For a short distance above Nicolosi, stunted vines are seen growing in black cinders, but these soon give place to a large tract covered with lava and ashes, with here and there patches of broom. There was no visible path, but the mules seemed to know the way perfectly, and they continued to ascend with the same easy even pace without any guidance, even after the sun had disappeared behind the western flank of the mountain. In fact, you trust yourself absolutely to your mule, which picks his way over the roughest ground, and rarely stumbles or changes his even step. I found it quite easy to write notes while ascending, and even to use a pocket spectroscope at the time of the setting sun. Subsequently we saw a man extended at full length, and fast asleep upon a mule, which was leisurely plodding along the highway. The same confidence must not however be extended to the donkeys of Etna, as I found to my cost a few days later at Taormina. Here the only animal to be procured to carry me down to the sea-shore, 800 feet below, was a donkey. It was during the hottest part of the day, and it was necessary to carry an umbrella in one hand, and comfortable to wear a kind of turban of many folds of thin muslin round one's cap. The donkey after carefully selecting the roughest and most precipitous part of the road, promptly fell down, leaving me extended at full length on the road, with the open umbrella a few yards off. At the same time the turban came unfolded, and stretched itself for many a foot upon the ground. Altogether it was a most comical sight, and it reminded me forcibly, and at the instant, of a picture which I once saw over the altar of a church in Pisa, and which represented S. Thomas Aquinas discomfiting Plato, Aristotle, and Averröes. The latter was completely overthrown, and in the most literal sense, for he was grovelling in the dust at the feet of S. Thomas, while his disarranged turban had fallen from him.