Chapter III: One Dead in the Fields (2)

All at once the arts make a great spring upward. The Greeks have appeared. Rude, archaic, Dorian, these arts at first, but strong, and showing a new spirit. The potteries have a glaze, the patterns grow more intricate, the reliefs show a plastic striving for grace and life, the ornaments are of gold as well as silver and bronze, and steel has appeared. Follows a splendid flowering; an apogee of beauty is reached. Vases of exquisite contours covered with spirited paintings, pictures of life and death, of war and love. Coins that are unrivaled in numismatic beauty; struck frequently with the quadriga to celebrate the winning of the chariot race at the Olympic games; a triumph valued as greatly by the Greeks of Sicily as is the winning of the Derby by English horsemen. Tools, jewels, arms, all adorned with infinite taste and skill. Statues of such subtle grace and loveliness as this famous “Nymph,” the long-buried marble now grown to tints of blond pearl. Figurines of baked clay, reproducing the costumes, the ornaments, the physiology of the passing generations—faces arch, lovely, full of gay humour. Splendid sarcophagi, and burial urns still holding ashes and calcined bones, and tiny clay reproductions of the death masks of the departed, full of tender human individuality, or else heads of the gods, such as that enchanting tinted and crowned Artemis, that still lies in one of the great sarcophagi amid a handful of burned bones.

Punic and Roman remains begin to show themselves, recording that tremendous struggle between Europe and Africa for dominion in the midland sea, under the impact of which the Greek civilization is to be crushed. Byzantine ornament appears. Africa makes another struggle and is for a while triumphant, leaving record of the Moorish domination in damascened arms, in deep-tinted tiles.

The Goths and Normans fuse with the Saracen arts at first, but soon dominate the Eastern influence and shake it off, developing an art inferior only to the Greek. The Spanish follow, baroque, sumptuous, pseudo-classical. All the story of all the conquerors is here.

“Oh!” sighs Peripatetica. “What an illustrated history; I could go on turning its pages for days.”

“Well, you’ll turn them alone!” snapped Jane, clutching frantically at her side, and adding in a dreadful whisper: “There are _fleas_ hopping all over these historical pages. Come away this instant.”

But they linger a moment on the way out to look again at the famous headless Venus Landolina.

“There is only one real Venus,” commented Peripatetica contemptuously. “The Melian. All the rest are only plump ladies about to step into their baths. I detest these fat women with insufficient clothing who sprawl all over Europe calling themselves the goddesses of love. Goddesses indeed! They look more like soft white chestnut worms. That great dominating, irresistible lady of the Louvre is a deity, if you like—Our Lady of Beauty—besides, this little person’s calf is flat on the inner side.”

“Iss it not righd dat her calve should be vlat on de inside?” queried an elderly Swiss, also looking, and showing all her handsome porcelain teeth in a smile of anxious uncertainty. “I dink dat must be righd, because Baedeker marks her wid a ztar.”

“Don’t allow your opinions to be unsettled by this lady’s,” consoled Jane sweetly. “She isn’t really an authority. It would be wiser perhaps and more comfortable to be guided by Baedeker.”

“Bud she has no head,” grieved the Swiss. “How can Baedeker mark her wid a ztar w’en she has no head?”

How indeed? But then, there is such a lot of body!...

It is some days later. They have “done” the river Amapus; have been rowed among the towering feathery papyrus plants, the original roots of which were sent to Heiro I. by Ptolemy, and which still flourish in Sicily though all the parent plants have vanished out of Egypt.

They have looked down into the clear depths of La Pisma’s spring. Jane says it is less beautiful than the Silver Spring in Florida out which the Ocklawaha river rises, but that fountain of a tropical forest—transparent as air, and held in a great argent bowl—has no history, while La Pisma was the playmate of fair Persephone, and on seeing her ravished away by fiery Pluto melted quite away into a flood of bright tears. And it was she who, having caught up Persephone’s dropped veil, floated it to the feet of Demeter, and told her where to look for the lost daughter. La Pisma and Anapus her lover were, too, the real guardians of Syracuse, for as one after another of the armies of invading enemies camped on their oozy plain they sapped the invaders’ strength, and blighted their courage with fevers from the miasmatic breaths exhaled upon the foes as they slept.

