SE N SICILY AND ANNE HOYT LIBRARY I ONiveRsry OF CALIFOKVWI SAN DIEQO I SEEKERS IN SICILY 'DEMETER'S WELL- BELOVED CHILDREN" SEEKERS IN SICILY BEING A QUEST FOR PERSEPHONE BY JANE AND PERIPATETICA Done into the Vernacular By ELIZABETH BISLAND AND ANNE HOYT NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMIX LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD Copyright, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY To ANDERS AND FRAU ZORN FROM THE NORTH, IN MEMORY OF THE SUN AND THE SOUTH, THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED BY A PAIR OF "WORD BRAIDERS" NOTE ' f HE designs upon the cover of this book, and at the beads of the chapters, are the tribe signs or totems of the original inhab- itants of the island of Sicily, which have survived all conquests and races and are still considered as tokens of good luck and de- fenders from the Evil-eye. PREFACE WHEN this book was written in the spring of the year the Land of the Older Gods was unmarred by the terrible seismic convulsions which wrought such ruin in the last days of 1908. Very sad to each of us it is when time and the sorrows of "this unintelligible world" carve furrows upon our own countenances, but when the visage of the globe shrivels and wrinkles with the lapse of ages then the greatness of the disaster touches the whole race. Sicily, whose history is so full of blood and tears, has been the victim of the greatest natural tragedy that man's chronicles record because of this line drawn by Time upon our planet's face yet it leaves her still so fair, so poignantly lovely, that pilgrims of beauty will- forgetting this slight blemish still journey to see the sweetest remnant of the world's youth. Happily 9 10 PREFACE Messina, the one city injured, was the one city where travellers rarely paused. All the others remain unmarred and are still exactly as they were when this chronicle of their ancient beauty and charm was set down. E. B. AND A. H. CONTENTS PREFACE CHAPTER I ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS . 15 CHAPTER II A NEST OF EAGLES 45 CHAPTER III ONE DEAD IN THE FIELDS 126 CHAPTER IV THE RETURN OF PERSEPHONE 178 CHAPTER V A CITY OF TEMPLES 192 CHAPTER VI THE GOLDEN SHELL 229 11 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS "Demeter's Well-Beloved Children" .... Frontispiece PAGE "A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself" 68 "Pan's Goatherd" 132 "yEtna, The Salient Fact of Sicily" 186 " The Saffron Mass of Concordia " 198 "Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of Flowers" . 218 "Sicily's Picture-book, The Painted Cart" .... 234 "The Last Resting Place of Queen Constance" . . . 249 13 SEEKERS IN SICILY CHAPTER I ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS " He ne'er is crown'd with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead." "On, Persephone, Persephone! . . . Surely Kore* is in Hell." This is a discouraged voice from the window. " Peripatetica, that sounds both insane and improper. Would it fatigue you too much to explain in the vernac- ular what you are trying, in your roundabout way, to suggest?" Thus Jane, a mere diaphanous mauve cloud, from which the glimmering fire picked out glittering points here and there. When Jane takes to teagowns she is really very dressy. Peripatetica strolled up and down the dusky drawing- room two or three times, without answering. Outside a raging wind drove furiously before it in the darkness the snow that flew upward in long spirals, like desperate hunted ghosts. Finally she took up a book from the 15 16 SEEKERS IN SICILY table, and kneeling, to get the light from the logs on the page, began to read aloud. These two were on such kindly terms that either one could read aloud without arousing the other to open violence. "Persephone, sometimes called Kore " read Peri- patetica, " having been seized by Pluto, as she gathered narcissus, and wild thyme, and mint, and the violet into her green kirtle was carried, weeping very bitterly, into his dark hell. And Demeter, her mother, missing her fair and sweet-curled daughter, sought her through all the world with tears and ravings; the bitter sound and moisture of her grief making a noise as of winter wind and rain. And her warm heart being so cold with pain the blossoms died on her bosom, and her vernal hair was shredded abroad into the air, and all growing things drooped and perished, and her brown benignant face became white as the face of the dead are white " Peripatetica closed the book, put it back on the table, and drew a hassock under her for a seat. "I see," said Jane. "Demeter is certainly passing this way to-night, poor dear! It's a pity she can't realize Persephone, that sweet soul of Spring, will come back. She always does come back." "Yes; but Demeter, the mother-earth, always fears that this time she may not; that Pluto will keep her in hell always. And every time she makes the same out- cry about it." " I suppose she always finds her first in Enna," Jane hazarded. " Isn't Enna in Sicily ? " "Yes, I think so; but I don't know much about Sicily, though everybody goes there nowadays. Let's go there, Jane, and help Demeter find Persephone." TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 17 "Let's!" agreed Jane, with sympathetic enthusiasm, and they went. Now, being Americans, and therefore accustomed to the most obliging behaviour on the part of the male sex, it never occurred to them that Pluto might be ungallant enough to object to their taking a hand in. But he did as they might have foreseen would be likely in a person so unmannerly as to snatch lovely daughters from devoted mothers. It began on the ocean. On quite a calm evening a wave, passing from under the side of the ship, threw its crest back perhaps to look at the stars and fell head over heels into their open port. Certainly as much as two tons of green and icy Atlantic entered impulsively, and by the time they were dried out and comforted by the tight-corseted, rosy, sympathetic Lemon every object they possessed was a mere bunch of depressed rumples. Throughout the rest of the voyage they presented the unfortunate appearance of having slept in their clothes, including their hats. These last, which they had be- lieved refreshingly picturesque, or coquettish, at start- ing, had that defiantly wretched aspect displayed by the broody hen after she has been dipped in the rain-barrel to check her too exuberant aversion to race-suicide. That was how Pluto began, and it swiftly went from bad to worse. Three large tourist ships discharged bursting cargoes of humanity upon Naples on one and the same day, and the hotel-keepers rose to their opportunity and dealt guilefully with the horde clamouring as with one voice for food and shelter. That one's hard-won shelter was 18 SEEKERS IN SICILY numbered 1 2 bis (an artful concealment of the unlucky number 13) was apparently an unimportant detail. It was shelter, though even a sea-sodden mind should have seen something suspicious in those egregious frescoes of fat ladies sitting on the knife edge of crescent moons with which Room 13 endeavoured to conceal its real banefulness. Even such a mind should have dis- trusted that flamingly splendid