e washerwomen,
chattering like sparrows; and everywhere the naked boys, like brown
sea-urchins, burrow in the clean warm sand, or splash the shallow
brine. If you like the fun, you may get a score of them to dive
together and scramble for coppers in the deeper places, their lithe
bodies gleaming wan beneath the water in a maze of interlacing arms
and legs.

Over the whole busy scene rise the grey hills, soaring into blueness
of air-distance, turreted here and there with ruined castles, capped
with particoloured campanili and white convents, and tufted through
their whole height with the orange and the emerald of the great
tree-spurge, and with the live gold of the blossoming broom. It is
difficult to say when this picture is most beautiful--whether in the
early morning, when the boats are coming back from their night-toil
upon the sea, and along the headlands in the fresh light lie swathes
of fleecy mist, betokening a still, hot day--or at noontide, when
the houses on the hill stand, tinted pink and yellow, shadowless
like gems, and the great caruba-trees above the tangles of vines and
figs are blots upon the steady glare--or at sunset, when violet and
rose, reflected from the eastern sky, make all these terraces and
peaks translucent with a wondrous glow. The best of all, perhaps, is
night, with a full moon hanging high overhead. Who shall describe
the silhouettes of boats upon the shore or sleeping on the misty
sea? On the horizon lies a dusky film of brownish golden haze,
between the moon and the glimmering water; and here and there a lamp
or candle burns with a deep red. Then is the time to take a boat and
row upon the bay, or better, to swim out into the waves and trouble
the reflections from the steady stars. The mountains, clear and
calm, with light-irradiated chasms and hard shadows cast upon the
rock, soar up above a city built of alabaster, or sea-foam, or
summer clouds. The whole is white and wonderful: no similes suggest
an analogue for the lustre, solid and transparent, of Amalfi
nestling in moonlight between the grey-blue sea and lucid hills.
Stars stand on all the peaks, and twinkle, or keep gliding, as the
boat moves, down the craggy sides. Stars are mirrored on the marble
of the sea, until one knows not whether the oar has struck sparks
from a star image or has scattered diamonds of phosphorescent brine.

All this reads like a rhapsody; but indeed it is difficult not to be
rhapsodical when a May nigh