THE JESUITS' CHURCH AND THE MILITARY HOSPITAL, RAGUSA
Do not miss the tiny twin islands with their two little churches. One of them, Santa Maria dello Scalpello, is a place of pilgrimage. Old, gray, minute yet dignified, with its few tall cypresses about it, it so completely covers the island that you see only a church with cypresses apparently floating upon the water. Now there is a scatter of ivory-white birds on the steel-colored surface, a glint of powder-blue on the ridges made by the ship. Marvelous harmonies of pearl color, gray, and blue, with here and there faint dashes of primrose-yellow, make magic in the distance before you. This is really an enchanted place, home of a peace that seems touched with eternity. And the ship creeps on, as if fearing perhaps to disturb it, farther and farther into places more secret still, and of a peace even more profound, till the pearl color and the gray, with their hints of yellow and blue, begin to give way to another dominion. The last bay has been gained. The secret of Cattaro is to be at length revealed. Through the wondrous delicacies of the now rather suggested than actually seen mist, and above them, dawns a marvelous pageant of autumn, which bears a curiously exact resemblance to one of Turner's superb visions.
It is like a dream, but a dream of ardor and power, in which browns, reds, russets, greens, and many shades of gold and of yellow march together from the circle of the waters through climbing valleys to the mountains, which here at last give pause to the sea. And bells are ringing in this great, this triumphant dream. And now surely faint outlines are becoming visible, as of turrets and cupolas striving to break in glory through the mist. The fires of autumn glow more fiercely, like a furnace fanned. Trails of smoke show here and there. Mist, smoke, and fire—it is like a grand conflagration. The turrets reveal themselves as great groups of trees. But the smoke rises from household fires; the cupolas are cupolas of churches; and the bells are the bells of Cattaro, calling from this vale of enchantment to the cannon which are thundering before Scutari beyond the mountains of Montenegro.
IN AND NEAR ATHENS
THE PARTHENON AT ATHENS