fire-screen in front of a walled-up fireplace; should have scented danger in that flamboyant black and gold and blue satin furniture of the vintage of 1870. There was plainly, to an obser- vant eye, something sinister and meretricious in so much dressiness, but Jane and Peripatetica yielded them- selves up to that serpent lodging without the smallest precaution, and lived to rue their impulsive confi- dence. To begin with, Naples, instead of showing herself all flowers and sunshine, tinkling mandolins, and moon- light and jasper seas, was as merry and pleasing as an iced sponge. Loud winds howled through the streets, driving before them cold deluges of rain, and in these chilling downpours the street troubadours stood one foot in the puddles snuffling songs of "Bella Napoli" to untuned guitars, with water dripping from the ends of their noses. Peripatetica whose eyes even under her low-spirited hat had been all through the voyage full of dreamful memories of Neapolitan tea-roses and blue blandness curled up like a disappointed worm and retired to a fit of neuralgia and a hot water bottle. There was something almost uncanny in the scornful irony of her expression as she hugged her steaming comforter to her cheek, and paced the floor in time to those melancholy damp wails from the street. Instead TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 19 of tea-roses she was prating all day of American com- forts, as she clasped the three tepid coils of the chilly steam-heater to her homesick bosom, while Jane paddled about under an umbrella in search of the traditional ideal Italian maid, who would be willing to contribute to the party all the virtues and a cheerful disposition, for sixty francs a month. Minna, when she did appear, proved to be Swiss in- stead of Italian, but she carried an atmosphere of happy comfort about her, could spin the threads of three languages with her gifted tongue, while sixty francs seemed to satisfy her wildest dreams of avarice. So the two depressed pilgrims, soothed by Minna's promise to assume their burdens the next day, fell asleep dream- ing that the weather might moderate or even clear. Eight o'clock of the following morning came, but Minna didn't. Jane interviewed the concierge, who had recommended her. The concierge interviewed the heavens and the earth, and the circumambient air, but spite of outflung fingers and polyglot cries, the elements had nothing to say about the matter, and for twenty- four hours they declined to let the secret leak out that other Americans in the same hotel had ravished their Minna from them with the glittering lure of twenty francs more. Finally it dawned upon two damp and depressed minds that some unknown enemy had put a comether on them though at that time they had no inkling of his identity. Large-eyed horror ensued. First aid to the hoodooed must be sought. Peripatetica tied a strip of red flannel around her left ankle. " In all these very old countries," she said oracularly, " secret malign influences from the multitudes of wicked 20 SEEKERS IN SICILY dead rise up like vapours from the soil where they have been buried." Jane listened and, pale but resolute, went forth and purchased a coral jettatura. "Let us pass on at once from this moist Sodom," she said. Visions of sun and Sicily dawned upon their mil- dewed imaginations. Now there is really but one way to approach Sicily satisfactorily. Of course a boat leaves Naples every evening for Palermo, but the Mediterranean is a treach- erous element in February. It had broken night after night in thunderous shocks upon the sea wall, making the heavy stone-built hotel quiver beneath their beds, and in the darkness of each night they had seen the water squadron charge again and again, the foremost spinning up tall and white to fling itself in frenzied futile spray across the black street. So that the thought of trusting insides jaded by two weeks of the Atlantic to such a foe as this was far from their most reckless dreams. The none too solid earth was none too good for such as they, and a motor eats up dull miles by magic. Motors are to be had in Naples even when fair skies lack, and with a big Berliet packed with luggage, and with the con- cierge's tender, rueful smile shedding blessings, at last they slid southward. Pale clouds of almond blossoms were spread against grey terraces. . . . Less pale smells rose in gusty whiffs. . . . Narrow yellow streets crooked before them, where they picked a cautious hooting way amid Italy's rising population complicated with goats and asses. . . . Then flat, muddy roads, and Berliet bumping, splashing between fields of green arti- TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 21 chokes. . . . The clouds held up; thinned, and parted, showing rifts of blue. . . . Vesuvius pushed the mists from her brow, and purple shadows dappled her shin- ing, dripping flanks. . . . Orange groves rose along the way. Flocks of brown goats tinkled past. More almond boughs leaned over walls washed a faded rose. Church bells clanked sweetly through the moist air from far-away hills. Runnels chattered out from secret channels fringed with fern. Grey olive-orchards hung like clouds along the steep. . . . The sun was fairly out, and Italy assuming her old traditional air of professional beauty among the nations of the earth. . . . The Berliet climbed as nimbly as a goat toward Sorrento. The light deepened; the sea began to pea- cock. More and more the landscape assumed the appearance of the impossibly chromatic back drop of an opera, and as the turn was made under the orange avenue of the hotel at Sorrento everything was ready for the chorus of merry villagers, and for the prima donna to begin plucking song out of her bosom with stereo- typed gestures. It was there they began to offer the light wines of the country, as sweetly perfumed and innocent as spring violets; no more like to the astringent red inks mas- querading in straw bottles in America under the same names, than they to Hercules. The seekers of Per- sephone drank deeply as much as a wine-glass full and warmed by this sweet ichor of Bacchus they bid defiance to hoodoos and pushed on to Amalfi. Berliet swam along the Calabrian shore, lifting them lightly up the steeps, swooping purringly down the slopes, swinging about the bold curves of the coast; rounding the tall spurs, where the sea shone, green and 22 SEEKERS IN SICILY purple as a dove's neck, five hundred feet below, and where orange, lemon, and olive groves climbed the nar- row terraces five hundred feet above. They were following the old, old way, where the Greeks had gone, where the Romans went, where Normans rode, where Spaniards and Saracens marched ; the line of the drums and tramplings of not three, but of three hundred con- quests! They were following in a motor car the passageway of three thousand years of European history that was to lead them back beyond history itself to the old, old gods. The way was broad and smooth, looping itself like a white ribbon along the declivity, and even Peripatetica admitted it was lovely, though she has an ineradicable tendency to swagger about the unapproachable superi- ority of Venezuelan scenery; probably because