The great sandy piazza, glittered as if strewn with powdered pumice.
Its whitewashed houses held a strange metallic glow, like the walls of
an immense furnace cooling off. The glare of the clouds, reflected from
the stone pillars of the church at its far end, gave them the
appearance of red granite. The church windows blazed as with inward
fire. The sacred images had assumed life-like colors and attitudes, and
the massive edifice seemed lifted now, in the splendor of the new
celestial phenomenon, to a prouder domination than ever, above the
houses of Radusa.
Groups of men and women, gesticulating and talking loudly, were pouring
from the streets into the square. Superstitious terror grew in leaps
and bounds from face to face. A thousand awful images of divine
punishment rose out of their rude fancies; and comments, eager
disputes, plaintive appeals, wild stories, prayers, and cries were
mingled in a deep uproar, as of a hurricane approaching. For some time
past this bloody redness of the sky had lasted through the night,
disturbing its tranquillity, illumining sullenly the sleeping fields,
and making dogs howl.
"Giacobbe! Giacobbe!" shouted some, waving their arms, who till then
had stood in a compact band around a pillar of the church portico,
talking in low tones, "Giacobbe!"
There came out through the main door, and drew near to those who called
him, a long, emaciated man, apparently consumptive, whose head was bald
at the top, but had a crown of long reddish hair about the temples and
above the nape of the neck. His little sunken eyes, animated with the
fire of a deep passion, were set close and had no particular color. The
absence of his two upper front teeth gave to his mouth when speaking,
and to his sharp chin with its few scattered hairs, the strangeness of
a senile faun. The rest of his body was a wretched structure of bones
ill-concealed by his clothes. The skin on his hands, his wrists, the
back of his arms, and his breast was full of blue punctures made with a
pin and india-ink, the souvenirs of sanctuaries visited, pardons
obtained, and vows performed.
When the fanatic approached the group at the pillar, a swarm of
questions arose from the anxious men. "Well, then? what did Don Console
say? Will they send out only the silver arm? Would not the whole bust
do better? When would Pallura come back with the candles? Was it one
hundred pounds of wax? Only one hundred? And when would the bells begin
to ring? Well, then? Well, then?"
The clamor increased around Giacobbe. Those on the outskirts of the
crowd pushed toward the church. From all the streets people poured into
the square till they filled it. And Giacobbe kept answering his
questions, whispering, as if revealing dreadful secrets and bringing
prophecies from far. He had seen aloft in the bloody sky a threatening
hand, and then a black veil, and then a sword and a trumpet.
"Go ahead! Go ahead!" they urged him, looking in each other's faces,
and seized with a strange desire to hear of marvels, while the wonder
grew from mouth to mouth in the crowd.