had gone to whip into docility sundry recalcitrants among his unruly
barons--when his vessel was overtaken by a violent storm of the sort
that so often lashes the Mediterranean into fury. The King, greatly
alarmed, vowed a fine church in honor of the Christ and the Twelve
Apostles if he and all his company were permitted to land unharmed. The
ship made Cefalù head, and everyone came ashore safely. Two years later
King Roger fulfilled his vow, by establishing a town at the foot of the
cliff, and beginning to rear the most magnificent sanctuary that had
been built in Sicily since the Greeks constructed their massive Doric
temples.
Tremendous and massive are the only words that fit this building, and
the enormous hewn stones upon which the façade rests seem to indicate
that here must once have stood some ancient fortification which offered
the Norman architects a permanent base upon which to build their shrine.
The twin spires, the play of the interlacing arches, the round-headed
portal--it is especially worthy of notice, by the way--all spell the
cool and coherent genius of the northern French architect. Indeed, it
is, like King Roger himself, of the Norman brood, but thoroughly adapted
to its Sicilian environment.
Within, one realizes how royally Roger fulfilled his vow. What miracles
were wrought by these hard-living, hard-fighting, hard-worshiping souls
who took their religion with such mighty seriousness that it became an
integral part of themselves and their daily lives! The main body of the
Cathedral is plain white and generally barren. But no pen can describe
in detail the blazing mosaics in the tribune without heaping color upon
color, design upon design. The colors of the pictures were executed by
artists who were almost tone impressionists, so delicate are the soft
shades they used to set off the more primitive hues of the borders.
From the floor of the chancel the flying ribs of the roof seem sections
of delicate enameled work. The farther away one stands the more perfect
the illusion becomes, to the point where the designs lose their
identity. Indeed, no master jeweler could produce a more harmonious
effect with his intricate interweaving of colors and blending of tones.
But the crowning wonder of the Cathedral--as in the Cathedral of
Monreale and the Cappella Palatina--is the enormous mosaic bust of the
Christ which fills the vault of the tribune. Built up like its fellows
of the brilliant bits of colored glass that adorn the rest of the apse,
it seems a portrait of encrusted gems, a human conception of the Godhead
that flashes inspiration from myriad delicate facets.
[Illustration: “One realizes how royally Roger fulfilled his vow in this
magnificent Cathedral.”]
Nevertheless, Cefalù Cathedral fails to impress the beholder as do the
other two in which there is not a jarring or inconsistent note from pave
to rooftree. Here in Cefalù the bare and dingy plaster walls of the
main body--adorned with dubious figures of saints of both sexes, covered
with dirt and cobwebs and minus certain of their limbs--make a contrast
so glaring as to strike dismay to the most appreciative spirit.
Old as the Cathedral is, the beach at Cefalù is strewn with curious
craft that seem even more ancient: queer old feluccas, cask-like smacks
with barrel bows and truncated sterns swept by huge tillers,
bottle-nosed xebecs with staring painted eyes for hawse-holes and
central sideboards in lieu of keels. And nowhere else in the island are
the different types of the forefathers more numerous and distinct: here
a distinctly Semitic type, with the swart face, black beard and piercing
eyes of the Phœnicians; here a pure Greek face worthy of the
sculptor; there a burnt-up son of the desert, and yonder a Roman beside
a Gaul. Busy and prosperous they seem, for all their dirt and
indifference to squalor and evil smells; and moreover, contented. Their
fishing smacks bring in tons of herring which by euphemy go out of
Cefalù in cans of oil as the best sardines. The chief industries of the
town, after the selling of clothes and notions, seemed to be the
manufacture and sale of cheap perfumes and footgear, so far as I could
see.
From Cefalù westward the railway runs beside acres upon acres of
artichokes and whole fields of crimson sumac, while the “donkey ears” of
the prickly pear form spiky hedges and great pin cushions everywhere.
For these are the _Campi Felici_, the Happy Fields of Fertility, whose
fruitful farms give back rich returns for the labor spent upon them, and
which murmur always with the creaking music of huge wooden wheels over
which run the endless strings of irrigating buckets introduced ages ago
by the Arabs. Another of their importations is manna. On the slopes of
Angels’ Peak--otherwise Gibilmanna, or Manna Mountain--these trees still
grow, as they did in Africa and Araby, and the people gather
considerable quantities of their exudations of gum.
