ere the
forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great
conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of
Castiglione with its crown of mediaeval towers, lead up the eye to the
huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white
hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of
cloud.

Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there
are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each
walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to
bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like
that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been
cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone;
slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery
where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus;
olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and
down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese
peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed
Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out
against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely
waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and
vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its
shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and
southward over a hundred miles of sea--this is Capri. The sea is
everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single
sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are
coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges
over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast
where the haze hides the temples of Paestum; at another the Bay of Naples
opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and
the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across
twenty miles of clear air.

The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a
delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the
call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand
feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird
to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the
hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Souther