but the view would
have repaid sitting up all night. We saw Marettimo hovering over Levanzo
"on the horizon all highest up in the sea to the West," as Ithaca is
described in the _Odyssey_. We saw Ustica floating over Cofano and Capo
S. Vito. We looked down on Custonaci, the Sanctuary of the Madonna and
the great curve of the bay from Cofano to the foot of the mountain. We
gazed over the low, undulating country covered with villages, roads,
fields and villas that lay all around us on the inland sides--the country
through which in 1860 Garibaldi marched to Calatafimi with his thousand
volunteers after landing at Marsala. We saw Monte Inice and the heights
above Segesta. We saw Pantellaria, halfway to Africa, but we could not
see Africa itself for Cape Bon is only visible under very exceptional
atmospheric conditions.

I have been on the mountain in the spring and eaten quails for supper.
It was the time of their migration, and they had been caught as they
rested on the islands. I have never been able to ascertain exactly what
it is that the quails do. First I read in a book that when going north
in the spring they rest on Levanzo and when returning south in the
autumn, on Favognana. Levanzo being north of Favognana this meant that,
in both cases, they choose for their resting-place the second island they
come to. There is no mistake about this being what I read, for I made a
memoria technica about it at the time out of what Rockstro, my old
counterpoint master, used to say musicians do in performing the diatonic
major scale unaccompanied. In ascending they pass over the grave
supertonic and take the acute supertonic, and in descending they pass
over the acute supertonic and take the grave supertonic; the two
supertonics being only a comma apart, as the two islands are only a very
little way from one another.

Then I was told by a native of Trapani that this is just what the quails
do not do, and that, in fact, they rest on the first island they come to,
namely, on Favognana when going north, and on Levanzo when going south,
being too tired to fly across the geographical comma that divides the two
islands. I was next told by another native of Trapani that the quails
rest on all the three islands indiscriminately and not merely on Levanzo
and Favognana, thus destroying any attempt at purity of intonation and
introducing equal temperament along with Marettimo, which had not
hitherto been touched upon. He also