will not get aground at all, says the old proverb. Briskly over two or
three miles to the next point, and the breeze is gone again. While she
is still forging ahead out go the sweeps, six or eight of them, and the
men throw themselves forward over the long slender loom, as they stand.
Half an hour to row, or more perhaps. Down helm, as you meet the next
puff, and the good felucca heels over a little. And so through the
night, the breeze freshening before the rising sun to die away in the
first hot morning hours, just as you are abreast of Camerota. L'Infresco
Point is ahead, not three miles away. It is of no use to row, for the
breeze will come up before long and save you the trouble. But the sea is
white and motionless. Far in the offing a Sicilian schooner and a couple
of clumsy "martinganes"--there is no proper English name for the
craft--are lying becalmed, with hanging sails. The men on board the
felucca watch them and the sea. There is a shadow on the white, hazy
horizon, then a streak, then a broad dark blue band. The schooner braces
her top-sail yard and gets her main sheet aft. The martinganes flatten
in their jibs along their high steeving bowsprits and jib-booms. Shift
your sheets, too, now, for the wind is coming. Past L'Infresco with its
lovely harbour of refuge, lonely as a bay in a desert island, its silent
shade and its ancient spring. The wind is south by west at first, but it
will go round in an hour or two, and before noon you will make
Scalea--stand out for the reef, the only one in Calabria--with a stern
breeze. You have passed the most beautiful spot on the beautiful Italian
coast, without seeing it. There, between the island of Dino and the cape
lies San Nicola, with its grand deserted tower, its mighty cliffs, its
deep, safe bay and its velvet sand. What matter? The wind is fair and
you are for Calabria with twenty tons of macaroni from Amalfi. There is
no time to be lost, either, for you will probably come home in ballast.
Past Scalea, then, where tradition says that Judas Iscariot was born and
bred and did his first murder. Right ahead is the sharp point of the