another. The mighty pillars lie where they sank; their bases are still
in place, the drums that composed them have fallen asunder; you can
trace the relation of part to part as they lie forlorn and disjointed
on the earth. A sandstone giant, that once upheld the roof, lies on the
ground; he reminds us of the Colossus at Thebes, even more of the carved
wood colossi that held up the great organ of the old Boston Music Hall.
The Temple of Heracles, near the Temple of Zeus, is no better preserved;
these vast ruins arouse a feeling of sadness and confusion. To what end
were they erected, with such incredible labor, if they were to be so
utterly destroyed? It was futile, discouraging, hopeless!
“There, there!” said Patsy, “that’s the reason I brought you here first.
Now come and see the great glory!”
“Notice one thing more,” said the _custode_, pointing to a bit of
cornice that lay protected from the weather by a large fragment. “You
see this white coating like fine stucco? The six temples of Girgenti
were all built of sandstone, yet they must look like marble. Oh! the
ancients knew some things we have forgotten! White marble was brought
from Greece, ground to a powder, mixed with mastic and spread over the
sandstone; the temples of Girgenti shone white as the Parthenon
itself.”
“I should like to think so,” sighed Patsy; “now they tell us the marble
surface was painted over with blue, red and green decorations.”
“It was a protection as well,” said the _custode_. “See, the stone is
friable; if it had not been for so many centuries covered with this
stucco, it would have been worn away by the sirocco.”
We walked through olive and almond groves to the Temple of Juno,
standing lonely and grand on the edge of a precipice. Lavender
morning-glories, blue iris, yellow daisies, grow about the broad steps.
After the desolate ruins we had seen, this looked, in comparison, almost
a complete building. We climbed the stair to the roof; against the
gray-green of the olives, the emerald of the almond trees, the
flower-gemmed grass, the rich amber color of the colonnade glowed dull
in the sunlight.
“It’s more like Pæstum than anything else,” said Patsy, “only I do not
find the roses of Pæstum that bloom twice in the year. Will a bit of
myrtle do as well?”
The Temple of Concord, even better preserved than the Juno, is the most
admired. The site of the Juno is more picturesque; the staircase to the
roof gives an extraordinary sense of nearness to the time when this was
a living place of worship, not a dead ruin.
At the Cathedral of Girgenti instead of being made much of, we were made
to feel that we were in the way--they were preparing for the services of
Passion Week--no time for _forestieri_, a resolute monk gave us to
understand;--we managed to steal a look at a lovely marble sarcophagus,
with scenes from the tragic story of Hippolytus carved in high relief.
We went to the Museum, a neglected dreamy place with a few real
treasures: an archaic marble statue of Apollo, very lovely, with the
fixed Æginetan smile; a gold belt, three thousand years old, with a
buckle exactly like one I wore.
“The Signori are Americans?” A handsome old man, poring over a big book,
looked up at us, as he asked the question of the attendant. The man
whispered something in his ear; then the old gentleman closed the book
and came to greet us with his faraway smile.
“That grand and majestic country, America, is not egotistical,” he
explained when he had welcomed us to Girgenti. “What vibrant sympathy
it has shown our country! We are egotists, it is the curse of our
people; but I revere America most, for the wondrous new science that has
come from there.” He beckoned us to look at his big book; an Italian
translation of a vulgar work on spiritualism, illustrated with cheap
spirit photographs.
“The last thing I should have expected to find in Agrigentum!” sighed
Patsy.
“You have some knowledge of spiritismo?” said the stranger.
“Oh yes, we know all about it!” Patsy assured him.
“Last night I paced up and down the room for twenty minutes with the
great Sesostris--it was his wish to talk with me, the medium, a
wonderful woman, ascertained.”
“How did Sesostris look?”
“Majestical! He was dressed all in white; though not so tall as I, he
has a noble bearing.”
“What did he say?”
Little that was new, it appeared, though the old gentleman repeated the
conversation, as well as those of Plato and Socrates, with whom he
often talked. While he rambled on, the attendant, a fat perspiring man,
was visibly embarrassed--he too wished to talk about America. As we took
our leave he found his chance.
“Behold, this came from San Francisco,” he pointed to a hideous
porcelain medallion, with a photograph of a man and a woman, hanging
from his buttonhole, “a portrait of my son and his wife, _non c’è
male_?”
“The Signori will return?” said the old man, hovering between us and his
big book. “They will let me be of some service to them?”
