Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/440

414 fashion, met to talk together, and also to hear what we or other strangers might say.

We were obliged to talk to them of Frederick the Second; and their interest in this great king was such that we thought it advisable to keep back the fact of his death, lest our being the bearers of such untoward news should render us unwelcome to our hosts.

Geology by way of an appendix! From Girgenti, the muschelkalk rocks. There also appeared a streak of whitish earth, which afterward we accounted for. The older limestone formation again occurs, with gypsum lying immediately upon it. Broad fiat valleys, cultivated almost up to the top of the hillside, and often quite over it, the older limestone mixed with crumbled gypsum. After this appears a looser, yellowish, easily crumbling, limestone: in the arable fields you distinctly recognise its colour, which often passes into darker, indeed occasionally violet, shades. About halfway the gypsum again recurs. On it you see growing, in many places, sedum, of a beautiful violet, almost rosy red; and on the limestone rocks, moss of a beautiful yellow.

The former crumbling limestone often shows itself ; but most prominently in the neighbourhood of Caltanisetta, where it hes in strata, containing a few fossils: there its appearance is reddish, almost of a vermilion tint, with little of the violet hue which we formerly observed near San Martino.

Pebbles of quartz I only observed at a spot about half-way on our journey, in a valley which, shut in on three sides, is open toward the east, and consequently also toward the sea.

On the left, the high mountain in the distance, near Camerata, was remarkable, as also was another, looking like a propped-up cone. For the greatest half of the way not a tree was to be seen. The crops looked