and
pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have
become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The
reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these
caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's
description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches,
the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or
the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in
their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above
the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern
headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the
South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to
the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in
grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island,
dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of
communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now,
alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of
the cliff.

The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without any striking points
of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri
below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone
concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the
place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a
half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is
practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri
which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to
find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is
packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or
Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on
either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line
of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of
its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge
a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau
crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and
cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a
steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the
great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywh