is a
bleak and gruesome memory; and next day we had a hundred and twenty
miles' drive to Catania, our faces turned towards Etna, the Queen of
Sicily, which we had not yet seen, but longed to see. In view of the
awful roads we were likely to encounter, I had asked the ladies if they
would mind starting at seven. They were ready on the minute, and I think
they were repaid by the beauty of the newly waked morning, bathed in
diamond-dew, and pearly with sunrise.

Again we drove through strange country, sterile save for the crowding
prickly pears with their leering green faces, tangled garlands of pink,
wild geranium, and a blaze of poppies spreading over the meadow land
like a running flame. We penetrated the heart of Sicily, wound through
her undulating valleys, and were frowned on by her ruined
robber-castles; but the towns were discouragingly squalid, for much of
our way led through the sulphur-mine district.

The true interest of that day came when from afar off we descried twin
mountains, each bearing a huddled town on its summit. My midnight
studies warned me that they were Castrogiovanni and Calascibetta, and I
had suggested to Miss Randolph on starting that even at the risk of
having to drive to Catania in the dark, we should not miss a visit to
Castrogiovanni. At Palermo she had bought Douglas Sladen's book, _In
Sicily_, and Miss Lorimer's travel-romance, _By the Waters of Sicily_,
so that she was already fired at the name of Castrogiovanni, and needed
no persuasion from me to turn aside to scale the ancient rock-fortress
that marks the very centre of Sicily. I am pretty sure that never before
has a motor-car climbed that winding road, and I think the whole
population turned out and ran at our heels as we drove slowly through
the sombre, wind-swept, eagle-eyrie of a town. As it happened, the day
was overcast, and scudding clouds drifted coldly across the
mountain-top, showing us the reason for the great blue hoods that the
men wear over their heads, their Saracenic faces peering out as from a
cave. We alighted in the market-place, and leaned on the balustrade to
see the tremendous view--all Sicily spread out below us, gleaming with
opaline lights and shadows. Hundreds of people clustered curiously round
us and watched with dark, lustrous eyes, as if we had been beings from
another world. We tried to ignore all these silent watchers, who, Aunt
Mary said, gave her "a creepy feeling in her spine," and gazed out over