I made the circuit of the little town, and found that it everywhere overlooks a steep, often a sheer, descent, save at one point, where an isthmus unites it to the mountains that rise behind.

In places the bounding wall runs on the very edge of a precipice, and many a crazy house, overhanging, seems ready to topple into the abyss.

The views are magnificent, whether one looks down the valley to the leafy shore, or, in an opposite direction, up to the grand heights which, at this narrowest point of Calabria, separate the Ionian from the Tyrrhene Sea.
I could now survey the ravines which, in twilight, had dimly shown themselves on either side of the mountain; they are deep and narrow, craggy, wild, bare.

Each, when the snows are melting, becomes the bed of a furious torrent; the watercourses uniting below to form the river of the valley.

At this season there was a mere trickling of water over a dry brown waste.