so few are in a position to contradict her, or because she enjoys showing off her knowledge of out-of-the-way places which most of us don't go to. She had always sniffed at the Mediterranean as overrated in the matter of colour, and declared it pale and dull beside the green and blue fire of Biscayne Bay in Florida, but it was a nice day, and a nice sight, and Peripatetica handsomely acknowl- edged that after Venezuela this was the very best scenery she knew. At Amalfi " Where amid her mulberry trees Sits Amalfi in the heat, Bathing ever her white feet In the tideless summer seas," they climbed 175 steps to the Cappucini convent which hangs like a swallow's nest in a niche of the cliffs, flanked by that famous terrace the artists paint again TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 23 and again, from every angle, at every season of the year, at every hour of the day. There they imbibed a very superior tea, while sea and sky did their handsomest, listening meanwhile to a fellow tourist brag of having climbed to Ravello his in motor car. If one cranes one's neck from the Cappucini terrace, on a small peak will be seen what purports to be a town, but the conclusion will be irresistible that the only way to reach such a dizzy eminence is by goat's feet, or hawk's wings, and the natural inference is that the fellow tourist is fibbing. Nevertheless one hates to be outdone, and one abandons all desire to sleep in one of those coldly clean little monk-cells of the con- vent, and climbs resolutely down the 175 steps again and interviews Berliet. Berliet thinks his chassis is too long for the sharp turns. Thinks that the road is bad; that it is also unsafe; that the hotel in Ravello is not possible; that he suspects his off fore tire; that there's not time to do it before dark; that his owner forbids his going to Ravello at all; that he has an ap- pointment that evening with a good-looking lady in Amalfi; that he is tired with his long run, and doesn't want to any way. All of which eleven reasons ap- peared so irrefutable, collectively and individually, that Jane and Peripatetica climbed into their seats and announced that they would go to Ravello, and go immediately. Berliet muttered unpleasant things in his native tongue as to signori being reckless, obstinate, and in- considerate; wound them up sulkily and took them. Peripatetica admitted in a whisper that up to that very day she had never even heard of Ravello, which proved to be a really degrading piece of ignorance, for 24 SEEKERS IN SICILY every human being they met for the next three months knew all about the place or said they did. Further experience taught them to know that Italy is crowded with little crumbling towns one has never heard of before, which when examined prove to be the very particular spots in which took place about a half of all the history that ever happened. History being a thing one must be pretty skilful if one means to evade it in Italy, for the truth is that whenever history took a notion to be, it promptly went on a trip to Italy and was. They hooted slowly again through narrow streets, pushed more goats and children out their way, and then Berliet swung round on one wheel and began to mount. Began to climb like the foreseen goat, to soar like the imagined hawk, up sharp zigzags that lifted them by almost exact parallels. Everything that puts on power and speed, and makes noises like bomb ex- plosions in a saw-factory, was pushed forward or pulled back. They rushed noisily round and round the peak at locomotive speed, and finally half way up into the very top of the sky they pulled up sharply in a cobble- paved square. Berliet leaped nimbly out, unscrewed a hot lid with the tail of his linen duster from which lid liquids and steam and smells boiled as from an angry geyser, and they found themselves in the wild eyrie of Ravello. That ubiquituosity (with the name of a hotel on his cap) who springs out from every stone in Italy like a spider upon the foolish swarming tourist fly, was waiting for them in the square as if by appointment, and before they could draw the first gasp of relief he had their possessions loaded upon the backs of the floating population, and they were climbing in TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 25 the dusk a stone stairway that called itself a street meekly and weakly unwitting of their possible destina- tion. The destination proved to be a vaulted court- yard, opening behind a doorway which was built of a choice assortment of loot from four periods of archi- tecture and sculpture; proved to be a reckless jumble of winding steps, of crooked passages, of terraces, bal- conies, and loggias, and the whole of this destination went by the name of the Hotel Bellevue. And once there, then suddenly, after all the noise and odours, the confusion and human clatter of the last three weeks, they stepped quietly out upon a revetment of Paradise. Below a thousand feet below in the blue darkness little sparks of light were Amalfi. In the blue darkness above, hardly farther away it seemed, were the larger sparks of the rolling planets. The cool, lonely dark- ness bathed their spirits as with a blessed chrism. The place was, for the night, theirs alone, and for one holy moment the swarming tourist failed to swarm. " In the Highlands ! In the country places 1 " murmured Jane, gratefully declining upon a broad balustrade, and Peripatetica echoed softly declining in her turn . . . "Oh, to dream; oh, to awake and wander There, and with delight to take and render Through the trance of silence Quiet breath." . . . And Jane took it up again . . . "Where essential silence cheers and blesses, And forever in the hill recesses Her more lovely music broods and dies." 26 SEEKERS IN SICILY Just then essential silence was broken by the last protesting squawk of a virtuous hen, who seemed to be about to die that they might live. Peripatetica recog- nized that plaintive cry. Hens were kept handy in fattening-coops on the Plantation, against the sudden inroads of unexpected guests. "When the big-gate slams chickens begin to squawk," was a well-remembered Plantation proverb. "How tough she will be, though," Jane gently moaned, "and we shan't be able to eat her, and she will have died in vain." Little did she reck of Signor Pantaleone Caruso's beautiful art, for when they had dressed by the dim, soothing flicker of candles in big clean bed-rooms that were warmed by smouldering olive-wood fires, they were sweetly fed on a dozen lovely dishes; dishes foamy and yellow, with hot brown crusts, made seem- ingly of varied combinings of meal and cheese, and called by strange Italian cognomens. And the late so very late pullet appeared in her due course amid maiden strewments of crisp salads; proving, by some Pantaleonic magic, to be aU that a hen could or should be. And they drank gratefully to her manes in Signor Caruso's own wine, as mellow and as golden as his famous cousin's voice. After which they ate small, scented yellow apples which might well have grown in Hesperidian gardens, and drowsed contentedly by the musky olive-wood blaze, among bowls of freesias and violets, until the almost weird hour of half past eight, when