above passage from Cicero _in
Verrem_. We alight at the embouchure of these most striking excavations,
and, descending a very steep short hill, wind through a small garden of
exquisite vegetation, and are in the first _lautumia_ of the series.
Here, deeply embayed in a colossal cave, we behold the marks of the
ancient pick-axe, and the niches, as it were, in which the labourers sat
while they chiselled out the extraordinary work, fresh as if they had
been done yesterday! Shapeless and half-fashioned masses, _ebauches_ of
columns for temples which never came into the possession of capitals, or
the support of entablatures--unborn Dorics of the Greek portfolios are
here. The sun striking obliquely from the mouth into the interior of the
cavern, made the green vegetation all hoary in the slanting light. Fires
in dark caverns are favourite subjects with some painters. We admire
them not, but we would have liked to take a sketch of one here for the
sake of poor Nicias and his fellow captives. A party of men is collected
round a caldron with a fire blazing beneath it; another group is seated
at a long table eating; some feed the immense boiler with new supplies
from a heap of dirty-looking earth-stained _salt_. Others test the
quality from time to time of that which has been purged and
crystallized. It was the native nitre of the country on which they were
occupied, and the test was its deflagration. In passing out of the
_first_ of the line of quarried caverns to go to the _Ear_, which is the
last, we are struck with the beauty of the garden into which it opens,
which is found in possession of many unfrequent flowers and plants, such
as had not prospered even here, but for the singularly sheltered
disposition of the spot. Against the wall there grew a magnificent
_Smilax sarsaparilla_ in full maturity. A decoction of the twigs of that
tree cured the gardener, as he assured us, of an obstinate pain in both
shoulders that no other medicine would touch; which testimony in its
favour made us look with an added interest on the cordate leaf, and
small white verbena-looking flower, of certainly the first, and in all
probability the last, _Smilax sarsa_ we should ever see _growing_. We
cut off from the main stem an arm about the thickness of an
ordinary-sized bamboo, and, like it, knotted, for a souvenir of the
place and the plant. In this same garden the tea-plant thrived; the
proprietor, Count S----, makes an annual _racolte_ of its