MALTA AND SICILY. 
211 
tence spoken by the prisoners in their usual 
tone was distinctly audible. I could also 
hear the faint sound made by tearing a very 
small piece of writing-paper. 
From this experiment, which perhaps has 
been tried by others who have visited this 
singular cavern, it appears that it might have 
been used by Dionysius as a place for over¬ 
hearing conversation, though the same end 
might have been attained by a much less 
complicated and expensive apparatus. It 
was probably a whim of the moment, and it 
is just such a childish design as would be 
likely to be conceived in the brain of a 
capricious tyrant. We may conclude that 
he chained his prisoners at such a distance 
from each other, that they could not converse 
in a whisper, so that there would be no dan¬ 
ger of his losing a single word of their com¬ 
munications. But I suppose that the eaves- 
