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It debouches through great limestone quarries on the main road. There, seen from below, Taormina comes out a cape, a town, and a hill. It is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge; one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land, exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the castle. This is the Taorminian land.
"But if you do not find him at once, and return him to us unharmed, I will have a regiment of soldiers in Taormina to search your mountains and break up the bands of brigands that infest them. When I prove that brigands are here and that you were not aware of them, you will be disgraced and deposed from your office."
But cheer up. We've only seen the romance of Taormina yet; doubtless it will be commonplace enough to-morrow." Beth's prediction, however, did not come true. The morning discovered nothing commonplace about Taormina.
To hurry in Egypt is as wrong as to fall asleep in Wall street, or to sit in the Greek Theatre at Taormina, reading "How to Make a Fortune with a Capital of Fifty Pounds."
All that one can do is to lay by in the memory a mental picture-gallery of recollection; and as I sat in the shelter of a big rock, gazing out over the level plain stretching below, where the changing shadows as they swept by turned the amber masses of the trees to gold, I conjured up in my mind's eye other scenes whose beauties will remain with me while life shall last: The purple and gold of a glorious sunset over Etna, the Greek theatre of Taormina in front of me, with the sea below a shimmering opal that melted away in the haze beyond Syracuse; the awful rapids raging furiously below Niagara, a very ocean tortured and maddened to blind fury, pouring its irresistible torrents through the chasm above the whirlpool; and again, a cloudless October morning, with just the keen zest of early autumn in the air, as I lay high up on a hillside in Ardgour watching for deer with the hills of Lochaber and Ballachulish reflected in all their glory of purple and russet in the waters of Loch Linnhe, windless and still!
"Well argued, Beth," said Uncle John, approvingly. "I couldn't have put the case better myself. What do you say, Silas Watson?" "That you are all quite right," answered the old lawyer. "And the best part of the whole thing, to me, is the fact that this nest of brigands will be wiped out of existence, and Taormina be hereafter as safe for tourists as old Elmhurst itself.
A search through old records carried the November phenomenon back to the year 902 A.D., long distinguished as "the year of the stars." For in the same night in which Taormina was captured by the Saracens, and the cruel Aghlabite tyrant Ibrahim ibn Ahmed died "by the judgment of God" before Cosenza, stars fell from heaven in such abundance as to amaze and terrify beholders far and near.
"I'm afraid there has been a mistake," said the little man, gazing around him anxiously. "There's no town here, and I told the guard to put us off at Taormina not this forlorn place." Just then Beth discovered a line of carriages drawn up back of the station.
For, although they dared not interfere to protect the victims of the terrible Il Duca, the hotel people fully recognized the fact that brigandage was not a good advertisement for Taormina, and hoped the "little incident" would not become generally known. Old Silas Watson, dignified lawyer as he was, actually danced a hornpipe when he beheld his old friend safe and sound.
"Jerrold didn't tell you?" "He only told me what I know already." "After all, what do you know?" "I know you were all right, you and he, when I saw you together here in the spring. So I suppose you were happy then. Jerrold looked wretchedly ill all the time he was at Taormina. So I suppose he was unhappy then because he was away from you. He looks wretchedly ill now. So do you.
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