"A beautiful place this _Segeste_ must be! One could undergo any
thing to see it!" Such would be the probable exclamation of more than
one reader looking over some _landscape annual_, embellished with
perhaps _a view_ of the celebrated temple and its surrounding
scenery; but find yourself at any of the inexpressibly horrid inns of
_Alcamo_ or _Calatafrini_, (and these are the two principal stations
between Palermo and Segeste--one with its 12,000, the other with its
18,000 inhabitants;) let us walk you down the main street of either,
and if you don't wish yourself at Cheltenham, or some other
unclassical place which never had a Latin name, we are much mistaken!
The "_Relievo dei Cavalli_" at Alcamo offers no _relief_ for you! The
_Magpie_ may prate on her sign-post about _clean_ beds, for magpies
can be made to say any thing; but pray do not construe the "_Canova
Divina_" Divine Canova! _He_ never executed any thing for the _Red
Lion_ of Calatafrini, whose "Canova" is a low wine-shop, full of
wrangling Sicilian boors. Or will you place yourself under the
_Eagle's_ wing, seduced by its _nuovi mobili e buon servizio_? Oh, we
obtest those broken window-panes whether it be not _cruel_ to expose
_new furniture_ to such perils! For us we put up at the "_Temple of
Segeste_," attracted rather by its name than by any promise or decoy
it offers. Crabbe has given to the inns at Aldborough each its
character: here all are equal in immundicity, and all equally without
provisions. Some yellow beans lie soaking to soften them. There is
salt-cod from the north, moist and putrid. There is no milk; eggs are
few. The ham at the Pizzicarolo's is always bad, and the garlicked
sausage repulsive. Nothing is painted or white-washed, let alone
dusted, swept, or scoured. The walls have the appearance of having
been _pawed_ over by new relays of dirty fingers daily for ten years.
This is a very peculiar appearance at many nasty places _out_ of
Sicily, and we really do not know its _pathology_. You tread
loathingly an indescribable earthen floor, and your eye, on entering
the apartment, is arrested by a nameless production of the fictile
art, certainly not of _Etruscan_ form, which is invariably placed on
the _bolster_ of the truck-bed destined presently for your devoted
head. Oh! to do justice to a Sicilian _locanda_ is plainly out of
question, and the rest of our task may as well be sung as said, verse
and prose being alike incapable of the hopeless reality:--
"Lodged for the night, O Muse! begin
To sing the true Sicilian inn,
Where the sad choice of six foul cells
The least exacting traveller quells
(Though crawling things, not yet in sight,
Are waiting for the shadowy night,
To issue forth when all is quiet,
And on your feverish pulses riot;)
Where one wood shutter scrapes the ground,
By crusts, stale-bones, and garbage bound;
Where unmolested spiders toil
Behind the mirror's mildew'd foil;
Where the cheap crucifix of lead
Hangs o'er the iron tressel'd bed;
Where the huge bolt will scarcely keep
Its promise to confiding sleep,
Till you have forced it to its goal
In the bored brick-work's crumbling hole;
Where, in loose flakes, the white-wash peeling
From the bare joints of rotten ceiling,
Give token sure of vermin's bower,
And swarms of bugs that bide their hour!
Though bands of fierce musquittos boom
Their threatening bugles round the room,
To bed! Ere wingless creatures crawl
Across your path from yonder wall,
And slipper'd feet unheeding tread
We know not what! To bed! to bed!
What can those horrid sounds portend?
Some waylaid traveller near his end,
From ghastly gash in mortal strife,
Or blow of bandit's blood-stained knife?
No! no! They're bawling to the _Virgin_,
Like victim under hands of surgeon!
From lamp-lit _daub_, proceeds the cry
Of that unearthly litany!
And now a train of mules goes by!
"One wretch comes whooping up the street
For whooping's sake! And now they beat
Drum after drum for market mass,
Each day's transactions on the _place!_
All things that go, or stay, or come,
They herald forth by tuck of drum.
Day dawns! a tinkling tuneless bell,
Whate'er it be, has news to tell.
Then twenty more begin to strike
In noisy discord, all alike;--
Convents and churches, chapels, shrines,
In quick succession break the lines.
Till every gong in town, at last
Its tongue hath loos'd, and sleep is past.
So much for nights! New days begin,
Which land you in another Inn.
O! he that means to see _Girgenti_
Or _Syracuse!_--needs patience plenty!"
