which it discloses on each side, with
here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a
sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign
of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands
by the sea. It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main
road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and a
hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge;
one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land,
exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the
castle.

This is the Taorminian land. What a quietude hangs over it! How poor,
how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent
beauty of enduring nature! It could not have been always so. This
theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by
great piers of massive Roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick
strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour
and populousness. The narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in
position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet
whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the
long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame.
Here Attic tragedies were once played, and Roman gladiators fought. The
enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. It held many
thousands. Whence came the people to fill it? I noticed by the
roadside, as I came up, Saracenic tombs. I saw in the first square I
entered those small Norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the
round arch. On the ancient church I have observed the ornamentation and
mouldings of Byzantine art. The Virgin with her crown, over the
fountain, was paltry enough, but I saw that this was originally a
mermaid's statue. A water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters I
come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces
of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, I see the
ruins of time. These echoes are not all of far-off things. That lookout
below was a station of English cannon, I am told; and the bluff over
Giardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the French tents
pitched there long ago. The old walls can be traced for five miles, but
now the circuit is barely two. I wonder, as I go down to my room in the
Casa Timeo, what was the past of this silen