Chapter V: A City of Temples

“’Tis right for him
To touch the threshold of the gods.”

THEY were running swiftly through the dark. On either hand was a dim and gloomy land of bare, shrivelled peaks, grey cinder heaps, and sulphurous smells. Intermittently visible by the strange subterranean glowings rose black, glowering mountains in the background, and nearer at hand were shadowy shapes of men and asses bringing sulphur from the mines. Within, the garlic-reeking tongue of a flickering gas-lamp vaguely illumined the dusk of the railway carriage.

“This is Pluto’s own realm,” declared Jane, removing her nose from the window-pane, through which she had been endeavouring to peer into the outer gloom. “If it’s not the very threshold of the infernal regions it ought to be. Peripatetica, you might spare me a glimmer or two from your Baedeker. Were there no temples to Pluto here? These are surely the very surroundings in which he should have been worshipped.”

“A temple to Pluto?” replied Peripatetica sleepily. “Where?... I never heard of one that I can remember; have you?”

Jane suddenly realized that her recollections held no account of any spot where that dark King of the Under World had been honoured under the sun; it was another mystery of the past, to which there was no answer, though Peripatetica gave up her nap in the effort to solve it—why had Pluto, supreme in the Under World as Zeus in the Upper one, beneath whose sway all men born must come, remained so unhonoured among living men?

The Greeks did believe in a future life; the spirit expiating or rewarded for deeds done in the flesh. Those were facts which men thought they knew, which were an integral axis of their faith—how so believing, did they treat it thus unconcernedly, seeing things in such different proportions from ourselves? So much concern for the fulness of life in the present, so little for the shadowy hereafter—shrines and temples and sacrifices on every hillside to the Deities of Life, of Birth, and Fertility; nothing for the God of Death.

Death and Life—they touched as closely in ancient days as now, perhaps more closely. The Greeks did not push away their dead to a dim, silent oblivion. Near to the warm heart of life they were held in bright, oft-invoked memory. In the busiest centres of life were placed the tombs of their dead; close to the theatre—to the Forum—wherever the living most thronged the Road of Tombs was; one where all the busiest tide of life flowed. Invocations and offerings and sweet ceremonies of remembrance were given to their dead more often than tears. And constantly the living turned to the dear and honoured dead—“much frequented” was the Greek adjective which went oftenest with the tomb. But the grim God of Death was apparently not for living man to make his spirit “sick and sorry” by worshipping. It was Life—glorious, glowing fulness of life to the uttermost—that was important to the Greek; Life that governed Death and made it either honoured and reposeful, or a state of shadowy wanderings and endless regret.

To the modern mind, still tinged with mediæval morbidity, groping back into the clear serenity of those golden days, it seemed to be life, life, only life that preoccupied the Greeks, and yet, they too had hearts to feel Death’s sting even as we—to be aware of the underlying sadness of all the joy upon this rolling world. They too could deeply feel the inexorable mingling of delight and pain, of life and loss....

Their great Earth Mother, blond and sunny as her golden grain, the deity of all fruitfulness and beneficent increase, is also _Ceres Deserta_—the Mater Dolorosa—shrouded in the dark blue robe of all earth’s shadows, haggard with tears of wasting desolation—“the type of divine sorrow,” as well as of joyous fruition ... her emblem the blood-red poppy, symbol in its drowsy juices, of sleep and death, as in its multitudinous seeds the symbol of life and resurrection.

And her daughter, like herself the most specially and intimately beloved by the Greeks among all their deities, had even more the dual quality—Goddess of Spring, of resurrection, and rejuvenescence, and yet too, Queen of the dark Under World. She was the impulse of all spring’s teeming life, and yet herself “compact of sleep and death and narcotic flowers bearing always in the swallowed pomegranate seeds the secret of ultimate decay, of return to the grave.”

Korè, the maiden, the incarnation of all fresh and sweet and innocent joyousness, was also symbol of its evanescence—“a helpless plucked flower in the arms of Aidoneus,” so that upon the sarcophagi of women who had died in early youth the Greeks were wont to carve Pluto’s stealing of Persephone, picturing the Divine Maiden with the likeness of the dear dead one’s face.

* * * * *

Dark, blurred shapes in Greek-like drapery of many-folded cape and shawl, appeared now and then in shifting crowds upon station platforms, like the uneasy shades of Pluto’s kingdom seeking escape.

