The most ancient
memory here is of them, for this is the shore of Charybdis. It is stated
in Sallust and other Latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the
Middle Ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the
straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast
up on the beach beneath the hill of Taormina.
The rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries
in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination,
more closely united here than is common. On a stormy afternoon I had
strolled down the main road, and was walking toward Letojanni. I came,
after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for
the road to pass beneath; and as I drew near I heard a strange sound, a
low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from
the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more
piercing and continuous sound. It was from the rock itself. The grand
music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and
reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources.
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