Jane and Peripatetica have found another mystery. Syracuse, it appears, is full of mysteries. This last is known as the Castle of Euryalus, and they must take horse and drive to it, six miles from the hotel, though still within the walls of the original city, once twenty-two miles about; shrunk in these later days to less than three. This six miles of pilgrimage gives ample time to search the guide-books for information as to this thing they have come out for to see. But the guide-books palter, and shuffle and evade, as they are prone to do about anything really interesting. Euryalus, solid enough to their eyes and to their sense of touch, seems as illusive in history as the cloudy towers of the Fata Morgana—now you see it, and now you don’t. It seems to come from nowhere. No one can tell when or by whom it was built, but it always turns up in the history of Syracuse in moments of stress—much like those Christian patron-saints who used suddenly to descend in shining armour to turn the tide of battle. One hears of Dionysius strengthening it when news comes that the dread Himilcon is on his way from Carthage with two hundred triremes accompanied by rafts, galleys, and transports innumerable. Dionysius makes Euryalus the key of a surprise he prepares for the Carthagenians, for when the latter come sailing into the harbour—“A forest of black masts and dark sails, with transports filled with elephants trumpeting at the smell of land,” and from the West “comes trampling across the plain by the Helorian road and the banks of the Anapus, the Punic army 300,000 strong, with 3,000 horse led by Himilcon in person,”—there stands waiting for them one of the most amazing works ever wrought by the will of a single man.

Dionysius in twenty days has built a wall three miles long barring Himilcon’s ingress at the only weak point. Seventy thousand of the inhabitants of Syracuse had worked at this building. Forty thousand slaves had been in the Latomiæ cutting the blocks of easily hewn sandstone, which six thousand oxen carried to the wall, while other armies of men had been upon the slopes of Ætna ravaging the oak woods for huge beams. When Himilcon comes the wall is complete.

Then there are more appearings and disappearings through the years, and suddenly Euryalus fills the foreground again. Archimedes is helping Hieronymus to fortify it against Marcellus—is designing veiled sally ports, and oblique apertures from which his “scorpions” and other curious war engines may hurl stones, is placing there the burning glasses with which he will set the Roman galleys on fire by means of the sun’s heat. But though the Carthagenians were terrible the Roman is more terrible still, and in spite of Archimedes they get into Syracuse after a three years’ siege. While the furies of final capture are raging Archimedes sits calmly drawing figures upon the sand. A Roman soldier rushing by carelessly smears them with his foot. Archimedes is angry, and “uses language.” The soldier, angry in his turn—no doubt “language” in Greek sounded especially insulting—shortens his sword and stabs “the greatest man then living in the world.”

Marcellus sheds tears when he hears it, and buries the father of mathematics with splendid honours, marking the tombstone—as Archimedes had wished—with no name, with only a sphere and a cylinder. He spared Syracuse too; left her temples and splendours intact, and forbid the usual plundering and massacres. Marcellus was, it seems, in every way a very decent person, and Peripatetica grieved that those frigid Romans wouldn’t let him have a triumph when he went home, and Jane breathed a hope that he used more language to that murderous soldier....

Later comes Cicero to Syracuse, hunting evidence against Verres, who had, as pro-consul, robbed the city of all the treasures Marcellus had spared, and the great lawyer takes time from his examination of witnesses to look out Archimedes’ resting place. He finds it overgrown with thistles and brambles, but recognizes it by the sphere and cylinder, and sets it once more in order.

“So Tully paused, amid the wrecks of time,
On the rude stone to trace the truth sublime,
Where at his feet in honoured dust disclosed
The immortal Sage of Syracuse reposed.”

