From Naples it was at the edge of sunset we sailed past the islands south. One is Procida, where Lamartine wrote _Graziella_; Capri, with its ancient Phœnician stairway, cut in solid rock. With deepening twilight, we passed such shore places as Sorrento, Torre del Greco. Then away for the open sea and the night. The next morning when I opened my port-hole we were anchored in front of dazzling white and pink mountains of stone, wild-lined, lofty. This was Sicily. We anchored far out. Little pink and violet-blue boats, roughly and heavily made, came for us and our luggage. When at length we landed, the glare of light on white chalk-soil was terrifying, and I recalled swiftly that one of Sicily’s other names is _Island of the Sun_. Suddenly the buildings of a very ancient world swept around me. The Greeks made settlements here almost a thousand years before the Birth of Christ. Palermo is a large city. It has wide and spacious streets, bordered with palaces of beauty—proud palaces of the Houses of Aragon, Bourbon, Orleans, Guise. Solemn, dignified, magnificent. It was here the Bourbons came for their last wild fling at power. The city is almost as lovely as Venice, which is all I am able to say, the highest praise I know. One reason that the architecture of Sicily is alluring, is because at one time or another, almost all great races have owned it, so all lovelinesses are united. And since it does not rain from May to October, the light was dazzling. Civilizations reached heights. The Greeks settled it at a dizzy number of centuries before Christ. The Romans held it awhile; the Norsemen. Once it was a center of Moorish culture. And then there was French, Spanish, and Italian rule. Roger of Sicily, of song and story, built fairy palaces, and then helped bring the learning of the Orient into Europe. He inspired and caused to be built three buildings which are wonders of beauty, among them _Mon Reale_ whose interior is covered with pictures made of gold and precious marble mosaics. _Mon Reale_ is several miles from the city, on the side of one of the towering, treeless, forbidding, pink-hued mountains of rock. The road that led to it was suffocating, white with dust, and the sun made me know that Africa was only eighty miles away. Barefoot women bearing burdens on their heads the size of their bodies, and leading donkeys, toiled along beside us. Every moment the view grew more astonishing, and greater the dazzle of unshaded light. At our feet lay the famous _Concha d’Oro_, (_Shell of Gold_), the fruitful plain that frames Palermo, filled with groves of oranges, figs, palms, and the bright blue curve of the shore, with the giant pink mountains of rock that mark it at either end.