Each morning at Syracuse we engaged little carriages (costing one shilling the hour) for the day, and took with us a well-filled luncheon basket for ourselves and our charming young drivers, and we wandered, and studied, and drew for hours. We spent a whole day on the grand heights of Epipolae, looking on one side across a luxuriant plain to snowy Etna, and on the other across the vast ruined city to the blue sea, with Ortygia gleaming upon it like a jewel. Another whole day was given to ascending the rivers Anapus and Pisma to the mystic blue fountain of Cyane: the most romantic of boating excursions, the boatmen every now and then being obliged to jump into the water and push the boat over the shallows or through the thick water-plants: the papyrus with its exquisite feathery crests almost meeting overhead, or grouped into the most glorious masses on the islets in midstream: enchanting little views opening every now and then to palms and cypresses and blue rifts in the roseate rocks of Megara; now a foreground of oleanders, then of splendid castor-oil plants. In returning, we walked up a hill to the Temple of Jupiter Olympus, through a perfect blaze of dwarf blue iris, the loveliest flowers I ever saw.
We spent the four first days of the New Year at Catania, a dull town, though backed by the glorious snow-fields of Etna, and we made thence two excursions—to Aci Castello, a beautiful old castle on lava rocks, and to Aci Reale, with the spring into which Acis, the lover of Galatea, is supposed to have been changed.
