DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.57734#0055
with fearful noise, splitting up in their passage, bounded
into the sea, or else, being impeded in their progress
by the pre-existing heaps of boulders, helped to
increase the picture of desolation.
It is more particularly when deviating from the
narrow pathway leading upwards from the sea, con-
sisting in many places of steps, that one comes
among the wild, confused and heaped-up ruins of the
land-slips, the which can only be surmounted by clim-
bing. We are no longer in the midst of homeric
scenery. This is a region suited to the fabulous,
where the modern intruder would hardly feel surprised
at the shock of seeing a centaur rush past, a prolific
family of Satyrs squatting about beneath the overhanging
rocks, or a sphinx sunning herself there on the steep
block, with her passionless gaze fixed on the gulfless
and islandless waters in the south.
A strange feeling comes over one in taking
cognisance of.that which the hand of man has done
amidst this inhospitable waste of boulders. Up above,
where the fallen rocks lie more sparingly around, there
are still walls and vineyards, but the wine-grower had
built his little cottage on a large, round boulder lying
free on the ground, suiting the ground-plan thereof
skilfully to the limited surface, while another one, a
painter, had built himself a studio with his own hands,
between two mighty fallen rocks, where he lived like
a second Robinson Crusoe. The few fishermen, too,
had built their cottages on the jumbled boulders and
dried their nets on the fantastically-grouped and
adamantine cliffs — which deserve to be peopled by
sirens, seated thereon and sending their seductive songs
over the waters.
But since (a few years back) a lime-kiln, with a
smoke-stack towering 40 metres high over the little
landing-stage, has been erected, which takes the heaped-
up boulders one by one into its capacious maw and
converts them into white lime, all the fabulous beings
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