Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers when Ulysses grasped the shore after his long swim.  Samphire, very salt and fragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-loving myrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbia above the reach of spray.  Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazily perched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as much as seeking sport.  One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind the hills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter.  While dreaming there, this fancy came into my head:  Polyphemus was born yonder in the Gorbio Valley.  There he fed his sheep and goats, and on the hills found scanty pasture for his kine.  He and his mother lived in the white house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow.  Young Galatea, nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam, and shy as the sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick mountain hyacinths, and little Polyphemus led the way.  He knew where violets and sweet narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink coralline and spreading sea-flowers with their waving arms.  But Galatea, having filled her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, and piping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and black ivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow.  Down the swift streamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more bitter with the sea.  But Polyphemus remained,—­hungry, sad, gazing on the barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves.

Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its mediaeval castle and the motto on its walls, Tempora labuntur tacitisque senescimus annis.  A true motto for the town, where the butcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, and palms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same hollow of the sunny mountain-side.  Into the hard conglomerate of the hill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into one another, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted by age.  The same plants grow from both alike—­spurge, cistus, rue, and henbane, constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings.  From the castle you look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one above the other like a big card-castle.  Each house has its foot on a neighbour’s neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone.  The streets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied, but very clean.  They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little monkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and sun ad libitum.