“You cribbed that from one of the guide-books,” jeered Jane.

“Of course I did,” admitted Peripatetica with calm unblushingness. “Do you imagine I go around with samples of formal Eighteenth Century Pope-ry concealed about my person?”

* * * * *

They are on their way to the theatre, passing by the ancient site of the Forum, which site is now a mere dusty, down-at-heels field where goats browse and donkeys graze, and where squads of awkward recruits are being trained to take cover behind a couple of grass blades, to fire their empty rifles with some pretence at unanimity.

The road winds between walled orange and lemon groves, in which contadini are drying and packing miles of pungent golden peel for transportation to French and English confectioners. The air is redolent with it.

Themistocles—Jane doubts his sponsors in baptism having had any hand in this, but the grubby card he presented with so pleasant a glance, so fine a gesture at the time of striking a bargain for the day, bore it printed as plain as plain—Themistocles, then, dismounts before a small drinking shop lying at the foot of an elevation. With one broad sweep of his hand he signifies that he is making them free of history, and yields them to the care of a nobleman in gold and blue; a nobleman possessing a pleasing manner and one of those plangent, golden-strung voices which the lucky possessors always so enjoy using.

The two demand the Latomia Paradiso; the name having seduced their sentimental imaginations. The peer intimates that the name is misleading, but with gentle firmness they drop down the path which descends into the quarries from which Dionysius hurriedly snatched the material for his wall; material (almost as easy to cut as cheese, but hardening in the air) which has been dug, scooped, and riven away as fantastically as if sculptured by the capricious flow of water, leaving caverns, towers, massy columns, arches, a thousand freaked shapes. Now all this is draped with swaying curtains of ivy, with climbing roses heavy with unblown buds, with trailing geraniums hanging from crannies, with wild flowers innumerable. Lemon and fig trees grow upon the quarries’ floor, mosses and ferns carpet the shady places, black-green caroba trees huddle in neglected corners.

The nobleman, however, is impatient to show other wonders. He leads the way into caverns through whose openings shafts of sunlight steal, turning the dusk within to a blond gloom, caverns where rope-makers walk to and fro twisting long strands, twirling wheels, with a cheerful chatter that booms hollowly back to them from the vaulted darkness over their heads; where the birds who flit in and out hear their twitterings reflected enormously, with a curious effect; where even the sound of dripping moisture is magnified into a large solemnity.

He has saved the best for the last. Here an arch soars a hundred feet, giving entrance to a lofty narrow cave. Where the sides of the arch meet is a small channel of chiselled smoothness, ending in an orifice through which a glimpse of the sky shows like a tiny blue gem. It is the Ear of Dionysius. In this cave, so the story runs, the Tyrant confined suspected conspirators, for this is a natural whispering gallery, and the lowest of confidential talk within it would mount the walls, each lightest word would run along that smooth channel, as through the tube of an ear, and reach the listener at the orifice. For the uneasy Dictator knows that his turbulent Greek subjects, who cannot rule themselves, are equally unable to bear placidly the rule of another, and it would have been interesting, and at times exciting, to have been permitted to watch that stern, bent face as the rebellious protests climbed in whispers to the greedy ear a hundred feet above.

A wonderful echo lives in this cave. Now it is plain why the guide has such large and vibrant tones—he was chosen because of that natural gift.

“Addio!” he cries gaily. “_Addio_,” calls the darkness, a little sadly and wistfully. The guide sings a stave, and all the dusk is full of melodious chorus. He intones a sonorous verse, and golden words roll down to them through the gloom.

“Speak! speak!” the nobleman urges, and Jane and Peripatetica meekly breathe a few banalities in level American tones. Not a sound returns; their syllables are swallowed by the silence.

“Staccato! staccato!” remonstrates the guide, and when they comply, light laughing voices vouchsafe answers.

“I think,” says Peripatetica reflectively, as they leave the Latomia, “that one has to address life like that if one is to get a clear reply—to address it crisply, definitely, with quick inflections. Level, flat indefiniteness will awake no echoes.”

