelaire in his fiction of a metallic
landscape might have imagined under the influence of hasheesh. Their
flights of steps are built of sharply cut black lava blocks no feet
can wear. Their door-jambs and columns and pediments and carved work
are wrought and sculptured of the same gloomy masonry. How
forbidding are the acanthus scrolls, how grim the skulls and
cross-bones on these portals! The bell-towers, again, are ribbed and
beamed with black lava. A certain amount of the structure is
whitewashed, which serves to relieve the funereal solemnity of the
rest. In an Indian district each of these churches would be a
temple, raised in vain propitiation to the demon of the fire above
and below. Some pictures made by their spires in combination with
the sad village-hovels, the snowy dome of Etna, and the ever-smiling
sea, are quite unique in their variety of suggestion and wild
beauty.

The people have a sorrow-smitten and stern aspect. Some of the men
in the prime of life are grand and haughty, with the cast-bronze
countenance of Roman emperors. But the old men bear rigid faces of
carved basalt, gazing fixedly before them as though at some time or
other in their past lives they had met Medusa: and truly Etna in
eruption is a Gorgon, which their ancestors have oftentimes seen
shuddering, and fled from terror-frozen. The white-haired old women,
plying t