At some point I decided I would stick to coffee and I spent the morning with buckets of it. Then to keep myself sober I decided to go for a walk, avoiding the centre ville, the dead centre, ha et cetera. Sicilian burial customs, q.v.

So out I went, cautiously hugging the walls. There was a big hill and I began to stalk it. Yes, I know quite well it sounds crazy; but then, it was. I began to approach it as if the old man himself, I mean my contemporary, according to Mary Lou—why, he’s no older than you are! What a liar the girl is. I was deceived in her. He is older than the church on which he shits. Pretty squalid the streets were, even for that area, I can tell you. I saw soon that the building that came into sight on the top was a church, probably a cathedral; and feeling so hot inside I thought I would case the cool joint for glass though the chance of anything other than atrocious stuff presented by the Mafia in about 1900 was minimal. After a time I had to stop, being out of puff, but no matter how long I waited I could feel the heat inside me and the heat outside me for the day was sweltering. It wasn’t ordinary daylight, it was incandescent daylight, not sunlight at all but an atmosphere with a luminescence in it. I thought at first it might be the drink but then realized if I could think that I wasn’t as bad with drink as I’d thought but with the other thing—being chased, I mean, and spied on, that not to put too fine a point on it was unbalancing my judgement just a little. As far as booze was concerned I hadn’t a trace of hangover which is a bad sign. Even the circle of sea round the island had an odd, brassy look about it. There was an islander coming down the hill past me and he was crossing himself like a mechanical doll. Then I saw what was up and why the island had the shakes. At a point on the horizon, God knows what the direction was, there was the plume of black smoke like you’d get from a megaton.

You can say what you like but the earth shaking is worse than the shakes. It destroys the last little bit of human security, I mean the feeling that in the last analysis your feet have something solid to stand on. But the earth shaking is a reminder of the crazy ball flying through space which if you care or have to think of it is an enormity verging on, no, surpassing outrage. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a description of the horrors of an eruption or earthquake you won’t find it here because as I now see I was too far gone to do anything but accept the whole thing as a personal insult or tribute and anyway the shakes—I mean the earth shakes—died away: and of course when I came out of that place on top of the hill I couldn’t have cared if the whole island, glass knives and all, had sunk into the sea.