The camp stood in a lemon grove fronting the Straits of Messina, where the whirlpool, Charybdis, darkens the sapphire water with streaks of violet. Across the narrow strip of sea to the left lay Scylla, directly opposite Reggio, the dark Calabrian mountains tipped with snow towering above. A more sublime view it would be hard to find, but our men did not stop [Illustration: REGGIO. QUEEN ELENA’S GROUP OF AMERICAN COTTAGES. _Page 244._] to look much at views, or to look back in fancy at the historical vista, the long line of heroes and conquerors who had landed in Sicily before them, and set up their camps with the same care to be within reach of a good spring of water. Of course they must have had some dim sense that they were living on classic ground, familiar to them in their school days. They knew, or had known then, that Ulysses and his men and the wandering Aeneas had been here; that Greeks and Phoenicians met and fought here; that Carthage had her first battle with Rome not far away; that Goths, Saracens, Normans, Germans, French and Spaniards had passed over this ground before them. Perhaps they gave a thought to the last comer, Garibaldi, who landed here with his Thousand in 1860 and won the jewel, Sicily, for King Victor’s crown; but it is more likely they thought very little about what happened before their day--it’s so much more fun to make history than to read it! All these other adventurers and heroes landed, sword in hand, to fight for the possession of this fair Sicily, this Helen among earth’s islands. For what, in the name of history, had these last invaders come? What booty did Belknap and his men hope to find in that abomination of desolation, Messina? They planted their flag where the standards of kings and conquerors have waved, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, and set to work at their task of teaching the inhabitants how to build and how to live in wooden houses. Sicily has never had a Wooden Age till now; here primitive man left his cave to build a cavelike house of the soft, easily worked, tufa stone of the island. The Northmen who helped the Sicilians build their new homes--Danes, Swiss, Americans, English--were at great pains to teach them how to live safely and with comfort in their wooden dwellings, where the two chief dangers to be reckoned with are fire and vermin. For the race of Northmen, these problems had already been solved by the time Attila, the Scourge of God, built his vast wooden palace on the Danube, only to die there on his wedding night (still mourned by all true lovers) in the arms of his bride, the gracious Hilda. The Northmen’s inherited knowledge was now to help the men of the South solve the riddle: how to live safely in civilized dwellings in a quaking land?