Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

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Fantasy Football Challenge presents
Young Knights of the Empire

65 of 87

beautiful present, and, I suppose on account of my known love of boating, it took the form of a silver model of a sailing dghaisa. It was so accurately and carefully made that not only did it include oars and boat-hooks, etc., but even the thole-pins and the scoop for bailing out water. I was, of course, delighted to see the place again after twenty years' absence, and to see so many of my old friends. Nothing seemed very much changed in all that time, except that the Boy Scouts had come into existence there as in every other important part of the British Empire. * * * * * SICILY. Any boy who has read Marryat's _Midshipman Easy_ will remember how that cheeky young Naval officer and a friend of his went for a spree in an Italian sailing boat from Malta to Sicily, which is eighty miles away, and how their spree turned into a pretty desperate adventure. The boys were attacked by their boat's crew during the night, and they only saved themselves by using their pistols on the Italian desperadoes. They eventually landed on the Sicilian coast not far from Syracuse. Anyone who has read Count Erbach's diary of his visit to Malta in the time of the Knights of St. John will remember his exciting experiences when, on leaving the island, for Sicily, the vessel in which he sailed had got within sight of Syracuse when a rakish-looking craft, which proved to be an Algerian pirate, ran out from under the land, and chased and captured his ship, and carried him off a prisoner to Tunis. Going farther back, every boy who has read his Greek and Roman history knows how Syracuse was in ancient days one of the great war harbours of the Mediterranean. It was the arsenal where fleets fitted out, and the depot where they brought back their booties of valuables and slaves after their victorious raids. You may imagine, then, that it was interesting to us to steam into the beautiful bay on a calm, sunny morning, past the old fort which guards the entrance, and into the back of the island on which the town now stands. All was looking sweet and peaceful where for hundreds of years had been the scene of strife and adventure. The Cathedral and Circus. The walls of the cathedral are supported by immense columns, which, 500 years before Christ was born, formed the walls of the Temple of Jupiter. Many are the signs of the Greek and Roman occupation of the place. We visited the great open-air circus where gladiators used to fight each other to the death, and where slaves were given to lions to devour before the eager eyes of ten thousand spectators. The seats are still there, and the dungeons of the slaves, and the dens of the wild beasts. * * * * * THE EAR OF DIONYSIUS. In the neighbourhood are the great quarries in which the slaves not only worked, but also lived. They were made to cut the walls so that they inclined inwards, and therefore could not be climbed. The only entrance to the quarries was by ladder, so there was no escape for a man once he got in there. There are huge caves cut in the walls of the quarries in which the slaves lived, and one of these caves has been cut into a narrow cleft exactly on the principle of the inside of your ear. So that anyone sitting at the top of the cleft can hear every word that is being spoken or even whispered in the cave below. It is said that Dionysius, the ruler of Syracuse, had this made so that he could sit in the cleft (where there is a little chamber with private door) unknown to the people in the cave, and there he could overhear all that the prisoners talked about and plotted among themselves. The whole cave is called "The Ear of Dionysius." I remember a similar kind of "ear" in a natural cave in Matabeleland. It was here that one of the native sorcerers used to hide himself, and when he whispered through a crack in the rocks it could be heard all over the cave. The people believed that it was the voice of a god speaking to them, so they used to come and pray to him for advice, and the old villain told them that they must rise up and murder all the white people, and their chief, Lobengula, who had long been dead, would come to life and

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