I
To cycle in Sicily is to experience the joys or the sorrows of the
pioneer, to pedal backward on the road of Time, and revisit the
pre-bicycle period ere man had evolved into a rotiferous animal. Palermo
has witnessed the landing of many tribes and races: Phœnician and Greek,
Roman and Goth, Saracen and Norman, Spaniard and Savoyard. But not till
my comrade and I disembarked with our wheels had any cyclist troubled
the Custom House. Others, indeed, had preceded us by land, but we hold
the record by sea—the first marine invaders. And our arrival, by way of
Tunis, fitly fluttered and puddered the guardians of the port. Three or
four officials and a chaos of bystanders, quidnuncs, and porters,
entered into excited discussion. The recording angel—a mild and muddled
clerk, whose palsied pen shook in his fingers—turned over not only a
new leaf, but a new book, and made us sign in three wrong places of the
immaculate tome; we had to answer a world of questions, and await
innumerable calculations and consultations. Meantime, without, the rich,
romantic harbour fretted our curiosity, and the painted Sicilian carts
gave an air of fairyland. The very dust-carts were perambulating
art-galleries, pompous with grave historic themes, or pious with carven
angels or figures of the Virgin; the horn of the horses was exalted,
springing in scarlet from the middle of their backs, their blinkers and
headpieces were broidered in red. The workaday world was transfigured to
poetry, and the old Church-poet’s maxim,
“Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th’ action fine,”
seemed translated into visual glorification of the dignity of labour and
the joy of common life.
Everything combined to make us kick our heels with unusual viciousness.
Finally we were condemned to pay about fourpence each, and, mounting our
ransomed machines, we rode forth into the strange new world.
Palermo itself proved a disappointment; a monstrous, straggling, stony,
modern city, wedged between mountain and harbour, as difficult to escape
from as a circle of the Inferno. Miles on miles of hard riding still
leave you hemmed in by unlovely houses, harried by electric trams. But
at last, by muddy byways, you come upon fluting shepherds, grey
olive-trees, flowering almonds, orange-groves, gleaming like fairy gold
through bowers of green, and beyond and consecrating all, the
blue-spreading, sun-dimpled sea. You have reached the land of
Theocritus—though Theocritus himself, by the way, is quite unknown to
the Palermese booksellers. And if Palermo is prosaic, Monreale, not five
miles off, is one of the remotest towns in Europe. Perched eleven
hundred and fifty feet above the sea, over which it looks superbly
across a pastoral landscape, it is a dirty network of steep and ancient
alleys, with shrines at street-corners, and running fountains down
steps, and large yellowish jars on the house-ledges by way of cisterns.
The roadway swarms with morose, shawled, swarthy men, lounging and
gossiping, while the busy women stride along, bearing brimming
vase-pitchers on their gracefully poised, kerchiefed heads; goats,
greedy of garbage, feed ubiquitously, some rampant on tubs of squeezed
lemons; poultry peck and scurry through the slime; the milkman passes
with his mobile milk-can, the she-goat, to be tapped at every door; on
the mouldering façades stream flaring insignia of orange-peel, strung
together for sale to confectioners, or macaroni hangs a-drying in the
sun. And, for crowning assurance of mediævalism, the magnificent
Roman-Saracen cathedral, surely one of the seven wonders of Christendom,
offers its bronze portals and its Byzantine blaze of mosaics, Bible
illustrations naïve as a Noah’s ark. Monreale is already the true
Sicily, with its aloofness from the modern age, and with its
architecture carrying like geological strata the record of all the
influences to which it has been exposed. Presently the cyclist or the
motorist will leave a new imprint upon the historic soil, saturated with
the blood of rival races, and with the finest poetry of Pagan mythology.
At present there are few roads for him to follow, and fewer inns to
lodge him, and the rumour of brigands dogs his footsteps, though we
ourselves never encountered even an exorbitant landlord. Like Blondins
of the bicycle, we pursued our unmolested way over tenuous ridges,
’twixt ditch and rut, daring to swerve no hair’s-breadth, and the only
terror of the countryside was that which we ourselves produced. Wherever
we passed, pigs scuttered and poultry fluttered, and goats bleated and
kids scampered; horses reared and broke from their traces, mules
stampeded in craven terror, dogs fled howling or dumb-struck, whole
populations crowded to the doors and balconies, children escorted us
literally by hundreds, racing by short cuts across the mountain-paths to
get additional glimpses of us from parallel parapets. Like ominous
comets we flared through the old Sicilian villages, scattering awe and
wonder. The only sensible creatures were the donkeys; they regarded us
stolidly, or turned a head of mere intelligent curiosity upon our
receding mechanisms. Our wheels had become Time-machines, tests of the
difference from standard central-European time, and they showed Sicily
half a century—nay, a whole cycle—slow.
Chronology is indeed a metaphysical figment, and even this little globe
still offers all the centuries simultaneously to the traveller.
Fantastic is the common reckoning of time by which our globe revolves in
a temporal continuum, so that it is the same date—within twelve
hours—all over its surface. The Irishman who spoke of the so-called
nineteenth century was severely logical. The nineteenth century has not
even yet dawned for the bulk of our planet, which presents in fact a
bewildering diversity of dates. The Pyrenees divide not merely right
from wrong, as Pascal was puzzled to find, but even century from
century.