We would gladly have returned, our new friend is one of the most learned
archeologists in Sicily; but, alas, he would only speak of
materializations and controls--his book was full of the gross impostures
we used to hear about years ago, before the high-grade mediums of these
later days and their dupes came to the fore.
“Think of the things he could have told us!” groaned Patsy. “What a
wasted opportunity!”
Not far from the Museum we passed a flaring placard with the words:
“At the Theatre of Empedocles will be presented the Cinematograph of
Edison.” Here in ancient Syracuse, the ends of the earth are brought
together--Empedocles and Edison; what a combination!
My last impression of Girgenti is of our visit to a little church--the
name is forgotten--and of Patsy’s chatter about what we saw there.
“This,” he said, as we walked along a dusty road of “splendor-loving
Acragas,” “is the Temple to Demeter and Persephone, though you wouldn’t
know it if I didn’t tell you.”
The little church shows few traces of the ancient temple. Its chief
treasure is a famous crucifix, that hangs against the wall, surrounded
by votive offerings, wax models of hands, feet, breasts and stomachs
(very like those of terra-cotta I saw at the Temple of Juno in Veii),
the most gross things of the kind I have seen in a Christian church.
“A lady who had paralysis of the hands,” said the cripple who served as
cicerone, “promised the Lord, if he would cure her, to pay him this
compliment. Eccelenza, she had faith--_aimé_ if we all had her
faith--she was cured. My grandmother herself saw this thing. Those two
wax arms she hung up in gratitude, they cost a horror; she gave the
_prete_ ten francs as well for the poor. It is a miraculous crucifix,
_davvero_, but to deserve the miracle one must have faith!”
From an olive grove came the sound of a shepherd’s flute; the thin sweet
music of the _pastorale_ was the only sound that broke the noontide
quiet as we sat outside the old temple of Demeter and Persephone,
dreaming!
“It all happened here,” said Patsy. “It was through these very fields
Persephone wandered picking violets when Pluton, king of Hades, sprang
from a dark cave and carried her off to his kingdom underground. Then
came the mother Demeter, in her hands the sceptre, corn, and the mystic
basket, searching for her lost daughter; she lighted Etna for a torch to
show the way; she looked high and low, she asked all she met for news of
her child. Kyane, Persephone’s playmate, alone had met Pluton carrying
off the maid, and because she begged him to set free her friend, Kyane
was turned into a beautiful spring (that very spring where the
_custode’s_ son went for papyrus). The voice of Demeter was heard
calling Persephone, Persephone, through these very fields and meadows.
In vain! Persephone, even if she heard her mother’s voice in the dark
kingdom of the dead, could not return; she had eaten the seed of the
pomegranate, she was the wife of Pluton. There was a great to-do;
Olympus was shaken to its foundations. Demeter refused to attend the
counsel of the gods, she laid a spell upon the land so that it bore no
fruit, no wheat, and was threatened by famine. In the end however the
matter was arranged, the family became reconciled. Zeus gave Sicily to
Persephone, as a wedding gift; the daughter now spends half the year in
her mother’s house, and half in her husband’s.”
So he repeated the lovely old fable-allegory of the seed hidden in the
earth half the year, and half the year alive again. How it echoes in the
thunder of the burial service!
“It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”
Paul had been at Eleusis; he knew the mysteries, had perhaps seen the
ancient marble bas-relief in the temple there of Demeter laying in the
hand of Triptolemus the precious grains of corn!
[Illustration: PALERMO. VILLA TASCA.]
[Illustration: PALERMO. VILLA D’ORLEANS.]
[Illustration: PALERMO. FOUNTAIN OF THE PRETORIA.]
[Illustration: PALERMO. CHURCH OF SAN GIOVANNI. _Page 393._]
XIII
PALERMO
“Prima sedes, corona regis, et regni caput.”
As we approached Palermo the pulse of life quickened; at every station
carloads of merchandise awaited transportation, golden oranges, paler
gold citrons, sacks of almonds, casks of wine, vast quantities of
sumach.
At Castel Termini, near the great sulphur mines, stood long freight
trains laden with huge fragments of beautiful yellow sulphur.
“Remember that day the smoke lifted and we got a good look into the
crater of Vesuvius?” said Patsy. “You were very much taken up with the
pale yellow velvet lining of the crater, and wanted to rip it out for an
opera cloak. That brimstone is exactly the same color; I suppose it’s
the same stuff.”
At Acquaviva there were more freight trains loaded with blocks of
sparkling rock salt.