Crossing a rustic bridge, we pass through a garden (for it is no
less, though man has had no spade in it) of pinks, marigolds,
cyclamens, and heart's-ease, &c. &c.; the moist meadow land below is
a perfect jungle of lofty grasses, all fragrant and in flower, gemmed
with the unevaporated morning dew, and colonized with the _Aphides,
Alticæ_, and swarms of the most beautiful butterflies clinging to
their stalks. _Gramina læta_ after Virgil's own heart, were these.
Their elegance and unusual variety were sufficient to throw a
botanist into a perfect HAY fever, and our own first paroxysm only
went off, when, after an hour's hard collecting, we came to a place
which demanded _another_ sort of enthusiasm; for THERE stood without
a veil the _Temple of Segeste_, with one or two glimpses of which we
had been already astonished at a distance, in all its Dorian majesty!
This almost unmutilated and glorious memorial of past ages here
reigns alone--the only building far or near visible in the whole
horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst
of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing
down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set
off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of
the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There
is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste--its
_theatre_; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing
about it at present, and must leave it in a parenthesis. To our left,
at the distance of eight miles, this hill country of harmonious and
graceful undulation ends in beetling cliffs, beneath which the sea,
now full in view, lies sparkling in the morning sunshine. We shall
never, never forget the impressions made upon us on first getting
sight of Segeste! _Pæstum_ we had seen, and thought that it exhausted
all that was possible to a temple, or the site of a temple.
Awe-stricken had we surveyed those monuments of "immemorial
antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of
prey--temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had
fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Pæstum to be probably the
most impressive monument on earth; but here at Segeste a nature less
austere, and more RIANTE in its wildness, lent a quite different
charm to a scene which could scarcely be represented by art, and for
which a reader could certainly not be _prepared_ by description. We
gave an antiquarian's devoutest worship to this venerable survivor of
2000 years, and of many empires--we _felt_ the vast masses of its
time-tried Doric, and even the wild flowers within its precincts, its
pink valerians; its _erba di vento_, its scented wallflower. The
whole scene kept our admiration long tasked, but untired. A smart
shower compelled us to seek shelter under the shoulder of one of the
grey entablatures: it soon passed away, leaving us a legacy of the
richest fragrance, while a number of wild birds of the hawk kind,
called "chaoli" from their shrill note, issued from their
hiding-places, and gave us wild music as they scudded by!
A few bits of wall scattered over the corn-fields are all that now
remains of the dwellings of the men who built this temple for their
city, and who, by its splendour, deluded the Athenians into a belief
of greater wealth than they possessed.
Our ascent to the theatre, the day after, proved to be a very steep
one, of half an hour on mule-back; in making which, we scared two of
those prodigious birds, the _ospreys_, who, having reconnoitred us,
forthwith began to wheel in larger and larger sweeps, and at last
made off for the sea. We found the interior of the theatre occupied
by an audience ready for our arrival; it consisted of innummerable
_hawks_, the chaoli just mentioned, which began to scream at our
intrusion. The ospreys soon returned, and were plainly only waiting
our departure to subside upon their solitary domain. We would not be
a soft-billed bird for something in this neighbourhood; no song would
save them from the hawks' supper. Having luxuriated on the 24th of
May for full four hours in this enchanting neighbourhood, we were
sorry to return to our inn--and such an inn! We departed abruptly,
and probably never to return; but we shall think of Segeste in Hyde
Park, or as we pass the candlestick Corinthians of Whitehall.
Thucydides[16] relates that a prevailing notion in his time was, that
the _Trojans_ after losing _Troy_ went first to _Sicily_, and founded
there Egesta and Eryx. Now, as on the same authority the first
_Greek_ colony was _Naxos_, also in Sicily, Greeks and Trojans
(strange coincidence!) must have _met again_ on new ground after the
_Iliad_ was all acted and done with, like a tale that is told.
[Footnote 16: _Vide_ THUCYDIDES, Book iv. chap. 15.]
On our return towards Palermo, one of our party having a touch of
ague, we crossed the street to the apothecary, (at Calatafrini, our
night's halt,) and smelling about his musty galenicals, amidst a
large supply of _malvas_ which were drying on his counter, the only
wholesome-looking thing amidst his stores, we asked if he had any
_quinine_. "_Sicuro!_" and he presented us with a white powder having
a slightly bitter taste, which, together with an ounce of green tea,
to be dispensed in pinches of five grains on extraordinary occasions,
comes, he says, from the East. On our observing that the quinine, if
such at all, was adulterated, and that this was too bad in a country
of malaria, where it was the poor man's only protection, he looked
angry; but we rose in the esteem of peasants in the shop, who said to
each other--"Ed ha ragione il Signor." Wanting a little _soda_, we
were presented with sub-carbonate of potash as the nearest approach
to it--a substitution which suggested to us a classical recollection
from Theocritus; namely, that in this same Sicily, 2000 years ago, a
Syracusan husband is rated by his dame for sending her _soda_ for her
washing in place of potash, the very converse of what our old
drug-vender intended to have washed our inside withal.