“‘How true’! as the ladies write on the margins of circulating library books,” comments Jane with unveiled sarcasm.

The guide has lots more up his gold-braided sleeve. He opens a gate and displays to them with a flourish the largest altar in the world. Six hundred feet one way, sixty feet the other; cut partly from solid rock, made in part of masonry. Hiero II. thought he knew a trick of governing worth any amount of listening at doors. Those who are fed and amused are slack conspirators. So this huge altar to Zeus is built, and here every year he sacrifices 450 oxen to the ruler of heaven.

“It must have rather run into money for him,” says Jane thoughtfully, “but he probably considered it cheaper to sacrifice oxen than be sacrificed himself.”

“Yes,” says Peripatetica, who has just been consulting the guide-book. “It must have been rather like the barbecues the American politicians used to give to their constituents half a century ago, for only the choicest bits were burnt before the gods, sprinkled with oil and wine and sweet-smelling spices, and the populace, I suppose, carried home the rest. No doubt Hiero found it a paying investment.”

The theatre, when reached, is found, of course, to have a beautiful situation. All Greek theatres have. They were a people who liked to open all the doors of enjoyment at once, and when they filled this enormous semicircle (24,000 could sit there) cut from the living rock upon the hillside, they could not only listen to the rolling, organ-like Greek of the great poets, and have their souls shaken with the “pity and terror” of tragedy, or laugh at the gay mockery of comedy, but by merely lifting their eyes they could look out upon the blue Ionian sea, the smiling flowered land, and in the distance the purple hills dappled with flying shadows. In their time all the surrounding eminences were crowned with great temples, and behind them—this was a contrast very Greek—lay the Street of Tombs. For they had not a shuddering horror of death, hastening their departed into remote isolation from their own daily life. They liked to pass to their occupations and amusements among the beautiful receptacles made for the ashes of those they had loved.

In this theatre Syracuse saw not only the great dramas, but the great dramatists and poets. Æschylus, sitting beside Hiero I., saw all his plays produced here; “The Ætnaiai” and “The Persians” were written for this stage. Pindar was often here; so were Bacchylides and Simonides, and a host of lesser playwrights. Indeed, no theatre has ever known such famous auditors. Theocritus, Pythagoras, Sappho, Empedocles, Archimedes, Plato, Cicero, have all sat here.

Plato was long in Syracuse; called by Dionysius to train his son Dion, he labours with such poor success that Dion is driven from the power inherited from his father, by the citizens outraged at the grossness of his vices. Before this fall Plato has left him in disgust, Dion remarking with careless insolence:

“I fear you will not speak kindly of me in Athens.”

To which the philosopher, with still more insolent sarcasm, replies:

“We are little likely to be so in want of a topic in Athens as to speak of you at all.”

Yet it would seem as if no good effort was ever wholly lost, for when Dion, earning his bread in exile as an obscure schoolmaster, is sneeringly asked what he ever learned from Plato, his dignified answer is, “He taught me to bear misfortune with resignation.”

* * * * *

Themistocles has conducted them, with much cracking of his whip, much irrelevant conversation, quite to the other side of what once was Syracuse, and has deposited them before a little low gate that pierces a high wall. Inside this gate is a tiny garden cultivated by two monks who do the work by means of short-handled double-ended hoes; a laborious-looking Sicilian implement. The garden is full of pansies growing between low hedges of sweet-smelling thyme and rosemary. At the same moment there debarks a carriage load of touring Germans. Typical touring Germans; solid, rosy, set four-square to the winds; all clinging to Baedekers encased in covers of red and yellow cross stitch of Berlin wool, all breathing a fixed intention of seeing everything worth seeing in the thorough-going German fashion. The monks openly squabble as to the division of the parties who have come to see the church and the catacombs, and eventually the big, shaggy, red-haired one, who might be some ancient savage Gaul come to life, sullenly carries off the Teutons. It is somewhat of a shock to Jane and Peripatetica when their slim, supple, handsome Sicilian explains to them that this contest has its reason not in their personal charm, but is owing to a reluctance to guide the hated Tedeschi.

