When the two chosen to act as Will's seconds went forward to meet the Prince's seconds, a most curious thing happened, for, the chaplain being ashore with the Admiral, there was not a man on board save Will who could speak their lingo. So here we had the strange spectacle of the principal in a duel acting as the interpreter between his own and his adversary's seconds. And, the matter being settled in this fashion, the Prince and his seconds went presently ashore. As soon as he was off watch, Will and his seconds followed, and Will wrote in the boat a line to his mother in the very probable event of his death, though I had no fear but that he would give a good account of himself. Will's seconds had asked that I should be allowed to accompany him as being his nearest friend; and it was granted willingly. We did not go through the town when we landed, but skirted along the sea front to where the road from the drawbridge conducts to the ruins of ancient Syracuse; and no sooner were we on the mainland, than we turned up to the right and drove for about a mile till we came to the Capuchin nunnery which stands on the brink of one of the most remarkable monuments in the world, the vast Latomia or quarry in which the unfortunate Athenians, captured at the siege of Syracuse, were confined. The singularity of the Latomia is that the quarries cut into enormous natural caverns, which had existed, probably unknown, beneath a thin shell of stone and earth. They went on quarrying until all the roof of the cavern had been cut away and its sides were as perpendicular as cliffs down to a few feet from the bottom, where fresh caverns, and shallower in depth, begin and stretch away into the bowels of the earth. This Latomia, so vividly described by Thucydides, as Mr. Comyn afterwards told us, seemed about a mile in length, varying in breadth from a few yards to a hundred yards, and was, in depth, of perhaps a hundred feet. It was largely covered with undergrowth, though there were some fine orange and lemon groves, valued, I was told, because, being somewhat sheltered from the sun, they came on when other crops were over. In the centre of one of these lemon groves, near the antique well, was an open glade and a lawn, used I do not know for what purpose. And here the duel was to take place.