place-names, where they have been lost, and occasionally the
incautious traveller is much misled. Of Sybaris no stone remains
above ground; five hundred years before Christ it was destroyed by
the people of Croton, who turned the course of the river Crathis so
as to whelm the city's ruins. Francois Lenormant, whose delightful
book, _La Grande Grece_, was my companion on this journey, believed
that a discovery far more wonderful and important than that of
Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site; he held it certain that
here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial mud, lay the temples and
the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when Crathis first flowed over
them. A little digging has recently been done, and things of
interest have been found; but discovery on a wide scale is still to
be attempted.

Lenormant praises the landscape hereabouts as of "incomparable
beauty"; unfortunately I saw it in a sunless day, and at
unfavourable moments I was strongly reminded of the Essex coast--
grey, scrubby fiats, crossed by small streams, spreading wearily
seaward. One had only to turn inland to correct this mood; the
Calabrian mountains, even without sunshine, had their wonted grace.
Moreover, cactus and agave, frequent in the foreground, preserved
the southern character of the scene. The great plain between the
hills and the sea grows very impressive; so silent it is, so
mournfully desolate, so haunted with memories of vanished glory. I
looked at the Crathis--the Crati of Cosenza--here beginning to
spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow over golden
sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the children,
that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned by
their own vapours.