There is something inexplicable in this universal unpopularity of the Teuton in Italy. Germany has been dotingly sentimental about Italy for generations.

“Kennst du das Land”

has hovered immanent on every lip from beyond the Rhine ever since the days of Goethe. They passionately study her language, her literature, her monuments, and her history. They make pilgrimages to worship at all her shrines, pouring in reverent Pan-Germanic hordes across the Alps to do it, and despite their extreme and skilful frugality they must necessarily leave in the Peninsula hundreds of thousands of their hard-earned, laboriously hoarded marks, which they have not grudged to spend in the service of beauty. Yet Italy seems possessed of a sullen repugnance to the entire race.

“Tedeschi!” hisses the monk. “Tutto ‘_Ja! Ja! Wunderschön!_’” with a deliriously funny imitation of their accent and gestures, as he steers swiftly around a corner to prevent the two parties fusing into one.

The church of San Giovanni is, of course, founded upon a Greek temple—most Sicilian churches are, and—of all places!—this one stands upon a ruin of a temple of Bacchus—the fragments of which poke up all through the tiny garden. The church, equally, of course, has been Eighteenth Centuried, but happily not wholly; remaining a great wheel window, and beautiful bits here and there of Twelfth Century Gothic in the outer walls, though the interior is in the usual dusty and neglected gaunt desuetude. The whole place is in decay, even the attendant monastery is crumbling, the number of monks shrunk to a mere handful, despite the fact that this is a spot of special sanctity, for when they descend into the massive chapel of the crypt there is pointed out to them the little altar before which Saint Paul preached when he was in Syracuse.

“Of course, St. Paul was here,” said Jane. “Everybody who was anybody came to Syracuse sooner or later—including ourselves.”

The guide is firm as to the altar having stood in this very chapel when that remarkable Hebrew poured out to the Syracusans his strange new message of democracy, but this is clearly the usual fine monkish superiority to cramping probabilities, for such rib-vaultings as these were as yet undreamed of by the architects of Paul’s day.

The altar is Greek, and no doubt was standing in the fane of Bacchus when the Jew spoke by it. The Greeks were interested and tolerant about new religions, and the life and death which Paul described would hardly have seemed strange to them, spoken in that place. That birth and death, the blood turned to wine, the sacred flesh eaten in hope of regeneration, having so many and such curious resemblances to the legends, and to the worship of the Vine God celebrated on that very spot. “At Thebes alone,” had said Sophocles, speaking of the birth of Bacchus, “mortal women bear immortal gods.” The violent death, the descent into hell, the resurrection, were all familiar to them, and what a natural echo would be found in their hearts to the saying, “I am the true Vine.”...

The monk only smiles bitterly when it is demanded of him to explain why a spot of so reverent an association should be abandoned to dust and decay, and to the interest of curious tourists, when the mere apocryphal vision of an hysterical peasant girl should draw hordes of miracle-seeking pilgrims to Lourdes.

Perhaps there was something typical in that anguished Christ painted upon the great flat wooden crucifix that hung over the altar in the crypt; a Christ fading slowly into a mere grey shadow; the dim, hardly visible ghost of a once living agony....

The monk goes before, the flickering candle which he shades with his fingers throwing a fan of yellow rays around his tonsured head. These are the Catacombs of Syracuse.

“On every hand the roads begin.”