Ten miles down the line we come to the site of Himera. Here two of the
greatest events in Greek history transpired, battles both, one a
glorious victory, the other a frightful defeat and disaster. The good
tyrant Theron of Akragas secured his vast number of able-bodied slaves
here after the first battle, when in 480 B. C., with his son-in-law, the
tyrant Gelon of Syracuse, he defeated the Carthaginians. It is said that
Hamilcar himself took no part in the battle, but that all day he stood
alone on a hilltop overlooking the fight, watching the Greeks driving
back his picked troops. All day he prayed and sacrificed in vain, and at
evening, his own army little more than a disorganized rabble streaming
pellmell across the field, he threw himself into the altar fire as a
supreme sacrifice to the bloody gods of Carthage. When Hamilcar’s
grandson, Hannibal Gisgon, was sent over in another campaign against the
Sicilian Greeks--this warfare was practically continuous--he wasted no
time--though he destroyed Selinus by the way--but hurried to Himera,
urged on by the spirit of filial vengeance. Baal and Ashtaroth were more
gracious to him than they had been to his grandfather, and he wiped
Himera from the map, literally leaving not one stone upon another in the
fated city. At the end of the day he made his sacrifice to the
gods--three thousand of the men of Himera, all who were left alive after
the battle, on the very spot where the Shophet Hamilcar seventy-one
years before had offered up himself.
* * * * *
What is the relation between street cries and criers? Do certain words
or names necessarily draw to themselves vendors whose characters can be
influenced by the sounds they utter in selling their wares; or do
natures of a given sort instinctively select only those things whose
names have a corresponding spirit to their own? Some Max Mueller can
perhaps answer the question; but anyone can observe the facts. They
apply especially to newsboys in the Latin countries. Passing Termini
again--the hot springs of Himera--the papers were just out, and the
voice of the little fellow at the window of the compartment with copies
of _The Hour_ was a long, musical drawl--“_L’ Oh-oh-oh-oh--raaaa! L’
Oh-oh-oh-oh--raaa...!_” Very different from this cry was that of the lad
selling _Life_. He cried in a sharp staccato recitative, repeating very
rapidly: “_La Vita-Vita-Vita-Vit’-Vit’-Vit’!_” Most lackadaisical of all
was the older boy who had _Sicilia_. From scarcely opened lips and with
dreamy eyes, he slowly intoned each syllable of the name, extending and
amplifying and sweetening it, as a tender morsel of which he could not
get enough, softening his c’s and making his l’s most liquid and
mellifluous--“_Seee-sheeeeee-lll-ly-aaaaah!_”
About the time that the Phœnicians founded Panormos, their greatest
city, in the bosom of the rich plain at the water’s edge, they also
founded another city upon the crest of a lofty rock at the other side of
the bay, and called it Solous, probably from the Hebrew or Phœnician
word _sela_, meaning rock. It was a border fortress, a watch tower from
which the Semitic traders could keep an eye on the ever encroaching
Greeks. But when the heyday of Phœnician power was fading, the
Soluntines invited the conquering Romans in, so the meager ruins to be
seen are not the wreck of Phœnician Solous, but of the Roman Soluntum
in which its identity was swallowed up. No greater contrast can be
imagined than that which exists between these two cities--Palermo
living, Solunto dead beyond any power to infuse life into its stony
veins.
[Illustration: “Solous was ... a border fortress, a watch-tower from
which to eye the encroaching Greeks.”]
There are three ways to reach Solunto--that is its modern Italian
name--by express train to the station for Bagheria; by accommodation to
Santa Flavia, which is within five minutes’ walk of the Antichità di
Solunto; or by carriage from Palermo, a ten- or twelve-mile drive each
way. Luncheon should be taken. If you enjoy a lively time, by all means
go by express to Bagheria on a _festa_ or feast-day. As you step from
the station platform you are immediately the center of a howling mob of
peasants and hackmen, all behaving like enraged lunatics and grabbing at
you from every side. When this happened to me, I called into play all
the football tactics I had ever learned, charged through the thickest of
the mass, and pelted down the road in exceedingly undignified fashion,
the whole pack yelling derisively at my heels.
As I trudged ahead, I heard the squeak of ungreased wheels, and was
hailed by the driver of a skeleton stage capable of holding four
uncomfortably--five were already in it.
