EUEOPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 82, 5 March 1938, Page 2

EUEOPE TO-DAY

IN THE SHADOW OF ETNA. Sicily has been claimed by many travellers as the rarest land peopled by a European race. It contains more ancient Greek temples than can be found ?n Greece itself.' It has open-air theatres of classic fame, mouldering in ruin in a garden of flowers, under a blue sky and above a blue sea. Its Saracen palaces and mosques rivalled those of Moorish Spain in olden times. Its Norman castles and cathedrals are among the architectural glories of the world. And above all this scene of beauty towers the vast cone of Etna, smoking menacingly like a thing of immense wizardry. A sea of fire still bubbles beneath the sea of water; it has formed chimneys for itself at Stromboli and other islets on Sicily’s northern coast. ,-Etna is its chief smoke-stack, 92 miles in circumference, reminding us, as the destruction of the seaport of Messina showed in 1908, that Sicily lives on a submarine furnace, which may any time take the water of the Mediterranean, turn it into ste-am-power, and blow up towns and people. Sicily used to produce more corn and fruit than Great Britain now does. Out of her widespread lava fields, as they weathered into fruitful dust under the kindly skies, came the richest harvests in the Old World.

The island is covered with ruins of stone and wrecks of races. The islanders .are remnants of the past, like the mouldering works of art by which they dwell. In some lonely village a traveller may perhaps see a Saracen maid playing with a Norseman lad. while a young Greek, as handsome os a statue, talks to a daughter of ancient Carthage, with her husband standing by looking like a Roman Emperor. (G)