To Peripatetica and Jane it began to seem as if their quest for the Lost Spring had taken them into the Under World of her imprisonment to behold with thrills of half pity, half awe, in “that dim land where all things are forgotten” her transformation into the mate of gloomy Dis, no longer bright, golden-haired girl-flower, but veiled _Proserpina Despœna_, the Queen of the Dead, where now:

“Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands,
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;

She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born,
Forgets the Earth, her mother,
The life of fruits and corn.”

* * * * *

Escaping at last from the sulphur fumes, the strange glares and the Hades visions, they found themselves standing under a clear star-strewn sky with a gentle air blowing in their faces. In an open carriage they were whirled off, they knew not where, into the night, stars bright overhead and lights like fallen stars on a high hill to the right, the soft wind of the darkness breathing of spring and green growing things.

Suddenly there was the welcoming door of the Hotel des Temples, and then little white bedrooms and quick oblivion.

* * * * *

There is a pounding on Jane’s door.

“Hurry, you sluggard!” says Peripatetica’s voice. “Come out and see what a delicious place this is!” and she enters radiant. “There’s no mistake about spring this time; everything is riotous with it—and it’s real country. Not mere theatrical scenery like Taormina, nor mere bones and stones like Syracuse, but real dear Arcadian country, with trees, actually _trees_! and there are great golden temples rising out of the trees, with the sea and the hills behind, and nothing but sweet peaceful meadows and orchards all around us—I want to stay here forever.”

When Jane too stood upon the hotel terrace drinking in all the fairness of the outlook which Peripatetica silently but proudly displayed, in the proprietorship of earlier rising, she was quite ready to echo the wish. Billowy orchards of almonds in tenderest leafage, hoary groves of olives, the silver and white of wind-stirred bean-fields in blossom, vivid emerald of young wheat, crimson meadows of lupine rolling down to a peacock sea glittering to a wide horizon.

Soft mountains, not too high; old stone pines black against the azure sky; brown walls of convents, and bell towers emerging from the dark green of oranges and pines; and rising out of all this Arcadian sweetness of meadow and grove the tawny columns of the Temples.

“Oh, let’s get to them at once!” cried Jane, and guideless and impatient they went, as the bird flies, straight across the intervening country, towards those beckoning golden pillars. Plunging down the hillside in front, garden-orchard, ploughed field, dusty highroad—all were merely a road between them and those temples of Lost Gods still rising unsubmerged above the tree tops. Little boys digging in the fields shyly offered them fossil shells and the bits of pottery their shovels had turned up, old women at garden gates called invitations to come in and pick oranges or inspect the ruins of “Casa Greco’s,” but they held straight on through olive groves seemingly old as the temples themselves, through velvety young wheat and flowery meadows. The distance was greater than had appeared from above. Sometimes the gleam of columns through the green beckoned illusively to impossible short cuts, as when a tempting grass path seemed to run straight to the feet of the nearest temple and instead led into a farmyard inhabited by fiercely barking dogs. A noise that called out the farm people to explain as politely as if these were the first strangers who had ever made the intrusive mistake, that an impassable wall made it impossible to reach the Temples through their property, and to detail a wee, starry-eyed bronze faun in tattered blue rags to put them upon the correct but roundabout road.

In the glowing sun of the spring morning—the old world renewing itself in blooming freshness all about—songs of birds and petals of fruit-blossoms in the air, against the shimmering blue of sky and sea and the new green of the earth’s breast, was upreared the saffron mass of Concordia—shrine of a Peace twenty centuries old.

It looked its name, did Concord, standing with all its amber columns worn but perfect, in unbroken accord, still upholding architrave and tympanum.

Intact in all but roof, on its platform of steep, worn steps it stands—in the midst of fields and groves that were once a clanging stone city, close beside the dusty highroad along which come the landau loads of hurried tourists—with its calm still unbroken. It embodies the permanence of peace through all the evanescent life of the flowing years. Unaltered through all the changes of time, its Doric columns rise, tranquil and fair, and hospitably it offers welcome to all who come.