Roads underground, these, leading away endlessly into darkness. At long intervals they widen into lofty domed chapels rudely hewn, as is all this place, directly from the rock. Here and there a narrow shaft is cut upward through the earth, letting in faint gleams of sunshine through a fringe of grass and ferns, showing sometimes an oxalis drooping its pale little golden face to peer over the shaft’s edge into the gloom below. And in all these roads—miles and miles of roads, extending as far as Catania it is said; roads under roads three tiers deep—and in all these roads and chapels are only open graves. Graves in the floor beneath one’s feet; graves in every inch of the walls; graves over graves, graves behind graves. Great family graves cut ten feet back into the rock, containing narrow niches for half a dozen bodies—graves where four generations have slept side by side. Graves that are mere shallow scoopings hardly more than three spans in length, where newborn babies must have slept alone. Tombs innumerable beyond reckoning, all hewn from the solid rock, and each and all vacant. An incredibly vast city of the dead from which all the dead inhabitants have departed.

This is the crowning mystery of mysterious Syracuse. Who were this vast army of the buried? And where have their dead bodies gone?... Christians, everyone says.

“But why,” clamours Peripatetica, “should Christians have had these peculiar mole-like habits?”

The monk merely shrugs.

“Oh, I know,” she goes on quickly before Jane can get her mouth open. “Persecution is the explanation always given, but will you tell me how you can successfully persecute a population of this size? There must be half a million of graves, at least, in this place, and there would have to be a good many living to bury the dead, and Syracuse in its best days hadn’t a million inhabitants. Now, you can’t successfully martyrize nine-tenths of the population, even if it is as meek and sheep-like as the early Christians pretended to be.”

“They didn’t all die at once,” suggests Jane helpfully. “This took years.”

“I should think it did! Years? It took generations, or else the Christians died like flies, and proved that piety was dreadfully undermining to the health. No wonder the pagans wouldn’t accept anything so fatal. But populations as large as this one must have been to furnish so many dead, don’t go on burrowing underground for generations. They come out and impose their beliefs upon the rest. And, besides, how can the stories of their worshipping and burying in secret be true when the mass of material taken out of these excavations would have to be put somewhere? And how could the presence or the removal of all that refuse stone escape attention? The persecuted Christian theory doesn’t explain the mystery.”

Even Peripatetica had to pause sometimes for breath, and then Jane got her innings.

“Equally mysterious, in my opinion,” she said, “is the rifling of all these graves. The monk tells me ‘the Saracens did it,’ but the Saracens were in Syracuse less than two hundred years, and of all these myriad graves only two or three have been found intact, and these two or three were graves beneath graves. Every other one for sixty miles, from the largest to the smallest, has been opened and entirely emptied. The Saracen population in Syracuse was never very large. It consisted in greater part of the ruling classes. The bulk of the people were natives and Christians, who would regard this grave-rifling as the horridest sacrilege, and if the Saracens undertook alone this enormous task they would have had, even in two hundred years, time for nothing else. The opening of the graves is as strange a puzzle as the making of them.”

“Perhaps some last trump was blown over Syracuse alone,” hazarded Peripatetica, “and all the dead here rose and left their graves behind them empty.”

“Come up into the air and sunlight,” said Jane. “Your mind shows the need of it.”

At the little gate sat one of the monastery dependents, whose perquisite was a permission to sell post-cards, and such coins and bits of pottery as he could retrieve by grubbing in the rubbish of the empty graves. He had a few tiny earthenware lamps, marked with a cross and still smoke-blackened, some so-called tear jugs, and one or two small clay masks which, from the closed eyelids and smooth sunken contours, must have been modelled in miniature from real death masks. Among these they found Arsinoë—or so they named her—whose face was touched with that strange, secret archness, that sweet smiling scorn so often seen on faces one day dead. The broad brow with its drooping hair, the full tender lips so instinct with vivid personality, went with them, and became to them like the record of some one seen long ago and dimly remembered, though the lovely benignant original must have been mere dust of dust for more than a thousand years.

* * * * *

A nun in a faded blue gown has been showing them the relics of Santa Lucia. She has also been telling them how the Saint, when a young man admired her eyes, snatched them out of her head with her own hands and handed them to the young man on a plate.

“What a very rude and unpleasant thing to do!” comments Jane in English. “But invariably saints seem so lamentably deficient in amiability and social charm.”

