Themistocles—Jane doubts his sponsors in baptism having had any hand in this, but the grubby card he presented with so pleasant a glance, so fine a gesture at the time of striking a bargain for the day, bore it printed as plain as plain—Themistocles, then, dismounts before a small drinking shop lying at the foot of an elevation. With one broad sweep of his hand he signifies that he is making them free of history, and yields them to the care of a nobleman in gold and blue; a nobleman possessing a pleasing manner and one of those plangent, golden-strung voices which the lucky possessors always so enjoy using.
The two demand the Latomia Paradiso; the name having seduced their sentimental imaginations. The peer intimates that the name is misleading, but with gentle firmness they drop down the path which descends into the quarries from which Dionysius hurriedly snatched the material for his wall; material (almost as easy to cut as cheese, but hardening in the air) which has been dug, scooped, and riven away as fantastically as if sculptured by the capricious flow of water, leaving caverns, towers, massy columns, arches, a thousand freaked shapes. Now all this is draped with swaying curtains of ivy, with climbing roses heavy with unblown buds, with trailing geraniums hanging from crannies, with wild flowers innumerable. Lemon and fig trees grow upon the quarries’ floor, mosses and ferns carpet the shady places, black-green caroba trees huddle in neglected corners.
The nobleman, however, is impatient to show other wonders. He leads the way into caverns through whose openings shafts of sunlight steal, turning the dusk within to a blond gloom, caverns where rope-makers walk to and fro twisting long strands, twirling wheels, with a cheerful chatter that booms hollowly back to them from the vaulted darkness over their heads; where the birds who flit in and out hear their twitterings reflected enormously, with a curious effect; where even the sound of dripping moisture is magnified into a large solemnity.
He has saved the best for the last. Here an arch soars a hundred feet, giving entrance to a lofty narrow cave. Where the sides of the arch meet is a small channel of chiselled smoothness, ending in an orifice through which a glimpse of the sky shows like a tiny blue gem. It is the Ear of Dionysius. In this cave, so the story runs, the Tyrant confined suspected conspirators, for this is a natural whispering gallery, and the lowest of confidential talk within it would mount the walls, each lightest word would run along that smooth channel, as through the tube of an ear, and reach the listener at the orifice. For the uneasy Dictator knows that his turbulent Greek subjects, who cannot rule themselves, are equally unable to bear placidly the rule of another, and it would have been interesting, and at times exciting, to have been permitted to watch that stern, bent face as the rebellious protests climbed in whispers to the greedy ear a hundred feet above.
A wonderful echo lives in this cave. Now it is plain why the guide has such large and vibrant tones—he was chosen because of that natural gift.
“Addio!” he cries gaily. “Addio,” calls the darkness, a little sadly and wistfully. The guide sings a stave, and all the dusk is full of melodious chorus. He intones a sonorous verse, and golden words roll down to them through the gloom.
“Speak! speak!” the nobleman urges, and Jane and Peripatetica meekly breathe a few banalities in level American tones. Not a sound returns; their syllables are swallowed by the silence.
“Staccato! staccato!” remonstrates the guide, and when they comply, light laughing voices vouchsafe answers.
“I think,” says Peripatetica reflectively, as they leave the Latomia, “that one has to address life like that if one is to get a clear reply—to address it crisply, definitely, with quick inflections. Level, flat indefiniteness will awake no echoes.”
“‘How true’! as the ladies write on the margins of circulating library books,” comments Jane with unveiled sarcasm.