Next morning the wind still blew, but the rain was over; I could begin my rambles.  Like the old town of Taranto, Cotrone occupies the site of the ancient acropolis, a little headland jutting into the sea; above, and in front of the town itself, stands the castle built by Charles V., with immense battlements looking over the harbour.  From a road skirting the shore around the base of the fortress one views a wide bay, bounded to the north by the dark flanks of Sila (I was in sight of the Black Mountain once more), and southwards by a long low promontory, its level slowly declining to the far-off point where it ends amid the waves.  On this Cape I fixed my eyes, straining them until it seemed to me that I distinguished something, a jutting speck against the sky, at its farthest point.  Then I used my field-glass, and at once the doubtful speck became a clearly visible projection, much like a lighthouse.  It is a Doric column, some five-and-twenty feet high; the one pillar that remains of the great temple of Hera, renowned through all the Hellenic world, and sacred still when the goddess had for centuries borne a Latin name.  “Colonna” is the ordinary name of the Cape; but it is also known as Capo di Nau, a name which preserves the Greek word naos (temple).

I planned for the morrow a visit to this spot, which is best reached by sea.  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.  Shape a solid mound of hard-pressed sand, and then, from the height of a foot or two, let water trickle down upon it; the perpendicular ridges and furrows thus formed upon the miniature hill represent exactly