“Hai--get in and ride!” he called cheerily. “Where are you going?”
“To Bagheria. I like walking!”
The driver laughed; so did his inconsiderate fares. “It is a very long
walk by this road to Bagheria--all the way around Sicily!”
I stopped walking. He went on: “But if you want to go to Solunto, I’ll
take you there for three _lire_. You can walk to Bagheria from there.”
“But your stage is too full now,” I objected.
“Never! Plenty of room. Come--I’ll take you for two _lire_, if you can’t
afford to pay me three.”
Crowding uncomfortably together, the other occupants, decent young
peasants, made room for me, and we creaked slowly on behind the
half-starved horse whose best pace was a walk. Here a huge brown villa
of the soap-box type deflected the road to one side; there fresh young
vegetables sprouted thickly from clay pits which had all the seeming of
prehistoric stone ruins; yonder a meadow full of drying brick and loose
straw proclaimed the brickmaker at work. Turning and twisting, the road
wandered on leisurely until we neared the Antichità di Solunto, the rest
house where visitors may stop to eat luncheon and buy the sour red wine
the custodian has for sale. A sudden ominous sagging of the rear of the
stage made everyone seize something. But a cheery voice reassured us,
and Gualterio’s beaming face peered in over the tailboard.
“I am here, _signore_!” he cried delightedly. “Behold, if you need me.”
I crawled out with some difficulty while everybody laughed but the
driver, who was demanding four _lire_ instead of two. Promptly Gualterio
took command of the situation.
“You go on--I will pay him!” and he turned on the fellow with a fervid
exposition of his complete ancestry of thieves and jailbirds, threw him
two _lire_, and started him off again.
The road up the hill to Solunto is magnificently paved even yet with the
great irregular smooth blocks the Romans put to such excellent purpose
on their military highways, curving to take advantage of every angle in
the abrupt hillside, winding among thickets of prickly pear, and past
little irrigation ducts among lemon groves which murmur with a susurrant
echo of the little channels that flow down Granada’s long slope. Neatly
piled beside the upper reaches of the road on either hand are
dismembered columns, statues, fragments of pilasters, cornices, and
blocks of marble. The ruins of the city itself are unsatisfying and
meager--a single wide street lined with the foundations of some
buildings of undiscernible age, half a dozen streets, similarly
desolated, crossing it at almost right angles, a single three-cornered
structure set up by an archæologist and called, for want of a better
title, the Gymnasium, and here and there some bit of mosaic pavement or
wall decoration.
Indeed, no one knew the exact site of Soluntum, which vanished ages ago,
until in 1825 a peasant scratching about on the hillside unearthed
splendid marble candelabra whose richness indicated their Roman origin,
and small statues of Jupiter and Isis. Soluntum was found, and the
archæologists proceeded to uncover it. It reminds one strongly of
Pompeii, though much less of interest has been discovered in it. But
Solunto has a view, a transcendent panorama before which even a fountain
pen falters.
At the foot of the hill, Gualterio--he had come out from Palermo for the
_festa_--put me into a passing jaunting car and sent me on my way to the
villas of Bagheria, the most interesting of which is the property of
Prince Palagonia. On either side of the gate are two queer old gnomes
mounted upon marble pedestals and dressed in fantastic adaptations of
Saracenic costume; the head gardener’s wife assured me that these trolls
are so terrible they frighten away not only trespassers, but “any other
evil spirit” who dares to come that way. She crossed herself devoutly
when she mentioned the names of certain malicious spirits who, she said,
would be only too glad to molest Bagheria but for the forethought of the
Prince.
The hollow wall about the rather ragged garden is wide enough in places
to be used as dwellings for the servants. Courageous indeed must they be
to rest under the shapes that decorate the wall, as weird a collection
of zoological nightmares as ever were carved in stone by an insane
sculptor at the hest of an insane patron. Black with age and the
weather, grotesque pipers, trolls, knights, gentlemen, ladies, elves,
monkeys, dragons, hunchbacks, cats, roosters, things intended to be
representations of evil spirits, a miscellaneous scattering of angels
and cherubs, a virgin or two, and the Prince’s patron saint, stand,
jump, walk, fly, or poise on one foot.
A heavy wind had played havoc with some of the figures a few days before
my visit. “_Ecc’!_” exclaimed the gardener’s wife, pointing ahead.
