Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/457

Rh buildings have furnished the necessary passages and rooms. Right across, at the foot of the semicircular range of seats, the scene was built; and by this means the two rocks were joined, and thus a most enormous work of nature and art was complete.

Now, sitting down at the spot where formerly sat the uppermost spectators, you confess at once that never did audience, in any theatre, have before them such a spectacle as you there behold. On the right, and on high rocks at the side, castles tower in the air: farther on, the city lies below you; and although its buildings are all of modern date, still, similar ones, no doubt, stood of old on the same site. After this the eye falls on the whole of the long ridge of Ætna; then on the left it catches a view of the seashore, as far as Catania, and even Syracuse; and then the wide and extensive view is closed by the immense smoking volcano, but not horribly, for the atmosphere, with its softening effect, makes it look more distant and milder than it really is.

If now you turn from this view toward the passage running at the back of the spectators, you have on the left the whole wall of the rocks between which and the sea runs the road to Messina. And then, again, you behold vast groups of rocky ridges in the sea itself, with the coast of Calabria in the far distance, which only a fixed and attentive gaze can distinguish from the clouds rising rapidly from it.

We descended toward the theatre, and tarried awhile among its ruins, on which an accomplished architect would do well to employ, at least on paper, his talent of restoration. After this I attempted to make a way for myself through the gardens to the city. But I soon learned by experience what an impenetrable bulwark is formed by a hedge of agaves planted close together. You can see through their interlacing leaves, and you think, therefore, it will be easy to force a way through