Directly there was a chorus of exclamation. The seven rocks of the Cyclops! The rocks the blind Polyphemus hurled so impatiently after “the crafty Ulysses.” They rise at no great distance from the shore, and from the size of some of them the strength of the giant must have been indeed taxed.
Speeding over the plain of Catania took me back to school days and my mythology. For to a part of it belongs the touching story of Proserpine and its harrowing pictures of Pluto carrying her off, her arms outstretched for rescue, and her lovely face furrowed with such terror, horror and agony as fixed itself indelibly upon memory. “The Vale of Enna,” with its flowers bedewed with the tears of the tortured mother and lighted by the burning torch in her hand, as she sought hither and thither for her lost child—how strange to think I was recalling all the story right there upon the ground.
We made but a short tarry at Messina, and then came our reluctant addio to beautiful, historic Sicily. Trinacria of old, so called because of its triangular shape. Not anywhere was flaunted that hideous coat of arms—the head of Medusa, the Gorgon with locks of wreathing serpents and the three legs springing from it as a center, representing a triangle, and the haunting countenance of horror that turned one into stone but to look at it. Yet, I put the picture of it into my album of Sicilian photographs!
How the heart aches over the good-byes that we know mean forever.
Good-bye, O lovely Sicily.
L. G. C.
