Several mortar-like basins or troughs, hollowed in the rock, evidently served for the pounding of corn, so that the inhabitants, whoever they were, must have known at least some of the arts of civilised life. A few of the rooms or burrows (for their size hardly warrants a better name) are still tenanted by shepherds, whose whole furniture consists of a kettle, a few pots, and some skins to lie upon. Parthey, a learned German traveller,[33] who visited many of the caves (the whole number probably exceeding 1,500), nowhere found the least traces of ornament about them; the doors and windows were mere rough holes broken through the rock. Thus there can be no doubt that the fragments of painted vases and sculptured marble that have been found here and there in the caves belong to a much later period, for a people sufficiently advanced in the arts to paint vases and to chisel marble could not possibly have been content with a mole-like existence. If we seek to ascertain the probable age of this cavern city, all circumstances combine to throw back its origin to a very ancient date. The total want of artistic decoration at once forbids us to assign these extensive but rude excavations to one of the Greek tribes which successively founded colonies in the island after expelling the aborigines from their ancestral seats. In the Roman, the Saracenic, or some later period a band of fugitives might indeed have found a temporary retreat in this remote vale, but could hardly have remained concealed long enough to execute a work which evidently required long years of undisturbed toil. Thus it has been conjectured that these caves were the dwellings of the ancient Sicanians, a people who became known to history only when about to disappear for ever from the stage of the world, having left no memorial of their existence save perhaps these rude vestiges of an infant state of society. Footnote 33: ‘Wanderungen durch Sicilien.’ We may justly presume that the aborigines of Malta, the Balearic Islands, and Sardinia were likewise troglodytes when the first foreign colonists landed on the shores of these islands. And such, after the lapse of more than thirty centuries, are the Sarde shepherds of the present day, who frequently have no better dwellings than the caves of the rocks. In Southern Italy the traveller meets with traces of the same primitive mode of life. Near a place called Iscalonga, in the province of Basilicata Mr. Mallet found many inhabited caves, excavated in dry tufa of extreme antiquity. Some of the troglodytes came out to see him pass, and looked savage and queer enough in their rough brown blanket-cloaks, with peaked hoods and sheepskins.