inward blessedness and a day of mountain air would no longer be denied their toll. Yet all through the hours of sleep "old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago" stirred like an TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 27 undertone of dreams within dreams. The clank of armed feet moved in the street. Ghostly bells rang whispered tocsins of alarm, and shadowy life swept back and forth in the broken, deserted town. The "Brass Hats" glimmered in the darkness. Goths set alight long extinguished fires. Curved Saracen swords glittered faintly, and Normans grasped the heights with mailed hands. The Rufolis, the d'Affliti, the Confalones, and della Maras married, feasted, and warred again in dumb show, and up and down the stairs of this very house rustled the silk robes and soft shod feet of sleek prelates. Even the sea below where the new moon floated at the western rim like a golden canoe was astir with the myriad sails of revenants. First the white wings of that "Grave Syrian trader . . . Who snatched his rudder and shook out his sail . . . Between the Syrtes and soft Sicily." After him followed hard the small ghostly sails of the Greeks. " They were very perfect men, and could do all and bear all that could be done and borne by human flesh and blood. Taking them all together they were the most faultlessly constructed human beings that ever lived, and they knew it, for they worshipped bodily health and strength, and spent the lives of generations in the cultivation of both. They were fighting men, trained to use every weapon they knew, they were boxers and wrestlers, athletes, runners and jumpers, and drivers of chariots; but above all they were sea- men, skilled at the helm, quick at handling the sails, masters of the oar, and fearless navigators when half 28 SEEKERS IN SICILY of all navigation led sooner or later to certain death. For though they loved life, as only the strong and the beautiful can love it, and though they looked forward to no condition of perpetual bliss beyond, but only to the shadowy place where regretful phantoms flitted in the gloom as in the twilight of the Hebrew Sheol, yet they faced dying as fighters always have and always will, with desperate hands and a quiet heart." The golden canoe of the young moon filled and sank behind the sea's rim, but through the darkness came the many-oared beat of ponderous Roman galleys carrying the dominion of the earth within their great sides, and as they vanished like a fog-wreath along the horizon, followed fast the hawk-winged craft of the keen-bladed, keen-faced Saracen, whose sickle-like crescent would never here on this coast round to the full. For, far away on the grey French coast of Cou- tance was a Norman gentleman named Tancred, very strong of heart, and very stout of his hands. There was no rumour of him here, as he rode to the hunt and spitted the wild boar upon his terrible length of steel. What should the Moslems know of a simple Norman gentleman, or care? and yet in those lion loins lay the seeds of a dozen mighty whelps who were to rend their Christian prey from the Moslem and rule this warm coloured South as kings and dukes and counts, and whose blood was to be claimed by every crown in Europe for a thousand years. Very few among the shadowy sails were those of the de Hautevilles, but quality, not quantity, counts most among men, and those ships carried a strange, potent race. Anna Comnena thus describes one of them: "This Robert de Hauteville was of Norman origin TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 29 he united a marvellous astuteness with immense ambition, and his bodily strength was prodigious. His whole desire was to attain to the wealth and power of the greatest living men; he was extremely tenacious of his designs and most wise in finding means to attain his ends. In stature he was taller than the tallest; of a ruddy hue and fair-haired, he was broad-shouldered, and his eyes sparkled with fire; the perfect proportion of all his limbs made him a model of beauty from head to heel, as I have often heard people tell. Homer says of Achilles that those who heard his voice seemed to hear the thundering shout of a great multitude, but it used to be said of the de Hautevilles that their battle cry would turn back tens of thousands. Such a man, one in such a position, of such a nature, and of such spirit, naturally hated the idea of service, and would not be subject to any man; for such are those natures which are born too great for their surrounding." When morning dawned all spirits of the past had vanished, and only the noisy play of the young hopes of the Caruso family disturbed the peace of the echoing court. Jane insisted upon calling these innocent in- fants Knickerbockers, because, she said, they were only short Pantaleones which is the sort of mild pleasantry Jane affects. Peripatetica doesn't lend herself to these gentler forms of jest. It was she who put in all that history and poetry. (See above.) Ravello used to be famous for her dye stuffs, and for the complete thorough-goingness of her attacks of plague, but her principal industries to-day are pulpits, and fondness for the Prophet Jonah. Her population 30 SEEKERS IN SICILY in the day of dyes and plague was 36,000, and is now, by generous computation, about thirty-six which does not include the Knickers. Just opposite the Hotel Bellevue is one of these pulpits, in the church of St. John of the Bull; a church which about a thousand years ago was a very superior place indeed; but worse than Goths or Vandals, or Saracens, or plague, was the pernicious activity of the Eighteenth Century. Hardly a church in Italy has escaped unscathed from its busy rage. No sanctuary was too reverend or too beautiful to be ravaged in the name of Palladio, or of " the clas- sic style." Marbles were broken, mosaics torn out, dim aisles despoiled, brass and bronze melted, carv- ings chopped and burned, rich glass shattered, old tapestries flung on the dust heap. All the treasures of centuries sweet with incense, softened and tinted by time, sanctified by a thousand prayers, and beautified by the tenderest emotions were bundled out of the way of those benighted savages, and tons of lime were had into the poor gaunt and ruined fanes to transform them into whited sepulchres of beauty. Blank plaster walls hid the sweetest of frescoes; clustered grey columns were limed into ghastly imitations of the Doric; soaring arches flowered like forest boughs vanished in stodgy vaultings; Corinthian pilasters shoved lacelike rood-screens out of the way, and fat sprawling cherubs shouldered bleeding, shadowy Christs from the altars. The spirit which inspired this stupid ruthless- ness was perfectly expressed by Addison, who, com- menting upon the great Cathedral of Siena, said pragmatically: "When a man sees the prodigious pains that our TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 31 forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy what miracles of architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic churches as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have been raised before or since that time. Than these Gothic churches nothing