The town and the port bear different names here; the reason for this is obscure, since the sea is at the end of the street. But if you want to get down to the beach as Lewis did every morning since his arrival in Sicily, you found that it was a forty minutes' walk, first along a road hidden beneath a thick floury dust patterned with chickens' feet, and then through sunken paths, climbing down the same kind of terraces that stretch from Gibraltar to the Atlas, and from Toulon to Lebanon, and make the shores of the Mediterranean look like the tiers of a giant circus. On getting down to the sea you saw that previously in the village you had been on a level with the horizon, and that the hotel itself was nothing but a cube which, set in a block of sky, was so hard that light seemed to break on it, only succeeding in reaching its more salient and unshaded surfaces. Stretched out naked with the _Mattino_ folded into a cocked hat on his head and his loins girt with a bath towel, Lewis waited for his skin to turn the colour of pyrites. Afterwards there would be a walk under the early afternoon sun to regain the shelter of his room. Thirty yards from the shore the coolness would evaporate, but until then he had to admit it to be the best bathe of the year. The gentle shelving of the shore went on beneath the water; the sand was so hot--even though it was towards the end of autumn--that after eleven o'clock he had to decide on his place and not move from it, at the risk of being scorched. After all, was not Africa just across there, a few hours' journey by sea? Grassless gardens came down towards the beach where olive trees, which were nothing but skin and bone, stretched themselves out of the cracked soil the colour of bread-crust.