File:Sicily in the Year 1825 - Elizabeth Campbell - text 14.jpg

"We rowed across the fine bay, the ancient Port, once crowded with shipping and riches, now a single vessel waiting release from quarantine, and landed at the mouth of the river Aenopus, in order to lighten the boat for crossing the bar. The view of the town from hence was beautiful: in the river Aenopus, or rather in the fountain of Chiana, a most beautiful basin of deep clear water, which rises here, apparently at once from the earth, the stream uniting with the Aenopus lower down, grows the Papyrus plant and here alone in Europe. It is of the reed nature, in parts more than thirty feet high, a single stem of tolerable thickness, surmounted by a drooping head of thin fibres, about eight inches long, which play with the wind in an elegant waving manner. The stalk is rather triangular, in the interior white and pithy and tasteless, but tough. Of this, cut in thin slices and dried the ancients made use to write upon; sometimes glued together and sometimes strung on a file. There is not a vestige of leaf to the plant etc. etc."