On the wall a most pious madonna, her hands crossed over her faded blue
breast, gazed sadly down upon a dancer standing upon her head and buried
almost to her shoulders in the mucky earth. How horrified the staid
Virgin must have been when the worldling flew down the wind and poised
upside down!
“Frightful, isn’t it?” asked my guide.
“Oh, _spaventosa_! When are you going to put her back on the wall?” I
inquired.
She shook her head sadly. “I do not know. Maybe never. The Prince is not
rich enough now to bother about raising fallen ladies!”
There are other unoccupied villas in Bagheria of the same kind, with the
same sort of “devil-scarers,” but I preferred the live performers to the
dead ones--the _festa_ waited. ‘_Festa di San Giu_,’ the natives called
it; but the railroad announcements in the stations stated that it was a
town fair in honor of San Giuseppe. Bagheria itself is not a
particularly attractive town, though clean and well-kept, and its
nineteen or twenty thousand inhabitants do their best to decorate
themselves and their buildings in honor of the saint, while thousands of
merrymakers flock in from Palermo and all the country round.
At one side of the Corso two workmen were nailing pinwheels, serpents,
set pieces and other explosives to a set of frames for a _castello di
fuoco_ (fire-castle), at the same time puffing on long, thin Italian
cigars. As I came along, one of the men knocked the ashes of cigar upon
a pile of small saucissions, and nodded a cheerful greeting.
“What’s the matter?” he called, as I sprang back. “Did something bite
you?”
“No,” I replied, steadily walking backward. “But aren’t those
fireworks?”
“Certainly!”
Stalls with cakes, sweet bread-sticks, candies, preserved watermelon
seeds, nuts, fruit of various sorts, and indigestion-breeding pastry
filled the streets. Around them the people flocked in their wonderful
Sunday clothes. Others, gray-headed and sedate, sat in couples on the
curbs, the men, generally fat, tinkling on ridiculously tiny mandolins,
while their wives sang, and the crowds in the cafés and on the sidewalks
clapped time or danced with feet, hands and heads, though all the while
sitting still. One wineshop, little more than a cellar, had twelve heaps
of not overly clean straw spread upon the damp stones.
“Does the illustrious foreign _Signore_ require a bed?” asked the
proprietor with a grinning bow. “Most cheap, sir, and excellent, only
two _soldi_--for all night. Eleven are already taken. Behold the
property!” and he pointed to various lumpy bundles of clothes, and large
bandanna handkerchiefs tied at the corners, undoubtedly containing food.
The owners of these bundles had made sure of their beds by stuffing
their property into the straw. Thanking the genial Boniface, I declined
his invitation and passed on.
At San Giuseppe the people, with cheery indifference, had turned the
yard of the house of prayer into a den of thieves. Gambling of every
sort known to the Sicilian peasantry was going on, and two games were
running full blast, one on each side of the main entrance. There were
the familiar _p’tits ch’vaux_; lotto on a black rubber sheet bearing
numbers; the old familiar shell game, and a sort of crude roulette.
Surrounding these stalls, of which there were nineteen on the sloping
piazza between the church and the street, were hundreds of boys and
young men, mostly lads of ten to twelve years. Their average play was
one _soldo_ or penny, the minimum bet half a _soldo_, and the high four
_soldi_.
The façade of the church was covered with hundreds of oil-cups in rows.
Inside, the whitewashed walls were hung, for the nonce, with a
bewildering jumble of strips of gaudy colored cloth, pendant from the
gallery, fringed and criss-crossed with gold lines like cheap wall
paper. The image of San Giu’ (Saint Joseph), mounted upon a large float,
waited at one side of the nave ready to go out on the men’s shoulders
just at dusk for the procession, and around it stood eighteen candles,
some of them six inches in diameter and no less than six feet in height.
On the front of the float hung votive offerings, paintings in smudgy
oils on cardboard, one showing the death of Benedetto Giuseppe, at the
hand of an assassin.
Children with carts and poles and rubber balls played about while old
men and women knelt praying on the stone floor, and young girls strolled
about in giggling pairs. Four hundred or more guttering candles filled
the church with smoke and falling flakes of soot, and “all the world”
eddied in and out comfortably and contentedly, unawed by their church or
their saint, making a comrade of holy Giuseppe and at peace with the
whole of Creation, including even the foreign interloper with the
camera, who sat to one side and watched as they made merry.
