PREPARING FOR A SLEIGH RIDE WITH THE MERCURY AT 44 DEGREES BELOW ZERO Permission had to be obtained from Moscow before the author was allowed to transport his motion-picture cameras, films, and binoculars through Siberia. While awaiting this permission he marked time at a little Siberian frontier town. Although the winter had hardly begun, constant subzero temperatures were experienced there. At last we reached the small town and military post of Kobdo, where a garrison of 300 soldiers is maintained. We had hoped for release, but were still under suspicion. Four hours were spent trying to convince two young Mongols of the police that we were not spies. Each time that we informed them who and what we were they roughly told us that we lied, that we were spies and dangerous char acters. met on our way to Kobdo. He gave us his entire time during our stay in Kobdo, and through his help we reached the Russian consul. This official induced the Mongols to return our confiscated arms and instruments, and did everything in his power to persuade them to allow us to continue to Ulyasutai and Urga. But permission was absolutely refused. We decided, therefore, to take the most MERCURY FALLS BELOW THERMOMETER'S practicable route to Peking, which was by GAUGE Finally another Mongol entered the yurt where our examination was being conducted. This man, a Buriat from southern Siberia, could read a certain amount of Russian, and, seeing our Russian letters, sent hurriedly for the governor general, the head of the district. Unlike the other Mongols we had met, he had slightly more brains than a child. Also he was able to use them. He asked a few searching questions, seemed satisfied at our answers, and ordered us taken to the house of a Russian whom we had wagon and sleigh to a branch of the TransSiberian Railroad at Biisk, in Siberia, thence by rail to Manchuria and Peking. The Russian consul gave us visas and permits and arranged for the return of our men and camels to Turkestan. Before reaching the railway, we encountered exceedingly cold weather, our registering thermometer sticking several times at 44° below zero. Peking was reached on New Year's Day, nine months after leaving Kashmir. after leaving Kashmir. We had traveled 7,900 miles across Asia, from the Indian Ocean to the Yellow Sea. S SICILY: ISLAND OF VIVID BEAUTY AND CRUMBLING GLORY ICILY refuses to be considered merely in terms of the present. Go there, lured by the beauties of its craggy north coast, the charm of its rolling hills, its sunshine, its picturesque people, or its huge volcano; and Sicily's glorious and varied past quickly thrusts itself also into the picture. The island stands to-day the product. of a racial melting pot that has seethed for centuries. The story of this human caldron may be read in the faces of the people. For the most part the many racial strains have been merged, but now and then a type flashes as a challenge from the past. Here one sees the high brow and straight nose of a Greek; there the deep, dark eyes of a Saracen; yonder the fair hair of a Teuton. When a Sicilian passes you to-day you may hear the footsteps of all the motley throng that has trod the shores of the island through thirty centuries.* RUINS OF GREEK PERIOD ABOUND More of Sicily's story is told in the signposts of stone from the past that one sees in rambling about the beautiful island. Scattered along its coasts, especially in the south and east, are the ruins of wonderful Greek temples, ranking with the architectural masterpieces of Greece itself. To the casual visitor from northern Europe or America, these magnificent relics of Greek civilization seem as incongruous as a Chinese pagoda in the heart of Africa. But they tell truly of the island's Golden Age, when Sicily, daughter of Greece, grew to a stature and a beauty that rivaled, if they did not actually surpass, those of the motherland. Sicily is often pointed out on the map as the "football of Italy," lying at the toe of the Italian boot. Politically, the island only too truly has been the football of Europe, kicked through the centuries from sovereignty to sovereignty; the object of countless conquests; tossed now to one power, now to another, by tyrant, king, pope, and emperor. It has suffered in * See, also, "Zigzagging Across Sicily," by Melville Chater, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for September, 1924. cessant strife and repeated invasions, and the mixture of blood and customs that has come with them, so that it finds itself in certain difficulties to-day. Potentially it is rich, the garden island of the Mediterranean; actually it is in large part a land of unprosperous peasants oppressed by absentee landlordism. There has been a distinct tide in the affairs of Sicily. First the world grew to it; then far beyond it. When the curtain first rose on the drama of Europe, civilization and culture were concentrated in the eastern Mediterranean, in Greece and along the shores of Asia Minor and Syria. Sicily was a raw frontier land. But inevitably civilization was to move westward along the water highway that lay waiting. A Greek Columbus of the day discovered Sicily and reported it sparsely settled; and soon "Going to Sicily" became a practice in the Greek world, as "Going to America" came to be an industry in Sicily 22 centuries later.* Greece's new western world developed with a startling rapidity to be seen again in America. Within a century and a half Greek towns occupied sites all along the east and south coasts of Sicily; and Syracuse, greatest of them all, had become wealthy and powerful. After another century it was the greatest city in all Hellas and perhaps in the world. In 415 B. C., even Athens was humbled in a war against this new Greek power of the West, and 7,000 Athenian captives, made slaves, were cast into the vast quarries of Syracuse to hew rock for its magnificent edifices, fragments of which remain to-day (see, also, Color Plate XIII). By the time Syracuse had overtaken Athens, Carthage had arisen in northern Africa; Rome had extended her power in Italy; the Greek world still dominated the East, and colonies were thriving in southern France and Spain. The Mediterranean and its shores were the civilized *See, also, “A Country Where Going to America Is an Industry," by Arthur H. Warin the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for December, 1909. ner, Autochrome Lumière by Luigi Pellerano ONLY A FRAGMENT REMAINS OF THIS SHRINE TO THE HEAVENLY TWINS The ruins of the Temple to Castor and Pollux, twin patrons of sport and hospitality, near Girgenti, stand where there once was a busy and beautiful city. Plato remarked that its people "built as though never expecting to die and feasted as if they had only an hour to live" (see also Color Plates VIII, XIV, and XV). MOUNT ETNA DOMINATES THE SICILIAN LANDSCAPE At the volcano's sprawling base lie pastoral groves of figs, olives, grapes and almonds. Encircling its huge girth is a timber belt which tapers off into a crown of scoriae and ashes, snow-clad most of the year. A wind-blown plume of smoke waves unceasingly above. The garden belongs to a hotel in Taormina (see also Color Plate IX), which once was a convent. The villagers of Piana dei Greci are direct descendants of Albanian Greek settlers at a period when Sicily offered a sanctuary from Turkish oppres- |