year, they tell me, are devoured by its angry waters: _mangia venti
cristiani all' anno!_ This is as bad as the Amendolea near Reggio. But
none of its victims have attained the celebrity of Alexander of
Molossus, King of Epirus, who perished under the walls of Pandosia in
326 B.C. during an excursion against the Lucanians. He had been warned
by the oracle of Dodona to avoid the waters of Acheron and the town of
Pandosia; once in Italy, however, he paid small heed to these words,
thinking they referred to the river and town of the same name in
Thesprotia. But the gods willed otherwise, and you may read of his death
in the waters, and the laceration of his body by the Lucanians, in
Livy's history.

It is a strange caprice that we should now possess what is in every
probability the very breastplate worn by the heroic monarch on that
occasion. It was found in 1820, and thereafter sold--some fragments of
it, at least--to the British Museum, where under the name of "Bronze of
Siris" it may still be admired: a marvellous piece of repoussee work, in
the style of Lysippus, depicting the combat of Ajax and the Amazons. . . .

The streamlet Trionto, my companion to Longobucco, glides along between
stretches of flowery meadow-land--fit emblem of placid rural
contentment. But soon this lyric mood is spent. It enters a winding
gorge that shuts out the sunlight and the landscape abruptly assumes an
epic note; the water tumbles wildly downward, hemmed in by mountains
whose slopes are shrouded in dusky pines wherever a particle of soil
affords them foothold. The scenery in this valley is as romantic as any
in the Sila. Affluents descend on either side, while the swollen rivulet
writhes and screeches in its narrow bed, churning the boulders with
hideous din. The track, meanwhile, continues to run beside the water
till the passage becomes too difficult; it must perforce attack the