Having no desire to traverse again a bad road, we took an early train, which brought us back to Catania at eight o'clock. Our first visit there was to the "divine artificer," who found eight punctures impartially distributed over my two tires. We thus learned to know the cactus in a new light. Hereafter we avoided even a dry piece of it lying in the road as cavalry would avoid caltrops. We took advantage of the necessary delay to visit the most interesting monument of Greek Catania, the theatre, covered by lava, on which rest the houses of the modern city. Enough underground excavation has been done to enable one to realize the appearance of the place when Alcibiades here harangued the Catanians to bring them over to the Athenian alliance, and had such drastic force lent to his lisping oratory by a body of Athenian hoplites, who, coming from their camp outside the city, broke down a weak spot in the wall and entered the city before he got to his peroration. Again it was about noon when we mounted with intention to ride to Lentini, somewhat over a third of the way to Syracuse, across a level plain, and then take a train across the hill-country to within ten miles of Syracuse, there to resume our ride. For an hour or more we were passing through the famous "Campi Læstrygonii," which Cicero calls "_uberrima pars Siciliæ_," now known as the plain of Catania, the most extensive plain in Sicily. Then we crossed the Symæthos, and soon began a gentle climb, with the sun almost in the zenith. Now and then a turn in the road, or if not that, a look over the shoulder, gave us a fine view of Ætna, which kept increasing in majesty as we receded from it. I was thankful that we had not climbed it. That would have in some measure vulgarized it. A geologist might do it in the line of his profession. But one who wishes to keep the Ætna of Æschylus and Pindar may do better to gaze with awe from the hill of Syracuse, as _they_ did, upon this Greek Sinai. I do not want to overpower a mountain like that. I want it to overpower me. One may doubt whether Coleridge would or could have written his hymn to Mont Blanc if he had "conquered" it, as tourists express it.