“Salt must be cheaper here than in Rome,” said Patsy. “When I asked your
Agnese for a handful to put in the electric battery, she was horrified
at my extravagance.”
“Agnese buys it by the pound at the tobacconist’s; it costs like gold
dust.”
Here a fat gentleman reared up from his nest of newspapers in the
corner. “Salt is free in Sicily,” he said; “we do not tax it as they do
in Italy. For a few _soldi_ you can buy a _kilo_ of the best, the most
fine. What you see is mineral salt, virgin salt, and comes from a cave
in the top of the mountain; there is none to compare with it!”
“There is no salt tax in Sicily,” said a small neat man who looked an
_avvocato_. “It would be useless; each one would then make his own. You
need only take water from the sea, put it in a pan, set it in the
sun--_via_! the water evaporates, and leaves salt as good as this!”
“Not so good!” roared the fat man, “miserable, inferior salt!” The veins
in his neck swelled with anger.
“Isn’t all salt pretty much alike?” Patsy put in soothingly.
“_Per Bacco_, no! It is all different. The salt from the sea, who knows
what nastiness gets into it? This salt, pure and fresh from the bowels
of the earth, has soda and other valuable minerals mixed with it; there
is no comparison, _me spiego_?” (Do I explain myself?) “Here, go thou,
Teodoro; bring a little bit of salt that these signori may know I speak
the truth!”
Teodoro, a handsome bearded young man in high brown shooting boots, had
just entered the carriage; we had noticed him walking up and down the
platform with a pair of pointers in leash.
“_Va bene._” Teodoro nodded good-naturedly to the fat man, evidently his
father, left the car, and walked leisurely across the tracks to the
freight train, followed by a porter. He touched a cake of shining
crystalline salt too big for one man to carry.
“_Pronto!_” cried the guard, lifting his horn.
“Wait,” roared the angry man, thrusting his head from the window. “_Che
animale!_ don’t you see my son?”
“Break it, _corpo di Bacco_! break it,” laughed Teodoro. The porter
pushed the glittering block of salt from the truck. It crashed on the
pavement broken in two. Teodoro picked up the larger piece, dusted the
splinters from his coat, then without a sign of haste stepped on board.
“They must be great chiefs,” murmured Patsy, as the guard tootled his
horn, and the train crawled out of the station.
“A thousand thanks,” I said to Teodoro, as he put the salt in the net
over our heads.
“It’s too bad to give so much trouble.”
“Nothing--a pleasure!” Teodoro had the nicest laugh, the whitest teeth.
He and Patsy made friends on the spot. They sat chatting gaily by the
further window while the angry father wrangled with the little
_avvocato_, who exasperated him more and more every time he spoke. They
were in the midst of a hot dispute when the angry man broke off to point
out a trolley that runs from the top of the mountain to the station
where the salt is loaded on the trains.
“_Guardi_, Signora, there is the place where this pure, this exquisite
salt is excavated from the entrails of the earth. _Me spiego?_”
We had just reached a white river. Its banks were lined with nespole,
palms, fig trees, gray asphodels, bushes of green carob. From the top of
the mountain one cobweb line of black crossed another; two iron baskets
passed each other on the aerial railway, one ascending empty, the other
descending laden with shining salt.
“What a pleasure to see life, movement, activity after the desolation of
Calabria and Messina!” Patsy exclaimed.
“_Davvero!_ This should be a rich country; our people are hard working,
frugal. We need only a little foreign capital to restore La Sicilia to
her ancient greatness. Crispi[1] saw that--if we only had a few such men
today!”
“I have heard Crispi speak in the Camera--what an orator! Once at Baron
Blanc’s I talked with him,” I murmured.
“As to capital,” said Patsy, “are your taxes favorable to foreign
investors? I met a man last winter from New York representing a
syndicate; he had five millions to invest in Sardinian mines. He looked
into it, found the taxes prohibitive, and left Italy without spending a
cent. All that good money is now invested in the Argentine.”
“Taxes! We do not tax lemons as you do in the United States; on the
contrary in the summer, when they are necessary to the health of the
people, they are sold in our great cities by the Government at less than
cost!”
“Has us there!” said Patsy. “People in New York are paying forty cents a
dozen for lemons while millions of them rot on the trees of Sicily
because--on account of our damnable tariff--it’s not worth while to
gather them!”
We were passing a small forlorn station without stopping.
“Behold!” The angry man pointed to a lemon grove that bordered the
track. “What a beautiful picture!”