can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic sim- plicity" of dull plaster! Much has been said of the irreverence of the Nine- teenth Century. The Eighteenth respected nothing their forefathers had wrought; not even in this little far-away mountain town, and St. John of the Bull is now poor Saint! housed drearily in a dull, dusty, echoing white cavern, with not one point of beauty to hold the protesting eye save the splendid marble pul- pit escaped by some miracle of ruth to stand out in that dull waste upon delicate twisted alabaster columns, which stand in their turn upon crawling marble lions. Its four sides, and its baldachino, show beautiful pat- terns of precious mosaics, wrought with lapis lazuli, with verd antique, and with sanguine Egyptian mar- bles. The carefullest and richest of these mosaics, of course along the side of the pulpit's stair is devoted to picturing that extremely qualmish archaic whale who in all Ra vello's churches unswallows the Prophet Jonah with every evidence of emotion and relief. Recently, in the process of removing some of the acres of Eighteenth Century plaster, there was brought 32 SEEKERS IN SICILY to light in a little chapel in the crypt a life-sized relief of St. Catherine and her wheel. Such a lovely lady! so fair, so pure, so saint-like; with faint memories of old tinting on her small lips, on her close-folded hair, and her downcast eyes that even the most frivolous of tourists might be moved to tears by the thought that she alone is the one sweet ghost escaped from all that brutal destruction of medi- aeval beauty; resurrected by the merest chance from her plaster tomb. Jane at the thought of it became quite dangerously violent. She insisted upon digging up the Eighteenth Century and beating it to death again with its own dusty old wig, and was soothed and calmed only by being taken outside to look once more by daylight at the delicious marble mince of fragments which the Hotel Bellevue has built into its portals Greek and Roman capitals upside down; marble lambs and crosses, gargoyles, and corbels adorning the sides and lintels in a charming confusion of styles, periods, and purposes. Ravello, as are all these arid ancient towns from which the tides of life have drained away, is as dry and empty as an old last year's nut; a mere hollow shell, ridged and parched, out of which the kernel of exist- ence has vanished. A tattered, rosy-cheeked child runs up the uncertain footway the stair-streets with feet as light and sure as a goat's. An old, old man, with head and jaws bound in a dirty red kerchief, and with the keen hawk- like profile of some far-off Saracen ancestry, crouches in a doorway with an outstretched hand. He makes no appeal, but his apparent confidence that his age TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 33 and helplessness will touch them, does touch them, and they search their pockets hastily for coppers, with a faint anguished sense of the thin shadow of a dial- finger which for them too creeps round and round, as for this old derelict man, for this old skeleton city. . . . A donkey heaped with brushwood patters up the steep narrow way; so narrow that they must flatten themselves against the wall to admit of his stolidly sorrowful passage. They may come and go, as all the others have come and gone, but our brother, the ass, is always there, recking not of Greek or Roman, of American or Tedeschi; for all of them he bears burdens with the same sorrowful stolidity, and from none does he receive any gratitude. . . . These are the only inhabitants of Ravello they see until they reach the Piazza and the Cathedral of Saint Pantaleone. They know beforehand that the Cathe- dral too has been spoiled and desecrated, but there still remain the fine bronze doors by the same Bari- sanus who made the famous ones in the church at Monreale in Sicily, and here they find the most beau- tiful of the pulpits, and the very biggest Jonah and the very biggest whale in all Ravello. Before that accursed Bishop Tafuri turned it into a white-washed cavern the old chroniclers exhausted their adjectives in describing the glories of Saint Pan- taleone's Cathedral. The richness of its sixteen enor- mous columns of verd antique; its raised choir with fifty-two stalls of walnut-wood, carved with incredible richness; its high altar of alabaster under a marble baldachino glowing with mosaics and supported upon huge red Egyptian Syenite columns its purple and gold Episcopal throne; its frescoed walls, its silver 3 34 SEEKERS IN SICILY lamps and rich tombs, its pictures and shrines and hangings all pitched into the scrap heap by that abominable prelate, save only this fine pulpit, and the Ambo. The Ambo gives itself wholly to the chron- icles of the prophet Jonah. On one stairside he leaps nimbly and eagerly down the wide throat which looks so reluctant to receive him, as if suspecting already the discomfort to be caused by the uneasy guest. But Jonah's aspect is all of a careless gaiety; he is not taking this lodging for more than a day or two, and is aware that after his brief occultation his reappearance will be dramatic and a portent. On the opposite stair it happens as he had prophetically foreseen, the mosaic monster disgorging him with an air of mingled violence and exhausted relief. No one can tell us why Jonah is so favourite a topic in Ravello. "Chi lo sara" everyone says, with that air of weary patience Italy so persistently assumes be- fore the eccentric curiosity of Forestieri. Rosina Yokes once travelled about with a funny little playlet called "The Pantomime Rehearsal," which concerned itself with the sufferings of the author and stage manager of an English house-party's efforts at amateur theatricals. The enthusiastic conductor used to say dramatically: "Now, Lord Arthur, you enter as the Chief of the fairies!" To which the blond guardsman replies with puzzled heaviness: "Yes; but why fairies?" Producing in the wretched author a sort of paralysis of bafflement. The same look comes so often into these big Italian eyes. The thing just is. Why clamour for reasons? It is as if these curious wandering folk, TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 35 always staring and chattering and rushing about, and paying good money that would buy bread and wine, merely to look at old stones, should ask why the sun, or why the moon, or why anything at all ? ... So they abandon Jonah and take on the pulpit in- stead, the most famous of all the mosaic pulpits in a region celebrated for mosaic pulpits. It is done after the same pattern as that of St. John of the Bull, but the pattern raised to the nth power. More and bigger lions; more and taller columns; richer scrolls of mo- saics; the bits of stone more deeply coloured; the marble warmed by time to a sweeter and creamier blond. The whole being crowned, moreover, by an adorable bust of Sigelgaita Rufolo, wife of the founder of the Cathedral and giver of the pulpit. A pompous Latin inscription under the bust records the virtues of this magnificent patron of religion. The inscription including the names of all the long string of stalwart sons Sigelgaita brought forth, and it calls in dignified Latinity the