To-Day Great Breakers Were Rolling Upon The Strand, And All
The Blue Of The Bay Was Dashed With White Foam; Another Night Would,
I Hoped, Bring Calm, And Then The Voyage!
Dis aliter visum.
A little fleet of sailing vessels and coasting steamers had taken
refuge within the harbour, which is protected by a great mole. A
good haven; the only one, indeed, between Taranto and Reggio, but it
grieves one to remember that the mighty blocks built into the
sea-barrier came from that fallen temple. We are told that as late
as the sixteenth century the building remained all but perfect, with
eight-and-forty pillars, rising there above the Ionian Sea; a guide
to sailors, even as when AEneas marked it on his storm-tossed
galley. Then it was assailed, cast down, ravaged by a Bishop of
Cotrone, one Antonio Lucifero, to build his episcopal palace. Nearly
three hundred years later, after the terrible earthquake of 1783,
Cotrone strengthened her harbour with the great stones of the temple
basement. It was a more legitimate pillage.
Driven inland by the gale, I wandered among low hills which overlook
the town. Their aspect is very strange, for they consist entirely -
on the surface, at all events - of a yellowish-grey mud, dried
hard, and as bare as the high road. A few yellow hawkweeds, a few
camomiles, grew in hollows here and there; but of grass not a blade.
It is easy to make a model of these Crotonian hills.
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