To return, however, from this digression, which has nothing to excuse it except the interest which clings even to often-repeated stories respecting the popular old volcano. Other features in that wonderful panorama, seen from Capri, have undergone scarcely inferior changes since the time of Tiberius. Yonder rich tract of level land at the mouth of the Sarno, between Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellamare, did not exist. The sea has retreated from it. Tiberius saw, instead of it, a deep bay washing the walls of the compact little provincial city of Pompeii. But the neighbouring port of Stabiæ is gone: not a vestige of its site remains. Above it to the right, Monte Sant’Angelo, and the limestone sierra of which it forms a part, remain, no doubt, unchanged by time. Only that marvellous range of Roman villas and gardens which lined its foot for leagues, almost rivalling the structures of the opposite Bay of Baiæ for magnificence, has disappeared, no one knows how or when. The diver off the coast of Sorento can touch with his hand the long ranges of foundation-work, brick and marble, which now lie many feet beneath the deep clear water. It was a strange fit of short-lived magnificence, that which induced the grandest of millionnaires, the chiefs of the Augustan age, to raise their palaces, all round the Gulf of Naples, on vaulted ranges of piles laid within the sea, so that its luxurious ripple should be heard under the rooms in which they lived. Niebuhr, who, with all his curious insight into the ways of antiquity, was not superior to the temptation of finding a new reason for everything, asserts that they did so in order to escape the _malaria_. But that mysterious evil influence extended some way beyond the shore. The country craft will, to this day, keep as far as they can, in the summer nights, off the coast of the Campagna, while the quiet land-breeze is wafting death from the interior. The real causes were, doubtless, what the writers of the time disclose. The land close to the shore was dear and scanty, and ill-accommodated for building, from its steepness. The first new-comer who set the fashion of turning sea into land, was imitated by others in the mere wantonness of wealth, until the whole shore became lined with palatial edifices, like the Grand Canal of Venice; but not so durably. These classical structures, frequently delineated with more or less detail in the Pompeian frescoes, were as beautiful and as transitory as those of our dreams; or like the vision which Claude Lorraine transferred to canvass in the most poetical of landscapes, his ‘Enchanted Palace.’ Judging from the singular phenomena exhibited by the ‘Temple of Serapis,’ and by other topographical records, geologists have concluded that land and sea, in this volcanic region, wax and wane in long successions of ages. Thus the sea rose (or rather the land sank) on the coast of the Bay of Naples for about eleven centuries previous to A.D.