“The animals belong to you?”
“To my son; he has gone to Anapo for fish, also for papyrus; it grows there as nowhere else; they say the Moros planted it. That goat is a famous milker,—even after the young ones have fed she gives half a brocca of milk!”
The ancient Via delle Tombe lies just above the Greek theatre; it led to the city and must have served as a thoroughfare for the living as well as a burial place for the dead. The road-bed is deeply furrowed with ruts of ancient chariot wheels. On either side are the tombs, rifled centuries ago; tombs, street, and theatre are all hewn out of the solid rock; the race that made them, built as no race builds today, for all time!
“Behold the depths of these ruts,” said the custode, “those narrow ones were made by the funeral cars.”
“It’s like Pompeii,” said Patsy;—“those old tracks hit harder than all the rest; they make the place alive as nothing else does.”
“Ci rivedremo?” said the custode as we parted. “The Signori will come again? They should see the sunset from here. The view of Syracuse, the great harbor, the Ionian sea is famous.”
“O, yes, I shall come back,” said Patsy. “Lonely, poor old chap,” he continued, as we drove off; “I shall have to make some photographs of the theatre and the goats.”
All of ancient Syracuse is intensely interesting. It is filled with the great shades of the past; we felt them all about us, just as we had felt the presence of the birds in the tree-tops over the old quarry. Modern Syracuse is disappointing; a little provincial town with narrow crooked streets lighted by electricity. Could this ever have been “the largest of Greek, the most beautiful of all cities?” The splendid capital of Dionysius and Hiero, the home of Theocritus? Today Syracuse has shrunken again to the size
SYRACUSE. FORT EURYELUS. [Page 353.]