Just by the town of Sciacca there are springs of hot water, (not however boiling) having a sulphurous smell, and an intensely salt taste, and depositing sulphur in their course. They are so copious as to form the chief supply of a mill just below them. Near to these there is a spring slightly warm, the taste of which is not unlike that of skimmed milk. The same hollow furnishes a small chalybeate, and it is said that there were not long ago two or three more springs of different qualities, which are now lost. The bank of the little hollow immediately above these springs consists of a white, argillaceous rock, such as I had already met with on the way, lying under a conglomerate, and throwing out the water. A brown friable stone lies over the argillaceous rock on one bank, while on the opposite side it is covered by a shaly grit, and over that by a compact limestone containing shells. In the afternoon we proceeded to Memplice, or Menfrice, where there is a miserable inn swarming with vermin. I waked in the night and brushed them off my pillow as lightly as I could, but they seem to harbour principally in the broken plaster of the walls, and never attacked me in such numbers after I adopted the plan of drawing my bed away from the side of the room.
With Sciacca I left the mountains, and entered a country of a completely different character; an extensive elevated plain, intersected by winding valleys, which divide it into flat-topped hills of nearly equal elevation. These tops are very stony, and are partially cultivated in vineyards and olive-grounds. The valleys are loamy, and all in corn. We crossed a river which occupies a valley of greater extent and more beauty than the rest, where the upper ground is covered with a forest of cork-trees, but the stream itself is as usual very offensive; and afterwards entered a great plain covered with brushwood, at the extremity of which stand, or rather lie, the ruins of Selinus, or as it was called by the Romans, of Selinuntum. These ruins are divided by a sandy valley into two distinct parts, each occupying its own eminence. On that at which we first arrive, there are the ruins of three large temples, one of which is emphatically called the Great Temple. About 45 feet of one column is still erect. It is above 10 feet in diameter, and looks like a tower, while the fragments heaped around seem the ruins of a city rather than of a temple. The magnitude of this edifice is far more impressive than that of the temple of Jupiter at Agrigentum. The columns and entablature are not built up as in that edifice, but formed of large masses; and the perception of this circumstance harmonizes in the mind with their massive proportions and vast magnitude. One block of the architrave (probably the angular one) measures 26 feet 2 inches in length, is 4 feet 9 inches wide, and 6 feet 10½ inches high; but the most striking masses of stone are those which form the great capitals, each of which has been cut out of a block 13 feet square. The shape of these capitals is very peculiar. I have seen nothing like them in Greece, except a fragment on a very small scale, which I noticed at Corfu. The common Grecian Doric capitals in the best examples, form a sort of ogee, and we find this curve in that of the third temple on this eminence, (fig. 1,) but in the great temple a deep hollow interrupts the flow of the lines as in fig. 2.
Fig 1.
Fig 2.
The fragments of this temple are on so large a scale that it is no easy matter to clamber among them. There are traces of the existence of a comparatively very small, internal, Doric order, and also of a still smaller Ionic. All the particulars of this immense building might be obtained, but it would be a labour of considerable time, and of some expense, for although one would not attempt to remove any of the larger masses, yet many of those of a smaller size, and these are not small, must be taken out of the way.
This, and indeed all the temples here, seem to have been thrown down by violence, perhaps by an earthquake; as although the surfaces are much weather-worn, the stone is not in general so wasted as to have endangered the stability of the building, and many of the columns might be set up again. They have fallen inwards from both sides, but those on the south the most regularly so. The stone, though of the same nature as that at Agrigentum, is of a much superior quality, being both firmer, and of a finer grain.
A. B. Clayton del. from Sketches by J. Woods