attention of the heavenly powers to the eminent deserts of this generous Rufolo, this mediaeval Carnegie. Sigelgaita's bust is an almost unique example of the marble portraiture of the Thirteenth Century if in- deed it truly be a work of that time, for so noble, so lifelike is this head with its rolled hair, its princely coronet and long earrings, so like is it to the head of the Capuan Juno, that one half suspects it of being from a Roman hand those masters of marmoral rec- ords of character and that it was seized upon by Sigelgaita to serve as a memorial of herself. Bernardo Battinelli, a notary of Ravello, writing in 1540 relates an anecdote which shows what esteem was 36 SEEKERS IN SICILY inspired by this marble portrait long after its original was dust: "I remember in the aforesaid month and year, the Spanish Viceroy Don Pietro di Toledo sent for the marble bust, which is placed in the Cathedral and much honest resistance was made, so that the first time he that came returned empty-handed, but shortly after he came back, and it was necessary to send it to Naples in his keeping, and having sent the magnifico Giovanni Frezza, who was in Naples, and Ambrose Flomano from this place to his Excellency, after much ado, by the favour of the glorious Virgin Mary, and by virtue of these messengers from thence after a few days the head was returned." In the year 1851 the palace of these splendid Rufoli, which in the time of Roger of Sicily had housed ninety knights with their men at arms, had fallen to tragical decay. A great landslide in the Fifteenth Century destroyed the harbour of Amalfi; hid its great quays and warehouses, its broad streets and roaring markets beneath the sea, and reduced it from a powerful Re- public, the rival of Venice and Genoa, to a mere fish- ing village. A little later the plague followed, and decimated the now poverty-stricken inhabitants of Ravello, and then the great nobles began to drift away to Naples, came more and more rarely to visit their Calabrian seats, and these gradually sank in the course of time into ruin and decay. Fortunately in the year before mentioned a rich English traveller, making the still fashionable "grand tour," happened into Ravello, saw the possibilities of this crumbling castle set upon one of the most beautiful sites in the world, and promptly purchased it from its indifferent Neapolitan TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 37 owner. He, much absorbed in the opera dancers and the small intrigues of the city, was secretly and scorn- fully amused that a mad Englishman should be willing to part with so much good hard money in exchange for ivied towers and gaping arches in a remote country town. The Englishman mended the arches, strengthened the towers, gathered up from among the weeds the delicate sculptures and twisted columns, destroyed nothing, preserved and restored with a reverent hand, and made for himself one of the loveliest homes in all Italy. It was in that charming garden, swung high upon a spur of the glorious coast, that Jane and Peri- patetica contracted that passion for Ravello which haunted them with a homesickness for it all through Sicily. For never again did they find anywhere such views, such shadowed green ways of ilex and cypress, such ivy-mantled towers, such roses, such sheets of daffo- dils and blue hyacinths. They dreamed there through the long day, regretting that their luggage had been sent on to Sicily by water, and forgetting quite their quest of Persephone that they were therefore unable to linger in the sweet precincts of the Pantaleone wines and cooking, devoting weeks to exploring the neigh- bouring hills, and to unearthing more pulpits and more Jonahs in the nearby churches. In the dusk they lingered by the Fountain of Strange Beasts, in the dusk they wandered afoot down the cork-screwed paths up which they had so furiously and smellily mounted. Berliet hooted contemptuously behind them as he crawled after, jeering as at "scare- cats," who dared mount, but shrank from descending these abrupt curves and tiptilted inclines except in the safety of their own low-heeled shoes. 38 SEEKERS IN SICILY At Amalfi they plunged once again into the noisy tourist belt the va et vient, the chatter, the screaming flutter of the passenger pigeons of the Italian spring. And yet there was peace in the tiny white cells in which they hung over the sheer steep, while the light died nacreously along the West. There was quiet in certain tiny hidden courts and terraces under the icy moon- light, and Jane said in one of these her utterance somewhat interrupted by the chattering of her teeth, for Italian spring nights are as cold as Italian spring days are warm Jane said: "What idiotic assertions are made in our time about ancient Europe having no love for, no eye for, Nature's beauty! Did you ever come across a mediaeval mon- astery, a Greek or Roman temple that was not placed with an unerring perception of just the one point at which it would look best, just at the one point at which everything would look best from it?" " Of course I never did," Peripatetica admitted with sympathetic conviction. "We get that absurd impres- sion of their indifference from the fact that our fore- bears were not nearly so fond of talking about their emotions as we. They had a trust in their fellow man's comprehension that we have lost. We always imagine that no one can know things unless we tell them, and tell them with all our t's carefully crossed and our i's elaborately dotted. The old literatures are always illustrating that same confidence in other people's imaginations, stating facts with what to our modern diffuseness appears the baldest simplicity, and yet somehow conveying all their subtlest meanings. Our ancestors happily were not ' inebriated with the exu- berance of their own verbosity.' . . . And now, Jane, TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 39 bring that congealed nose of yours in out of the open air. The moon isn't going on a vacation. She will be doing her old romance and beauty business at the same old stand long after we are dead and buried, not to mention to-morrow night." Berliet was all his old self the next day, and they swooped and soared, slid and climbed toward Paestum, every turn around every spur showing some new beauty, some new effect. Gradually the coast sank and sank toward the sea; the snow-caps moved further back into the horizon; grew more and more mere white clouds above, more and more mere vapoury amethyst below, and at last they shot at a right angle into a wide level plain, and commenced to experience thrills. For the guide-books were full, one and all, of weird tales of Passtum which lay, so they said, far back in a coun- try as cursed and horrible as the dreadful land of the Dark Tower. About it, they declared, stretched lep- rous marshes of stagnant ooze choked with fat reeds, where fierce buffalo wallowed in the slime. The con- tadini passed through its deadly miasma in shuddering haste, gazing large-eyed upon a dare-devil Englishman who had once had the courage to pass a night there in order to gratify a bold, fantastic desire to see the tem- ples by moonlight. It was such a strange, tremendous