The Roman Catholic religion patronises painting oddly here; not a
cart but is adorned with some sacred subject. Every wretched vehicle
that totters under an unmerciful load, with one poor donkey to draw
six men, has its picture of _Souls in Purgatory_, who seem putting
their hands and heads out of the flames, and vainly calling on the
ruffians inside to _stop_. We read _Viva la Divina Providenza_, in
flaming characters on the front board of a carriole, while the whip
is goading the poor starved brute who drags it; for these barbarians
in the rear of European civilization, plainly are of opinion that a
cart with a sacred device shall not _break down_, though its owner
commit every species of cruelty.
The next day found us again installed at our old quarters in Palermo,
where, during our brief remaining stay, we visit a conchologist,
before which event we had no notion that Sicily was so rich in
shells. Two sides of a moderately large room are entirely devoted to
his collection. Here we saw a piece of wood nearly destroyed by the
_Teredo navalis_, or sailor's bore, who seems more active and
industrious here than elsewhere, and seldom allows himself to be
taken whole. Out of hundreds of specimens, three or four perfect ones
were all that this collector could ever manage to extract, the
molluscous wood-destroyer being very soft and fragile. His length is
about three inches, his thickness that of a small quill; he lodges in
a shell of extreme tenuity, and the secretion which he ejects is, it
seems, the agent which destroys the wood, and pushes on bit by bit
the winding tunnel. But his doings are nothing to the working of
another wafer-shelled bivalve, whose tiny habitations are so thickly
imbedded in the body of a nodule of _flint_ as to render its exterior
like a sieve, _diducit scopulos aceto_. What solvent can the chemist
prepare in his laboratory comparable to one which, while it dissolves
silex, neither harms the insect nor injures its shell. Amongst the
_fossils_ we notice cockles as big as ostrich eggs, clam-shells twice
the size of the largest of our Sussex coast, and those of oysters
which rival soup-plates. We had indeed once before met with them of
equal size in the lime-beds at _Corneto_. Judging by the _oysters_,
there must indeed have been _giants_ in those days. But this
collection was chiefly remarkable for its curious fossil remains of
_animals_ from _Monte Grifone_. In this same Monte Grifone, which we
went to visit, is one of the largest of the caves of bones of which
so many have been discovered--bones of various kinds, some of small,
some of very large animals, mixed together pell-mell, and
constituting a fossil paste of scarcely any thing besides. None of
the geologists, in attempting to explain these deposits, sufficiently
enter into the question of the origin of the enormous _quantity_, and
_close juxtaposition_, of such heterogeneous specimens.
By eight o'clock we are on board the _Palermo_ steamer, which is to
convey us hence to _Messina_. The baked deck, which has been
saturated with the sun's heat all day, is now cooling to a more
moderate warmth, and soothing would be the scene but for the noise of
women and children. Large liquid stars twinkle here and there, like
so many moons on a reduced scale, over the sea, and the night is
wholly delightful! A bell rings, which diminishes our numbers, and
somewhat clears our deck. The boats which carry off the last
loiterers are gone, shaking phosphorus from their gills, and leaving
a train of it in their tails; and the many-windowed Pharos of the
harbour has all its panes lit up, and twinkles after its own fashion.
Round the bay an interrupted crescent of flickering light is
reflected in the water, strongest in the middle, where the town is
thickest, and runs back; and far behind all lights comes the clear
outline of the darkly defined mountain rising over the city. Our own
lantern also is up, the authorities have disappeared, Monte Pelegrino
begins to change its position, we are in motion, and a mighty light
we are making under us, as our leviathan, turning round her head and
_snuffing_ the sea, begins to wind out of the harbour. A few minutes
more, and the luminous tracery of the receding town becomes more and
more indistinct; but the sky is _all stars_, and the water, save
where we break its smoothness, a perfect mirror. Wherever the paddles
play, there the sea foams up into yellow light and _gerbes_ of
amber-coloured fireballs, caught up by the wheels, and flung off in
our track, to float past with incredible rapidity. Men are talking
the language of Babel in the cabin; there is amateur singing and a
guitar on deck--_Orion_ is on his dolphin--adieu, Palermo!