the basis. I find that I can
understand more than half that is said, the Arabic terminations being
applied to Italian words. I believe it has never been successfully reduced
to writing, and the restoration of pure Arabic has been proposed, with
much reason, as preferable to an attempt to improve or refine it. Italian
is the language used in the courts of justice and polite society, and is
spoken here with much more purity than either in Naples or Sicily.

The heat has been so great since I landed that I have not ventured outside
of the city, except last evening to an amateur theatre, got up by the
non-commissioned officers and privates in the garrison. The performances
were quite tolerable, except a love-sick young damsel who spoke with a
rough masculine voice, and made long strides across the stage when she
rushed into her lover's arms. I am at a loss to account for the exhausting
character of the heat. The thermometer shows 90 deg. by day, and 80 deg. to 85 deg. by
night--a much lower temperature than I have found quite comfortable in
Africa and Syria. In the Desert 100 deg. in the shade is rather bracing than
otherwise; here, 90 deg. renders all exercise, more severe than smoking a
pipe, impossible. Even in a state of complete inertia, a shirt-collar will
fall starchless in five minutes.

Rather than waste eight more days in this glimmering half-existence, I
have taken passage in a Maltese _speronara_, which sails this evening for
Catania, in Sicily, where the grand festival of St. Agatha, which takes
place once in a hundred years, will be celebrated next week. The trip
promises a new experience, and I shall get a taste, slight though it be,
of the golden Trinacria of the ancients. Perhaps, after all, this delay
which so vexes me (bear in mind, I am no longer in the Orient!) may be
meant solely for my good. At least, Mr. Winthrop, our Consul here, who has
been exceedingly kind and courteous to me, thinks it a rare good fortune
that I shall see the Catanian festa.

Chapter XXX.

The Festival of St. Agatha.

Departure from Malta--The Speronara--Our Fellow-Passengers--The First
Night on Board--Sicily--Scarcity of Provisions--Beating in the Calabrian
Channel--The Fourth Morning--The Gulf of Catania--A Sicilian
Landscape--The Anchorage--The Suspected List--The Streets of
Catania--Biography of St. Agatha--The Illuminations--The Procession of
the Veil--The Biscari Palace--The Antiquities of Catania--