Chapter I: 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 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.

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CONTENTS

PAGE
PREFACE 9
CHAPTER
I ON THE ROAD TO THE LAND OF THE GODS 15
II A NEST OF EAGLES 45
III ONE DEAD IN THE FIELDS 126
IV THE RETURN OF PERSEPHONE 178
V A CITY OF TEMPLES 192
VI THE GOLDEN SHELL 229

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children” _Frontispiece_

PAGE

“A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself” 68

“Pan’s Goatherd” 132

“Ætna, The Salient Fact of Sicily” 186

“The Saffron Mass of Concordia” 198

“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of 218
Flowers”

“Sicily’s Picture-book, The Painted 234
Cart”

“The Last Resting Place of Queen 248
Constance”

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SEEKERS IN SICILY