The trees were bowed down with the weight of lemons; the ground beneath
was yellow with the precious fruit that would lie there till it had
turned black with decay.
“We have to thank America for that,” said the angry man.
“Say something to that rude person,” I whispered to Patsy.
“There’s nothing to say; he has us on the hip.”
“What does it mean?”
“How can you expect a waif of the universe, just back from the
Argentine, to know the ins and outs? It’s some beastly log rolling. The
lemon-growers in Florida, California,--how do I know what States have
swapped votes with some of the big fellows,--you protect me, I’ll
protect you!”
“Politics, all politics,” roared the father of Teodoro. “_Una
porcheria_, mud, mud! I know; my son here has just been defeated at the
election by an animal! This one gave each voter five francs. ‘Elect me,’
he said; ‘when I am elected, come back; I will give you five francs
more.’ This piggery all comes to us from America. The Signori can tell
us. Is there not bribery and rioting at your elections?”
“As to bribery,” said Patsy, “I suppose that has existed since the
beginning of time. Rioting? The elections go off quietly enough in our
town.”
“Quietly, _per Dio_! Last night I was at the Café Greco when Z., who
writes the articles signed Piff Paff, was there. Tale came in and said
to him: ‘So it is you who please yourself in writing lies about me?’
This one took a chair, that one a bench--pim poom! Mirrors were smashed,
bottles broken, a farce--piggery--_me spiego_?”
“The elections should have been put off,” said the small _avvocato_.
“We in Sicily have enough at this moment without that business; but no,
the politicians care more about keeping their men in than about their
distracted country, desolated, ruined by the most consummate disaster
the world has seen!”
Grudgingly Teodoro’s father agreed; he would have preferred to disagree.
A man of intelligence, feeling, sentiment, not a man of power.
He had a low forehead, dark, angry eyes, a swart color that showed
Saracen descent. All his good qualities--I am sure there were many--were
nullified by his volcanic temper, that without rhyme or reason burst
forth, devastating the hour as an eruption of Etna blasts the lovely
vineyards and olive groves, and turns them into burnt lands that produce
nothing.
In the silence that followed, Teodoro’s gay lilting voice was heard
imparting advice to Patsy.
“For Palermitan dishes? Go to the Ristorante Trinacria, order _pasta con
sarde_, _baccalà à ghiotto_, _melone d’inverno_, _zibibbi_, a _fiasco_
of Vino di Zucco--Ah, behold us arrived at Termini--here is made the
best _pasta_ (macaroni) in Sicilia.”
At Trabia the little _avvocato_ hopped briskly off the train and
returned carefully carrying his bandana handkerchief filled with eggs.
“They cost a horror at Palermo; my wife always asks me this favor,” he
explained, as he stowed away three dozen eggs in his lawyer’s bag.
After Trabia our fellow travelers fell asleep worn out by much
conversation, and we were left to enjoy the marvelous scenery as we
approached the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Shell in whose midst stands
Palermo, the old Panormus--all-haven--of the Greeks. The road runs
between the mountains on the right and the sea on the left,--a narrow
strip of land ’twixt yellow sands and gray-green hills. Now and then we
caught a glimpse of some valley of paradise, with locust and Judas trees
among the groves of oranges and lemons with their “golden lamps in a
green night.” We passed many Saracen water-wheels with irrigating
trenches running through fertile fields. Between the exquisite airy blue
hills that jut out into the sea and the emerald valleys, the way crossed
many _torrenti_, dry stony water-courses descending from the mountains
to the shore. These _torrenti_ (the first we saw was the Torrente Zaera
at Messina) are characteristic of Sicily. For a short time in early
summer, when the snows on Etna and the Madonia mountains are melting,
there is water in them, but for the greater part of the year they are
empty ravines. J. saw them used in turn for roads--he even went through
one in an automobile--for stone quarries, for gravel and sand pits, and
for the washing and drying of clothes.
Sicily, the granary of the Romans, still bears three simultaneous crops
in the neighborhood of Palermo. We saw olive groves planted with grape
vines and wheat,--all three seeming to thrive. The suicidal destruction
of the forests has had the same terrific effect upon Sicily that we saw
in Spain, that we see today in the United States. After the arid, poorly
cultivated regions we had passed through, it was comforting to rest our
eyes on the lovely verdure, that, thanks to the Arabs, still surrounds
Palermo. The innumerable wells, pumping machines, norias, the
astonishing richness of the soil, reminded us at every step of Granada,
the lost paradise of the Moor. Here, in the Conca d’Oro, as in Granada,
the labor of those truly great agriculturalists, the Arabs, still
beautifies and enriches the land they loved.
