CAPRI

"CAP, signor? Good day for Grott." Thus spoke a mariner, touching

his Phrygian cap. The people here abbreviate all names. With them

Massa is Mas, Meta is Met, Capri becomes Cap, the Grotta Azzurra is

reduced familiarly to Grott, and they even curtail musical Sorrento

into Serent.

Shall we go to Capri? Should we dare return to the great Republic,

and own that we had not been into the Blue Grotto? We like to climb

the steeps here, especially towards Massa, and look at Capri. I have

read in some book that it used to be always visible from Sorrento.

But now the promontory has risen, the Capo di Sorrento has thrust out

its rocky spur with its ancient Roman masonry, and the island itself

has moved so far round to the south that Sorrento, which fronts

north, has lost sight of it.

We never tire of watching it, thinking that it could not be spared

from the landscape. It lies only three miles from the curving end of

the promontory, and is about twenty miles due south of Naples. In

this atmosphere distances dwindle. The nearest land, to the

northwest, is the larger island of Ischia, distant nearly as far as

Naples; yet Capri has the effect of being anchored off the bay to

guard the entrance. It is really a rock, three miles and a half

long, rising straight out of the water, eight hundred feet high at

one end, and eighteen hundred feet at the other, with a depression

between. If it had been chiseled by hand and set there, it could not

be more sharply defined. So precipitous are its sides of rock, that

there are only two fit boat-landings, the marina on the north side,

and a smaller place opposite. One of those light-haired and freckled

Englishmen, whose pluck exceeds their discretion, rowed round the

island alone in rough water, last summer, against the advice of the

boatman, and unable to make a landing, and weary with the strife of

the waves, was in considerable peril.

Sharp and clear as Capri is in outline, its contour is still most

graceful and poetic. This wonderful atmosphere softens even its

ruggedness, and drapes it with hues of enchanting beauty. Sometimes

the haze plays fantastic tricks with it,--a cloud-cap hangs on Monte

Solaro, or a mist obscures the base, and the massive summits of rock

seem to float in the air, baseless fabrics of a vision that the

rising wind will carry away perhaps. I know now what Homer means by

"wandering islands." Shall we take a boat and sail over there, and so

destroy forever another island of the imagination? The bane of

travel is the destruction of illusions.

We like to talk about Capri, and to talk of going there. The

Sorrento people have no end of gossip about the wild island; and,

simple and primitive as they are, Capri is still more out of the

world. I do not know what enchantment there is on the island; but--

whoever sets foot there, they say, goes insane or dies a drunkard. I

fancy the reason of this is found in the fact that the Capri girls

are raving beauties. I am not sure but the monotony of being

anchored off there in the bay, the monotony of rocks and precipices

that goats alone can climb, the monotony of a temperature that

scarcely ever, winter and summer, is below 55 or above 75 Fahrenheit

indoors, might drive one into lunacy. But I incline to think it is

due to the handsome Capri girls.

There are beautiful girls in Sorrento, with a beauty more than skin

deep, a glowing, hidden fire, a ripeness like that of the grape and

the peach which grows in the soft air and the sun. And they wither,

like grapes that hang upon the stem. I have never seen a handsome,

scarcely a decent-looking, old woman here. They are lank and dry,

and their bones are covered with parchment. One of these brown-

cheeked girls, with large, longing eyes, gives the stranger a start,

now and then, when he meets her in a narrow way with a basket of

oranges on her head. I hope he has the grace to go right by. Let

him meditate what this vision of beauty will be like in twenty ears.

The Capri girls are famed as magnificent beauties, but they fade like

their mainland sisters. The Saracens used to descend on their

island, and carry them off to their harems. The English, a very

adventurous people, who have no harems, have followed the Saracens.

The young lords and gentlemen have a great fondness for Capri. I

hear gossip enough about elopements, and not seldom marriages, with

the island girls,--bright girls, with the Greek mother-wit, and

surpassingly handsome; but they do not bear transportation to

civilized life (any more than some of the native wines do): they

accept no intellectual culture; and they lose their beauty as they

grow old. What then? The young English blade, who was intoxicated

by beauty into an injudicious match and might, as the proverb says,

have gone insane if he could not have made it, takes to drink now,

and so fulfills the other alternative. Alas! the fatal gift of

beauty.