story, that of the Greek Poseidonia, later the Roman Paestum. Long ago those adventuring mariners from Greece had seized the fertile plain which at that time was cov- ered with forests of great oak and watered by two clear and shining rivers. They drove the Italian natives back into the distant hills, for the white man's burden even then included the taking of all the desirable things 40 SEEKERS IN SICILY that were being wasted by incompetent natives, and they brought over colonists whom the philosophers and moralists at home maligned, no doubt, in the same pleasant fashion of our own day. And the colonists cut down the oaks, and ploughed the land, and built cities, and made harbours, and finally dusted their busy hands and busy souls of the grime of labour and wrought splendid temples in honour of the benign gods who had given them the possessions of the Italians and filled them with power and fatness. Every once in so often the natives looked lustfully down from the hills upon this fatness, made an armed snatch at it, were driven back with bloody contumely, and the heaping of riches upon -riches went on. And more and more the oaks were cut down mark that! for the stories of nations are so inextricably bound up with the stories of trees until all the plain was cleared and tilled; and then the foothills were denuded, and the wave of de- struction crept up the mountain sides and they too were left naked to the sun and the rains. At first these rains, sweeping down torrentially, un- hindered by the lost forests, only enriched the plain with the long hoarded sweetness of the trees, but by and by the living rivers grew heavy and thick, vomit- ing mud into the ever-shallowing harbours, and the knds soured with the undrained stagnant water. Commerce turned more and more to deeper ports, and mosquitoes began to breed in the brackish soil that was making fast between the city and the sea. Who of all those powerful land-owners and rich merchants could ever have dreamed that little buzzing insects could sting a great city to death? But they did. Fevers grew more and more prevalent. The malaria- TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 41 haunted population went more and more languidly about their business. The natives, hardy and vigor- ous in the hills, were but feebly repulsed. Carthage demanded tribute, and Rome took it, and changed the city's name from Poseidonia to Passtum. After Rome grew weak Saracen corsairs came in by sea and grasped the slackly defended riches, and the little winged poi- soners of the night struck again and again, until grass grew in the streets, and the wharves crumbled where they stood. Finally the wretched remnant of a great people wandered away into the more wholesome hills, the marshes rotted in the heat and grew up in coarse reeds where corn and vine had flourished, and the city melted back into the wasted earth. So wicked a name had the miasmatic, fever-haunted plain that age after age rolled away and only birds and serpents and wild beasts dared dwell there, or some outlaw chose to face its sickly terrors rather than the revenge of the law. "Think," said Jane, "of the sensations of the man who came first upon those huge temples standing lonely in the naked plain! So lonely that their very existence had been long forgotten. Imagine the awe and surprise of such a discovery They were spinning had been spinning for half an hour along a rather bad highway, and Peripatetica found it hard to call up the proper emotions in answer to Jane's suggestion, so occupied was she in looking for the relishing grimness insisted upon by the guide- books. There were reeds; there were a very few in- nocuous-looking buffalo, but for the most part there were nice cultivated fields of grain and vines on either hand, and occasionally half a mile or so of neglected shrubby heath. 42 SEEKERS IN SICILY "Why, half of Long Island is wilder than this!" grumbled Peripatetica. "Where's the Dark Tower country? Childe Roland would think this a formal garden. I insist upon Berliet taking us somewhere that will thick our blood with horror." As it turned out, a wise government had drained the accursed knd, planted eucalyptus trees, and was slowly reclaiming the plain to its old fertility, but the guide- books feel that the story is too good to be spoiled by modern facts, and cling to the old version of 1860. Just then by way of compensation, Berliet having fortunately slowed down over a bad bit an old altar- piece of a Holy Family stepped down out its frame and came wandering toward them in the broad light of day. On the large mild gray ass a real altar-piece ass sat St. Anna wrapped in a faded blue mantle, carrying on her arm a sleeping child. At her right walked the child's mother, whose thin olive cheek and wide, timid eyes seemed half ghostly under the white linen held together with one hand under her chin. Young St. John led the ass. A wreath of golden-brown curls blew about his golden-red cheeks, and he wore goat- hide shoes, and had cross-gartered legs. Jane now says they never saw them at all. That it was just a mirage, or a bit of glamourie, and that there is nothing remaining in new Italy which could look so like the typical old Italy but if Jane is right then how did the two happen to have exactly the same glamour at exactly the same moment? How could they both imagine the benign smile of that strayed altar picture ? Is it likely that a motor car would lend itself to sacred visions? I ask you that! There was certainly some illusion not sacred TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 43 about the dare-devilisliness of that Englishman who once spent a moonlit night at the temples, for a little farming village lies close to the enclosure that shuts off the temples from the highway, the inhabitants of which village seemed as meek as sheep and anything but foolhardy, and there was reason to believe that they spend every night there, whether the moon shines or not. But the Temples were no illusion, standing in stately splendour in the midst of that wide shining green plain, by a sea of milky chalcedony, and in a semi-circle be- hind them a garland of purple mountains crowned with snow. Great-pillared Neptune was all of dull, burned gold, its serried columns marching before the blue background with a curious effect of perfect vigour in repose, of power pausing in solid ease. No picture or replica gives the sense of this energy and power. Doric temples tend to look lumpish and heavy in reproduc- tions, but the real thing at its very best (and this shrine of Neptune is the perfectest of Greek temples outside of Athens) has a mighty grace, a prodigious suggestion of latent force, of contained, available strength that wakes an awed delight, as by the visible, material ex- pression of an ineffable, glorious, all-powerful god. "Well, certainly those Greeks !" gasped Jane when the full meaning of it all began to dawn upon her, and Peripatetica, who usually suffers from chronic palpitation of the tongue, simply sat still staring with shining eyes. Greeks to her are as was King Charles' head to Mr. Dick. She is convinced the Greeks knew everything worth knowing, and did everything worth doing, and any