Not Just Your Ordinary Swamp
- May 10, 2016
- 1 min read
This unsigned photo provided a clue, which helped us figure out its location. Can you spot it?
The photo is focused on tall bushes to the center right. A quick consult with a plant dictionary reveals that these bushes are papyrus!
In Italy, papyrus grows only along the Anapo and Cyane rivers, and in the early 1900s, this site was a big tourist attraction. Here is what John L. Stoddard wrote about this very spot in his book "Sicily" in 1905:
"I must confess to being deeply moved in the presence of these last survivors of that once invaluable plant, which not alone suggested to Egyptian architects a graceful form of columns for their temples, but has brought down to us the treasures of Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Roman thought...
About a mile from the entrance of the river, the tufted stalks of the papyrus parted, and we found ourselves upon the surface of a deep and limpid pool. It was the classic Fountain of Cyane. No spot in Sicily is mythologically more romantic, or more inseparably linked with Grecian gods; for here it was that Pluto cleft the earth, and carried fair Persephone down into the nether world..."
Commute is 55 minutes on the train each way so I print a stack of hard sudoku puzzles on Sunday nights and knock one out per ride.
The evil difficulty is actually evil, one took me three days to finish, which has not happened since my old Puzzle Baron subscription lapsed.