On my left hand stretched a long fiat-topped mountain, forming the southern slope of the valley we ascended; steep, dark, and furrowed with innumerable torrent-beds, it frowned upon a river that rushed along the ravine at its foot to pour into the sea where the mountain broke as a rugged cliff.

This was the Mons Moscius of old time, which sheltered the monastery built by Cassiodorus.

The headlong, swollen flood, coloured like yellow clay, held little resemblance to the picture I had made of that river Pellena which murmurs so musically in the old writer's pages.

Its valley was heaped with great blocks of granite--a feature which has interest for the geologist; it marks an abrupt change of system, from the soft stone of Catanzaro (which ends the Apennine) to the granitic mass of Aspromonte (the toe of Italy) which must have risen above the waters long before the Apennines came into existence.

The wild weather emphasized a natural difference between this valley of Squillace and that which rises towards Catanzaro; here is but scanty vegetation, little more than thin orchards of olive, and the landscape has a bare, harsh character.