further proof of their ability only fills her with a gratified sense of " I-told-you-so-ness." So 44 SEEKERS IN SICILY she lent a benign ear to a young American architect there, who pointed out many constructive details, which, under an appearance of great simplicity, proved consummate grasp of the art, and of the subtlest secrets of architectural harmonics. Before the land made out into the harbour Posei- don's temple stood almost on the sea's edge. The old pavement of the street before its portals being disin- terred shows the ruts made by the chariot wheels still deep-scored upon it, and it was here "The merry Grecian coaster came Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green bursting figs, and tunnies steeped in brine " anchoring almost under the shadow of the great fane of the Lord of the Waters; and here, when his cargo was discharged, he went up to offer sacrifices and thanks to the Sea-god of Poseidonia, and "Hung his sea-drenched garments on the wall," and prayed for skill to outwit his fellows in trade; for fair winds to blow him once more to Greece. Besides the temple of Neptune there was, of course, the enormous Basilica, and a so-called temple of Ceres, and some Roman fragments, but these were so much less interesting than the golden-pillared shrine of the Trident God, that the rest of the time was spent in looking vainly and wistfully for Paestum's famous rose gardens, of which not even the smallest bud re- mained, and then Berliet gathered them up, and went in search of the Station of La Cava. CHAPTER II A NEST OF EAGLES "So underneath the surface of To-day Lies yesterday and what we call the Past, The only thing which never can decay." TRUSTFULLY and sleepily Jane and Peripatetica, in the icy starlight of La Cava, boarded the express of European de Luxe. Drowsy with the long day's rush through the wind, they believed that the train's clatter would be a mere lullaby to dreams of golden temples and iris seas and "the glory that was Greece." No robbers or barbarians nearer than defunct corsairs crossed their imaginings; the hoodoo had faded from mind, shaken off by the glorious swoop of Berliet, and they supposed it left behind at Naples, clinging bat- like under the gaudy frescoes of Room 13 to descend on other unwary travellers. Half of their substance had been paid to the Com- pagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits for this night's rolling lodging, and they begrudged it not, remember- ing that it entitled their fatigue to the comforts of a 45 46 SEEKERS IN SICILY room to themselves in all the vaunted superior civil- ization and decencies of a European compartment car. Presenting their tickets in trusting calm they prepared to follow the porter to a small but cosy room where two waiting white beds lay ready for their weary heads. But the Hoodoo had come on from Naples in that very train. Compartments and beds there were, but not for them. The porter led on, and in a toy imitation of an American Pullman, showed them to a Lilliputian blue plush seat and a ridiculous wooden shelf two feet above that pretended it could unfold itself into an upper berth. This baby section in the midst of a shrieking babble of tongues, a suffocation of unaired Latin and Teutonic humanity, was their compartment room, "a vous seules, Mesdames!" telegraphed for to Rome and made over to them with such flourish by the polite agent at Naples! If the car was Lilliputian its passengers were not. Mammoth French dowagers and barrel-like Germans overflowed all its tiny blue seats, and the few slim Americans more than made good by their gener- ous excess of luggage. It was a very sardine box. In a fury too deep for words or tears Peripatetica .and Jane sank into the few narrow inches the porter managed to clear for them, and resigned themselves to leaving their own dear bags in the corridor. "They will, of course, be stolen, but then we may never need them again. We can't undress, and shall probably be suffocated long before morning," remarked Peripatetica bitterly, with a hopeless glare at the imi- tation ventilators not made to open. Their fury deep- ened at the slow struggles of the porter to adjust the inadequate little partitions, at the grimy blankets and A NEST OF EAGLES 47 pillows on the little shelves, at the curtains which didn't conceal them, the wash-room without water or towels and the cattlc-train-like burden of grunts and groans and smells floating on the unbreathable atmosphere. Morning dawned golden on the flying hills at last, and then deepest fury of all was Peripatetica's, that passionate lover of fresh air, to find that in spite of everything she had slept, and was still breathing! Calabria, lovely as ever, melted down to her glow- ing seas; one last swooping turn of the rails, and an- other line of faint hills rose opposite and that was Sicily! The train itself coiled like a weary serpent into a waiting steamer, which slipt smoothly by the ancient perils of Scylla and Charybdis; and nearer and nearer it rose, that gold and amethyst mountain-home of the Old Gods. The white curve of Messina, "the Sickle," showed clear at the base of the cloud-flecked hills. Kronos, father of Demeter, enthroned on those very mountain peaks, had dropped his scythe at the sea's edge, cutting space there for the little homes of men, and leaving them the name of his shining blade, "Zan- cle," the sickle, through all Greek days. It was there, really there in actual vision, land of fire and myths; the place of the beginnings of gods and men. Peripatetica and Jane burst from the car and climbed to the narrow deck above to get clearer view. The sea wind swept the dust from their eyes and all fatigue and discomfort from their memories. Their spirits rose to meet that Spirit Land where Immortals had battled and labored; had breathed themselves into man, the divine spirit stirring his little passing life with revelation of that which passeth not; that soul 48 SEEKERS IN SICILY of beauty and wisdom, and of poetry which should move through the ages. Their eyes were wide to see the land where man's imaginings had brought the divine into all surroundings of his life, until every tree and spring and rock and mountain grew into semblance of a god. Oh, was it all a "creed outworn"? Here might not one perchance still see "Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn " ? In these very mountains before them had man him- self been shaped; hammered out by Vulcan upon his forge in ^Etna. Here, in this knd he had been taught by Demeter to nourish himself from the friendly earth, taught how to shelter himself from the inclement ele- ments by Orion, Hunter and Architect a god before he was a star. There Zeus, all-conquering wisdom, had prevailed against his opponents and placed his high and fiery seat, this very ./Etna, upon the bound body of the kst rebellious Titan, making even the power of ignorance the pediment of his throne. There the fair maiden goddesses, Artemis and Minerva and Persephone, had played in flowery fields. There had Pluto stolen the fairest away from among the blossoms, the entrance to his dark underworld gaping suddenly among the sunny meadows. There had the desolate mother Demeter lit at .