XVII
THE WESTERN SHORE
Going westward from Palermo, the railroad cuts inland behind Monte
Pellegrino, crossing the Conca d’Oro past many villas, and does not
again touch the coast until, ten miles away, it reaches Sferracavallo,
whose main street is so atrociously paved as to give the town its
merited name--Unshoe-a-Horse. The line then skirts the shore for some
distance, and the early morning scenes on the water to the right are
more than lovely. Fishermen flit about in their white-winged boats or
toil at launching the heavy craft. The waterfront of every village is a
hive of industry. One picturesque and striking scene after another flits
by until, at the end of an hour or so, we come out at Cinisi-Terrasini
on the shores of the Gulf of Castellammare, a tremendous, sparkling
expanse belted in by a fillet of gleaming white sand. From the bay,
orchards and grain fields roll upward to the hills that pyramid, one
upon another, into mountains dim and blue in the misty distance.
At Partinico we desert the shore and sweep in a ragged loop inland to
pause a moment at the town--it has a far reaching trade in oil and
wine--before darting back shoreward again, unable to resist the
fascination of Father Neptune. Close to the water’s edge another town,
Balestrate, sprawls along shore among the dunes, over which grows a
savage luxuriance of reeds and grasses, among which, on an occasional
acre, wrested from barrenness, is a hut of thatch and a hardy family of
hard working peasants. Can these be the descendants of the Sikans and
Sikels who so long ago vanished from the earth; and are these huts
anything like the primitive dwellings in which those still more
primitive folk loved and bred and died? Certainly except for using iron
tools and smoking tobacco, they seem to have little advantage over their
progenitors. Paying back-breaking taxes and furnishing conscripts to-day
is almost as bad as being at the mercy of a Greek tyrant with his
demands for money and men.
At the head of the bay, three miles before the railroad reaches the town
of Castellammare, once the seaport of Elymian Segesta, it turns
southward, and ascends the valley of the Fiume San Bartolommeo. Its
principal tributary is the Fiume Freddo (Cold Stream), once the
Krimisos, near which a wonderful battle was fought between the
Carthaginians, and the Greeks under Timoleon the Deliverer. So alarmed
was Carthage by his prowess and activity that for the first time the
Sacred Band, the picked Home Guard, was sent over to Sicily. Near the
Krimisos, Timoleon, undaunted by the desperate odds, hurled his eleven
thousand Greeks against the 70,000 barbarians. Just before the conflict
the Greeks met a mule train laden with _selinon_, or wild celery, the
plant used at funerals. What omen could have been worse? Panic hovered
in the air. But Timoleon’s wit was quick and sure. Gayly he made a
wreath of the plant and crowned himself, with the remark that it was the
crown used at the Isthmian Games. With a shout of relief officers and
men followed his example, and confidence mounted high as the host
marched on. In the battle that followed, the very gods of Hellas fought
for the Deliverer, Zeus the Thunderer darkening the heavens and hurling
his fiery bolts. Rain and hail quenched the ardor of the Carthaginians;
the thunder deafened and the lightning blinded them--the whole storm
drove straight in their faces. And the Greeks, marching forward steadily
under the divine ægis, cut the Punic host to pieces, annihilated the
Sacred Band.
History repeated itself May 15, 1860, when, on the hills of Calatafimi,
again a deliverer of the people, this time Giuseppe Garibaldi, crushed a
foreign enemy and oppressor. Many an army had marched and camped and
fought among these hills and vales, and the powdery dust of the
milk-white roads had puffed up from the feet of Elymian and
Phœnician, Greek and Roman legions. But never before had a victory
meant so much to civilization as the success of the badly armed but
desperately determined and immortal Thousand who followed the
gray-haired sailor-hero. And history repeated itself yet again when
Garibaldi, like Timoleon, refused everything for himself, counting it
honor enough to serve Sicily so well.
While it is possible to drive from Castellammare to all the points of
interest in the vicinity, and they are many, it is better to go on by
the train to the station Alcamo-Calatafimi. Neither town is near the
railway station, but either _diligenzia_ or carriage is to be had for
the ride--four miles to Alcamo, an old Saracenic town which still keeps
a certain oriental tang, or about six miles in the other direction to
Calatafimi. Almost straight north, along the high-road to Castellammare,
are the ruins of Segesta, a spot full of tragic memories.