But I do not think Capri is so dangerous as it is represented. For

(of course we went to Capri) neither at the marina, where a crowd of

bare-legged, vociferous maidens with donkeys assailed us, nor in the

village above, did I see many girls for whom and one little isle a

person would forswear the world. But I can believe that they grow

here. One of our donkey girls was a handsome, dark-skinned, black-

eyed girl; but her little sister, a mite of a being of six years, who

could scarcely step over the small stones in the road, and was forced

to lead the donkey by her sister in order to establish another lien

on us for buona mano, was a dirty little angel in rags, and her great

soft black eyes will look somebody into the asylum or the drunkard's

grave in time, I have no doubt. There was a stout, manly, handsome

little fellow of five years, who established himself as the guide and

friend of the tallest of our party. His hat was nearly gone; he was

sadly out of repair in the rear; his short legs made the act of

walking absurd; but he trudged up the hill with a certain dignity.

And there was nothing mercenary about his attachment: he and his

friend got upon very cordial terms: they exchanged gifts of shells

and copper coin, but nothing was said about pay.

Nearly all the inhabitants, young and old, joined us in lively

procession, up the winding road of three quarters of a mile, to the

town. At the deep gate, entering between thick walls, we stopped to

look at the sea. The crowd and clamor at our landing had been so

great that we enjoyed the sight of the quiet old woman sitting here

in the sun, and the few beggars almost too lazy to stretch out their

hands. Within the gate is a large paved square, with the government

offices and the tobacco-shop on one side, and the church opposite;

between them, up a flight of broad stone steps, is the Hotel Tiberio.

Our donkeys walk up them and into the hotel. The church and hotel

are six hundred years old; the hotel was a villa belonging to Joanna

II. of Naples. We climb to the roof of the quaint old building, and

sit there to drink in the strange oriental scene. The landlord says

it is like Jaffa or Jerusalem. The landlady, an Irish woman from

Devonshire, says it is six francs a day. In what friendly

intercourse the neighbors can sit on these flat roofs! How sightly

this is, and yet how sheltered! To the east is the height where

Augustus, and after him Tiberius, built palaces. To the west, up

that vertical wall, by means of five hundred steps cut in the face of

the rock, we go to reach the tableland of Anacapri, the primitive

village of that name, hidden from view here; the medieval castle of

Barbarossa, which hangs over a frightful precipice; and the height of

Monte Solaro. The island is everywhere strewn with Roman ruins, and

with faint traces of the Greeks.

Capri turns out not to be a barren rock. Broken and picturesque as

it is, it is yet covered with vegetation. There is not a foot, one

might say a point, of soil that does not bear something; and there is

not a niche in the rock, where a scrap of dirt will stay, that is not

made useful. The whole island is terraced. The most wonderful thing

about it, after all, is its masonry. You come to think, after a

time, that the island is not natural rock, but a mass of masonry. If

the labor that has been expended here, only to erect platforms for

the soil to rest on, had been given to our country, it would have

built half a dozen Pacific railways, and cut a canal through the

Isthmus.

But the Blue Grotto? Oh, yes! Is it so blue? That depends upon the

time of day, the sun, the clouds, and something upon the person who

enters it. It is frightfully blue to some. We bend down in our

rowboat, slide into the narrow opening which is three feet high, and

passing into the spacious cavern, remain there for half an hour. It

is, to be sure, forty feet high, and a hundred by a hundred and fifty

in extent, with an arched roof, and clear water for a floor. The

water appears to be as deep as the roof is high, and is of a light,

beautiful blue, in contrast with the deep blue of the bay. At the

entrance the water is illuminated, and there is a pleasant, mild

light within: one has there a novel subterranean sensation; but it

did not remind me of anything I have seen in the "Arabian Nights." I

have seen pictures of it that were much finer.

As we rowed close to the precipice in returning, I saw many similar

openings, not so deep, and perhaps only sham openings; and the

water-line was fretted to honeycomb by the eating waves. Beneath the

water-line, and revealed here and there when the waves receded, was a

line of bright red coral.