Excerpt from Lands of Summer: Sketches in Italy Sicily and Greece We woke the next morning to find ourselves cautiously skirting the foam-flecked sea, on the edge of the Calabrian landscape, awesome in its vast distances scarred and seamed by earthquake, all gullies and dry torrents, bordered with cactus-hedges, half uprooted by subterranean convulsion. We hailed their thorny disks as harbingers of the warm south; but alas! the wind rose, the sun obscured itself, the blue sea paled; and when, in the very teeth of Scylla and Charybdis, our grimy train crawled aboard a modern ferry-boat for its unmomentous passage of those mythic perils, Sicily opened out before us gray and cold. At three o'clock in the afternoon of our third day we alighted shivering in the central railway-station of Messina. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy.

In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.