"I'm coming, I'm coming, wait up, stones!   Sometimes, some tone or season,  we are able to be together, or to be one, to live, to die in this great hush of hardness, mother of all glow. Sometimes flowing  through volcano's fire or river's arbor or fresh air's faithful circulars or stuck trek through the snow or caked dust in the desert regions, metallic dust cloud, or even farther, the polar father of stone, ice sapphire,  Antarctica: in this point or port or birth or death we shall be stone, borderless night, unbending love, unending brilliance, eternal light, buried fire, pride condemned to its intensity: the only star that is ours."             Pablo Neruda    Stones of the Sky

© Pablo Neruda 1970, Fundacion Pablo Neruda Translation  copyright 1987 by James Nolan Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA

 

 

A carving of inspired poet and traveler, Pablo Neruda, on the beach at his home in Isla Negra, Chile, looking out across the seas of his beloved "Fiery Stone Mother.".

 

 

 

Algol and Munthe

http://www.isvroma.it/public/lancellotti/prusac.pdf

Axel Munthe, Renaissance Man and physician to Queen Victoria of Sweden, conveys the amazing account of how the head of Medusa appeared to the him as if it had been a cameo on the seabed. He sent workers to retrieve it, off the coast of his home on Caprik , Villa San Michele, and it was there!


The Medusa mask that Munthe found on the sea floor is demonstrably from Rome. It is one of many Medusa masks that adorned the Temple of Venus and Roma, built by Hadrian in 307 AD.