The nun unlocks the gate of the Cappucini Latomia, and Jane and Peripatetica descend the long stair cut in the rocks. They are seeking the place where the remnant of that army Alcibiades so skilfully introduced into Catania, finally perished.

They have been reading tales of the Athenians’ long siege of Syracuse, of their final frightful despairing struggle, so full of anguish, terror, and fierce courage—“when Greek met Greek”—and they have come to look at the spot where those seven thousand unhappy prisoners finally found an end. When they were driven into this quarry they were all that remained of the tremendous expedition which Athens had drained her best blood to send. Alcibiades had fled long ago, and was in exile. Nicias and Demosthenes, who had surrendered them, were now dead; fallen on their own swords. The harbour of Syracuse was strewn with the charred wrecks of their fleet. The marshes of Anapus were rotting with their comrades, the fountain of Cyane choked with them. They themselves were wounded to a man, shuddering with fevers, starving, demoralised with long fighting and the horrible final _débâcle_ when they were thrust all together into this Latomia; not as now a glorious garden with thyme and mint and rosemary beneath their feet, ivy-hung, full of groves and orchards, but raw, glaring, shaled with chipped stone, the staring yellow sides towering smoothly up for a hundred feet to the burning blue of the Sicilian sky. There in that waterless furnace for seventy days they died and died. Died of wounds, of thirst, of starvation; died of the poisonings of those already dead.

And the populace of Syracuse came day by day, holding lemons to their noses, to look down at them curiously, until there was not one movement, not one sound from any one of the seven thousand.

There is but one human gleam in the whole demoniacal story—a touch characteristically Greek. Some of the prisoners had beguiled the tedium of dying by chanting the noble choruses of Euripides’ newest play, which Syracuse had not yet heard, and these had been at once drawn up from among their fellows and treated with every kindness. They were entreated to repeat as much as they could remember of the poet’s lines again and again, and were finally sent back to Athens with presents and much honour.

Not a trace of the tragedy remains. The only record of death now in those lovely wild, deep-sunken gardens is a banal monument to Mazzini, and a tomb hollowed out of the wall in one of the caves. A tomb closed with a marble slab, upon which was cut an epitaph telling, in the pompous formal language of that day, of the young American naval lieutenant who died here suddenly on his ship in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century, and because he was a Protestant, and therefore could not occupy any Catholic graveyard, was laid to rest alone in this place of hideous memories.

Poor lad! Sleeping so far from his own people, and thrust away here by himself, since he must, of course, not expect to lie near those who had been baptised with a different motion of the fingers. Seeing which isolation Peripatetica quoted that amused saying of an ironic old Pagan world, “Behold, how these Christians love one another!”

* * * * *

It is the terrace of the Villa Politi. They have finally forgiven the villa, and have climbed up here from the Latomia to sit on its lovely terrace, to drink tea and eat the honey of Hybla, to look down on one side into the blossom-hung depths of the Athenians’ prison, on the other out to the mauve and silver of the twilight sea.

“Peripatetica,” says Jane with great firmness, “I am suffering from an indigestion of history. I am going away somewhere. All these spirits of the past block up the place so that I’ve no freedom of movement. It’s an oppression to feel that every time one puts a foot down it’s in the track of thousands and thousands of dead feet, and that one’s stirring up the dust of bones with every step we take. Everything we look at is covered so thick with layer on layer of passion and pain that I’ve got an historic heartache. _I_ leave to-morrow.”

Peripatetica didn’t answer at first. She was looking out over the dusky sea, from which breathed a soft slow wind.

The change had come while they were in the Latomia; had come suddenly. That bleak unkindness in the atmosphere—of which they were always conscious even in the sun—had all at once disappeared. Even though the sun was gone a mild sweetness seemed to exhale from the earth, as from a heart at last content.

“Jane,” said Peripatetica, turning shining eyes upon her, “Persephone has returned. Let us go to Enna and meet her!”

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