Looking down upon the Golden Shell from a height, the plain seems
literally paved with the gold of oranges, lemons, mandarins and citrons.
It is one immense continuous fruit grove of the orange tribe, intermixed
with Japanese medlars, mulberries, almonds, figs and olives. The Conca
d’Oro takes its name not only from its extraordinary fertility, but from
its shape. Behind Palermo the airy mountains draw together, the plain
narrows almost to a vanishing point; as it approaches the sea it widens
out into what is variously called a shell or a cornucopia.
Palermo is alive! When still far off we had felt its life pulse
throbbing stronger and stronger; when we were in its midst, we knew this
was the heart of Sicily. We arrived at the Hotel des Palmes in good time
for dinner. The fine dining-room was filled with gaily dressed
Palermitans. After the loneliness of Syracuse and Girgenti it was
pleasant to find ourselves again among people full of the business life.
Even at the Timeo in Taormina, we had been in the shadow of the
disaster; all the Sicilians there were in deepest mourning; the few
foreigners were all connected in one way or another with the earthquake.
At the next table to ours sat General Mazza, his wife and their charming
young son. There was much jesting, and we heard the words _Pesce
d’Aprile_ continually. Across the room at another table sat a pair of
beauties in blue and rose color, the center of attraction. Young Mazza
was called away in the middle of dinner by a message that a lady must
speak to him at the telephone. Looking very important, the boy left the
room. Then the word was passed (all the guests seemed to know each other
well) that this was a _Pesce d’Aprile_. The young fellow returned to
find the pretty girls scoffing, the elders on a broad grin. He blushed
furiously as he sat down at the table again, where the General, his
father, very gorgeous in a handsome uniform, and his vivacious mother
received him with jeers. He made an amusing gesture to his tormentors,
hammering one thumbnail upon the other.
“Hello, it’s the first of April; _Pesce d’Aprile_ is their name for
April fool!” said Patsy.
How good it was to hear their merry laughter, to see these young people
brimming over with the joy of life!
After dinner we sat in the long corridor and, while the Palermitans read
their papers, flirted, drank coffee, and smoked cigarettes, Patsy and I,
like two traveling merchants, took account of our stock of knowledge.
“What do we know about Palermo?”
First of all we know its agony. A city, like a man, is remembered
longest for what it has suffered. Sicily has had three great agonies;
they loom large through the mists of history as the three promontories
of Trinacria loom out through the sea mists to the sailor feeling his
way around the island.
First: The Athenian defeat at Syracuse.
Second: The Sicilian Vespers at Palermo.
Third: The great earthquake at Messina.
The Sicilian Vespers is the name given to that terrible uprising of the
Sicilians in the year 1282, when the people turned against their French
king, Charles of Anjou. The fire of revolt had long smouldered, and it
was blown to a flame on Easter Monday when a French officer named Drouet
grossly insulted a Sicilian woman. Her husband avenged the outrage by
killing the officer. Just as the bells of Santo Spirito, a church of
Palermo, rang for the vesper service, the voice of the angry husband
roused the holiday crowd:
“Now let these Frenchmen die at last!”
The cry echoed through the length and breadth of Sicily, and every
French man, woman, and child in the island was massacred; the insult was
wiped out in seas of blood!
Palermo, or Panormus, never amounted to much in the old Greek time when
Syracuse was mistress of Sicily. It’s so alive now, because, like Rome,
it has lived a long life and is still vigorous. Its greatness really
began when, in the ninth century of our era, the Saracens came, saw, and
conquered the island and made Palermo their capital. First the Saracen,
then the Norman, last the Spaniard, have held and loved Palermo; these
three have ruled her, made her what she is, left their mark upon her. We
have already seen the Moor’s vivifying touch, in the springs that
murmur, the fountains that dance, in the earth still bright with flower
and fruit he planted, rich with the wheat he watered!
The Normans! Their conquest of Sicily is just as remarkable, quite as
romantic as their
[Illustration: PALERMO. TOWER OF THE MARTORANA. _Page 391._]
[Illustration: WATER CARRIERS, TAORMINA.]
[Illustration: PALERMO, CHURCH OF THE MARTORANA. _Page 391._]
[Illustration: PALERMO. CAPELLA PALATINA. _Page 392._]