A sense of terror comes after I have watched the cone of Etna for an hour. Sometimes when the little white puffs of smoke stop, my heart stands still. While the great monster blows out his rings of smoke, I feel safe; in those moments of suspended breathing there is terror. It is as if I were listening to the long breaths of a sleeping giant, who, when he stops breathing, may awake and destroy me. The tension is over, he breathes again; his breath goes up in a white feather, like the souls of dying saints as the Italian primitives painted them, coming out of the mouth in a white scroll. This is a place of fearsome beauty; to choose it out of the wide earth for a home, to establish one’s house here, shows a gambler’s nature. What if that great monster should awake, pour out his deadly floods of scorching lava on farm, villa, town? Etna must have counted for much in forming the fiery Sicilian nature. The Swiss, from looking on the iron calm of their dead snow-capped mountains, have caught something of their steadfastness. The Sicilian has before him day and night this splendid savage creature, sleeping now but sure to wake again, whose sleep means life and safety, whose waking means death and torture; how can it but affect his character? The very grapes grown on its flanks make potent inflaming wine; if its fever is in the blood of the grape, a thousand times more is it in the hot blood of its men and women. The earthquake? It is as if the giant had turned over in his bed, shaken his great shoulders, brought down town and city, destroyed a district, snapped ancient temple columns like pipestems, crushed cathedral and hut alike in one awful blood-curdling welter of pain, that has darkened the earth, made the whole world mourn. These words--I copy them exactly--were hardly jotted down in my diary, when I was startled by a violent barking of dogs, a terrified braying of donkeys, the groan of cattle, then--the earth heaved like the sea, once, twice, thrice! Next complete silence; for a long moment Nature held her breath. Men, beasts, tree-toads, were silent; not a leaf stirred, the very winds were stilled. The shocks were light; we had felt far worse at Messina, but there we had expected them. “There has never been a severe _terramoto_ in Taormina,” said Alessandro, the porter of the Timeo. “That is why the _forestieri_ have settled here. The town stands on solid rock and cannot be shaken. There is nothing to fear.” Every person I met said the same thing. As the day wore on, the strange faintness born of the earth tremors passed away, yet during all the weeks we stayed at Taormina the memory of it lingered. The giant who sleeps below Etna had but turned in his sleep; if he should awake and roar at us as he had roared at those others! We spent much of our first day in the old theatre; Patsy had been there since dawn.