in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galley
he used these beautiful Taorminian marbles. My friend the librarian told
me also, with his Sicilian burr, of the wine of Taormina, the Eugenaean,
which was praised by Pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of Rome; but
now, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour.

The sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. But the
mullet that is celebrated in Juvenal's verse, and the lampreys that once
went to better Alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers,
the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as
long as this rock itself. The rock lasts, and the sea. The most ancient
memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated
in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the
Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the
straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast
up on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina.

The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries
in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination,
more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had
strolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came,
after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for
the road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, a
low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from
the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more
piercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand
music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and
reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. It seemed
the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that
lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had