Meals in the byways of Sicily were rather haphazard. The hotels had
often nothing in the house, and even when one advanced the money to get
something, there might be a dearth in the neighbourhood. Macaroni is,
however, a standby. But a single bed-sitting-dining-and-coffee-room
spells adventure rather than accommodation. The possession of one spare
room sets up the hardy Sicilian peasant-woman as a hotel-keeper. Ceres
wandering through Sicily in search of Proserpina must have had a poorish
time, unless she fell back upon her own horn of plenty. It was a
voluptuous emotion to glide one evening into the broad white streets of
Castelvetrano under a crescent moon and into the haven of a real hotel.
Castelvetrano was the nearest town to one of the great goals of our
pilgrimage—the ruins of Selinunte. The Normans did not conquer Sicily
as permanently as those old Greeks, and even in their decay the Greek
temples of Sicily rank with the most precious vestiges of ancient art.
Some hours of cycling brought us to the magnificent chaos of graven
stone that fronts eternity on a barren field by a lonely shore. There
they lie, seven temples, sublime in their very huddle and pell-mell, a
wilderness of snapt and tumbled columns, Ossa piled on Pelion. Only one
of Vulcan’s freaks—and the fire god had a workshop under Etna—could
have wrought this mighty upheaval. In utter abandonment the land
stretches towards the empty sea, and where priests sacrificed and
worshippers trod, spring the wild parsley, the purple anemone, the
marigold, and the daisy. From clefts of the great broken bases or in
hollows of the fallen capitals push dwarf palms and myrtles, like the
lower world of the vegetable reasserting itself over the stone that had
mounted to beauty by alliance with man’s soul. An odd monolith left
towering here or there but accentuates the desolation.
The temples of Concord and of Juno Lacinia still stand four-square to
the winds at Girgenti. But of all the temples that preserve for us “the
glory that was Greece,” that of Segesta stands predominant, if only by
reason of its situation. From afar it draws the eye upwards, gleaming
almost white on its hilltop. But, standing amid the wild fennel in its
grassy court, you see that the noble Doric pillars, though marvellously
preserved through three-and-twenty centuries, are corroded in great
holes and bear the rusty livery of Time. Behind the temple the earth
sinks into a gigantic cup, forming a natural theatre, and in front
stretches a vast spread of rolling hills, with beautiful cloud-shadows
of purple and brown and silver, and a little glimmer of the Gulf of
Castellamare. The few cultivated patches, the faint trees and solitary
farms in the dim background, scarcely modify the impression of Nature
unadorned. Nothing is given you but the largest elemental things—the
sun, the sea, the barren mountains, and the sternest, sublimest form of
human architecture. Nothing is known even as to the god to whom the
temple was dedicated.
One could wish that mighty Syracuse, with its memories of Æschylus and
Pindar, had lapsed to such a wilderness instead of surviving as a small
modern town for tourists. A Babylon with restaurants and cab-fares is
bathos. But Taormina—the first Greek settlement—still remains, despite
its pleasure-pilgrims, the culminating point of a visit to Sicily.
Culminating, too, in a sense that will not recommend it to cyclists.
Ours are perhaps the only machines that have laboured steadily and daily
up this forbidding steep, some four hundred feet above the sea and the
railway station. The road mounts even higher—past walled gardens of
roses and lemons and almonds, till from the ruined castle at Mola you
command a marvellous scape of land and sea. But the mere every-day view
from Taormina itself is one of the greatest pictures of the Cosmic
Master, for out beyond the sunlit straits shows the Calabrian foot of
Italy, generally muffled in a fairy mist, while the Sicilian shore is
washed by a pale rainbowed streak of sea. And for eternal background
Etna towers, infinitely various, now in snow-white majesty, now
cloud-veiled and sombre, now ablaze with an apocalyptic splendour of
sunset. But it is in the wooded gorges around Taormina, with their
tumbling rock-broken streams, that the climax of Sicilian
picturesqueness is reached: here is all the wild witchery of romantic
landscape, set to music, as it were, by the piping and trilling of some
solitary, far-off shepherd, whose every note travels clear-cut in the
lucid air. In the grove below you passes a procession of young women,
their right hands supporting lemon-baskets on their shawled heads. Their
feet are bare, and they sing a wistful Eastern melody as they move
slowly on. A boy leads a black cow by a string round its horns. All is
antique and pastoral. Or rather, the Eclogues of Virgil and the Idylls
of Theocritus seem contemporary.
At the Greek Theatre, too, that naked majestic amphitheatre, how
tinkling and trivial would have sounded the dialogue of modern drama.
Sophocles and Æschylus alone could fill the spaces with due thunder. Or
was not the large drama of the Greeks positively forced upon them by
this great natural theatre, o’er-towered by mountains, roofed by the
sky, and giving on the sapphire sea? The infinities and the eternities
conspired with the dramatist in a religious uplifting, and his utterance
must needs be spacious and noble.