Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/343

 Paradise. The road we took wound through orange groves, the sea lay glittering below us, mountains towering above, each hill-top crested with a ruin which had crumbled to decay when the world was young. My Goddess said that she had never known how much truer than history mythology was until this magic morning. Why, we saw the stones that Polyphemus threw after Ulysses, and the scene of Acis' love, and always before us, beckoning us on, was the white, hovering cone of Etna.

At last we struck the little station of Giardini on the coast, the nearest to Taormina, which lies some hundreds of feet above on a high shoulder of the mountains. An exquisite road, engineered in gradual curves, winds upwards along the mountain breast, and as usual the Napier took it at an easy ten miles an hour, and could have done it faster if I had let her. The view grew fairer and fairer as we mounted, and the coast line disclosed itself to north and south. In some three miles we were at the gate of the town. Taormina is practically a long, straight street, at one end the Timeo, at the other the San Domenico. It is simply a Sicilian village, with its Norman fountain and its crumbling palaces, but with a history that goes back to Greece in its prime. Above rises on a splendid height the old Castello; further inland, and higher still, is the wild village of Mola peeping over the edge of a precipice that overhangs the valley. Twenty miles away floats the stately cone of Etna. It is a place of entrancing beauty, and the gem of it all is the ancient Greek theatre. I suppose that nowhere in the world have nature and the noblest art