This hopeless occupation, without a moment's
respite, for an hour or more; nothing would induce it to proceed a step
further; it had plainly made up its mind to find shelter here from the
burning rays, or die. And of shelter there was none.
What would not this pig (I now thought) have given to be transported
into the lizard's cool aquatic paradise; and the lizard, into that
scorching sunlight!...
It was not to muse upon the miseries of the animal creation that I have
revisited these shores. I came to puzzle once more over the site of that
far-famed Athene temple which gave its name to the whole promontory.
Now, after again traversing the ground with infinite pleasure, I fail to
find any reason for changing what I wrote years ago in a certain
pamphlet which some scholar, glancing through these pages and anxious to
explore for himself a spot of such celebrity in ancient days, is so
little likely to see that he may not be sorry if I here recapitulate its
arguments. Others will be well advised to pass over what follows.
Let me begin by saying that the temple, in every probability, stood at
the Punta Campanella facing Capri, the actual headland of the Sorrentine
peninsula, where - apart from every other kind of evidence - you may pick
up to this day small terra-cotta figures of Athene, made presumably to
be carried away as keepsakes by visitors to the shrine.
