Hotel Timeo (named for Timæus, the great historian of the place) is a creature-comfortable house where the guests dress for dinner. Two fashionable American ladies sat at a table near ours, a family of Sicilians in deep mourning farther away. At a glance we saw that the guests were all men and women of the world.
“Quite a contrast to the camp,” said Patsy, as the French waiter brought our consommé. “Don’t you miss Gasperone, the Africano, the carpenters sitting below the salt?”
Early next morning nightingales and blackbirds called and called me to the window. I stepped on the balcony and saw Etna at dawn, clear against a pearl-gray sky. The mountain rises out of the sea to an enormous height; it is snow-covered at this season a third of the way down. In the crystal clearness of early morning the summit was unclouded; the smoke was blown from the cone like a gray feather.
Two hours later Assunta, the Sicilian beauty, who brought the breakfast tray with honey, white bread and golden butter, threw wide the shutters.
“The Signora will eat outside? It is the habit of the strangers.”
In the South spring comes with one stride, as night in the tropics. It was here. A jessamine clambered up from the garden, bringing its starry blossoms, its delicate perfume; a tall lemon tree in full blossom, a rose tree touched the balcony—I leaned down and picked a blush rose. Beyond was a feathery mimosa, covered with fine yellow flowers; splendid savage cactus plants raised their armed spikes like spears; a pergola was lost under an amethystine rain of wistaria, an arbor hidden by the harsh glory of bourganvillia; a row of amphoræ, that once held wine or oil, overflowed with purple heliotrope. On a wall stood a jewelled bird, the prince of peacocks, sunning himself, his long tail sweeping the path. Below lay the turquoise sea, the scalloped shore, the long point of Naxos, tawny sand, rimmed with white foam; in the lovely bay a fishing boat slipped before the wind. Beyond Naxos the sloping line of Etna begins, rising grandly from the blue sea; the flanks are covered with white villages, shining in the sun. Slowly, smoothly, the line mounts and mounts, broken here and there with little mounds. The color is smoky blue to the snow-line. Now the smoke, instead of blowing aside, hangs above the cone in two snowy rings. On the shore glisten the white houses of Giardini; close at hand is Taormina—the old city wall, the flame-shaped battlements of the Badia, the clock on the cathedral. The hum of bees as they delve in the flower-cups, rifling honey for their hive—honey that Assunta will in turn ravish for some stranger, fills the air; the ceaseless chirrup of the tree-toads makes a soft alto to the bees’ treble; the fragrance of the flowers floats up like incense, that delights yet does not stupefy; every sense is fed on beauty. Is not this the one perfect hour to which one might say “stay”?
A sense of terror comes after I have watched the cone of Etna for an hour. Sometimes when the little white puffs of smoke stop, my heart stands still. While the great monster blows out his rings of smoke, I feel safe; in those moments of suspended breathing there is terror. It is as if I were listening to the long breaths of a sleeping giant, who, when he stops breathing, may awake and destroy me. The tension is over, he breathes again; his breath goes up in a white feather, like the souls of dying saints as the Italian primitives painted them, coming out of the mouth in a white scroll. This is a place of fearsome beauty; to choose it out of the wide earth for a home, to establish one’s house here, shows a gambler’s nature. What if that great monster should awake, pour out his deadly floods of scorching lava on farm, villa, town? Etna must have counted for much in forming the fiery Sicilian nature. The Swiss, from looking on the iron calm of their dead snow-capped mountains, have caught something of their steadfastness. The Sicilian has before him day and night this splendid savage creature, sleeping now but sure to wake again, whose sleep means life and safety, whose waking means death and torture; how can it but affect his character? The very grapes grown on its flanks make potent inflaming wine; if its fever is in the blood of the grape, a thousand times more is it in the hot blood of its men and women.
The earthquake? It is as if the giant had turned over in his bed, shaken his great shoulders, brought down town and city, destroyed a district, snapped ancient temple columns like pipestems, crushed cathedral and hut alike in one awful blood-curdling welter of pain, that has darkened the earth, made the whole world mourn.
These words—I copy them exactly—were hardly jotted down in my diary, when I was startled by a violent barking of dogs, a terrified braying of donkeys, the groan of cattle, then—the earth heaved like the sea, once, twice, thrice! Next complete silence; for a long moment Nature held her breath. Men, beasts, tree-toads, were silent; not a leaf stirred, the very winds were stilled.
The shocks were light; we had felt far worse at Messina, but there we had expected them.