As of old one may climb its steps to worship and admire. The road winds to its very base, and it stands as free to all comers as to the sun and wind. It alone of all the glories of once magnificent Akragas remains in its original shape. Other shrines were greater, larger, more splendid in their day. The high house of Zeus, with its mammoth columns, was nearly three times the height of Concord; it had an enclosure of three hundred and seventy-two feet to Concord’s one hundred and thirty-eight, and must once have looked scornfully on its little neighbour. Hercules, with his marvels of sculpture and painting; Juno, with her statue-enriched “thymele” terrace extending her precincts around its out-door altar and her renowned picture by Zeuxis, for whose composite beauty the five loveliest girls of the city had been models, probably outranked simple Concord. No record of its holding venerated treasures of beauty has come down from the days of its prime. Yet it alone has survived whole; emerging intact from the storms of war and nature, as if its own distilled atmosphere of serenity has acted as a preservative against Time. Even the Middle Ages treated it gently. St. Gregory of the Turnips took it for a shrine, and a gentle, serene saint he must have been; one able to dwell in the abode of Peace without feeling any desire to alter and rebuild, glad to look out of its open peristyle and watch his turnips in the sunny fields, wisely refraining from choking the pillars into walls and plaster like poor Minerva’s at Syracuse. Concordia’s cella seemed to have been just a cosy fit for St. Gregory and he a careful tenant, leaving only the two arched openings in its walls to mark his occupancy. And so the Temple is to-day the best preserved in existence—shorn of all its statues, stucco, and decoration, a little blurred and worn in outline, as if Time’s maw, while refraining from crushing, has yet mumbled it over gently.

It was apparently this completeness of preservation which had so enamoured Goethe that he dared to speak lightly of the stern majesty of the temple of Pæstum by comparison. Poseidon’s great fane he thought as inferior to Concord’s as a hero is inferior to a god.

“A god to a hero,” quoted Jane with a resentful sniff. “It was just like that pompous, stodgy old German to be carried away by mere preservation, and to prefer this sugary-slightly-melted-vanilla-caramel temple to that solemn splendour of Pæstum.”

“What an abominable simile you’ve used for this lovely thing,” scolded Peripatetica. “You’re even worse than Goethe—if possible.”

“It isn’t an abominable simile,” protested Jane flippantly. “It _is_ exactly the colour of a good vanilla caramel, and moreover it looks like one licked all over by some giant tongue.”

Having said an outrageous thing she pretended to defend it and believe it, but her heart smote her for irreverence as she and Peripatetica strolled about the peristyle, gazing through the columns at the pictures their tawny flutings framed, and she grudgingly admitted that the situation at least was divine.

Perched on the crest of a sheer-dropping rocky cliff, Concordia faces the west. To the south dark blue sea, and to the north billowy woods and fields in all the gamut of spring greens surge up to the apricot-tinted town, which is the last shrunken remnant of old Akragas. Beneath the cliff green meadows stretch smooth to the African Sea. Eastwards, on a neighbouring knoll, Juno lifts her exquisite columns against the blue, and softly moulded hills melt into the distant ruggedness of Castrogiovanni’s mountains. To the north lie fields and groves and orchards, with dottings of farmhouse and church, up to the top of the Rupe Athena, where, with her usual passion for conspicuousness, high Athena had once kept watch in her Temple, that now, according to the so frequent fate of the mighty, is fallen into nothingness.

How worshipful his blithe gods of Sun and Abundance must have here appeared to the Greek; how good the world spread out for him in all its fairness; the citadel-crowned hill protecting his rich city, the shining sea carrying his commerce; the mountains of the bounteous Earth Mother’s home encircling the rolling groves and meadowland she blessed so fruitfully, and the triumphs of his own handiwork in the marvellous temples and buildings of this splendid Akragas, “fairest of mortal cities,” as even the poets of Greece admitted.

The Plutonian shore of the previous night seemed very far away, now that Persephone was back in her own “belonging” country again; the dark terrors of Hades had grown dim. Naturally the gods of Light and Day were the only ones worshipped; they were supreme for life—and after—ah well! “the dark Fate which lay behind gods and men could not be propitiated by any rites, and must be encountered manfully as one meets the inevitable.”...

“Of course there were no temples to Pluto, they wouldn’t have known how to build one,” said Peripatetica, looking from the enclosed cella to the sunlit peristyle outside. “I never quite realized before the cheerful, self-possessed publicity of Greek worship; their temples standing always in these open elevated sites; open themselves to the light and air—majestically simple. There is just the little enclosure to shelter the statue of the god, and all the rest is clear openness, where the worshippers stood under glowing sun and sky, or looking out into it. It’s essentially an out-of-door building, the Greek Temple, spreading its beauty to light and air like a flower. Pluto would have had to evolve a type of his own, he never could have fitted into this calm cheerfulness.”

“No,” pondered Jane, “there is no room for superstitious terrors in the sunshine. I wonder does superstition turn naturally to caves and gloom, or do dark holes in the ground breed it? There is all the space of light and darkness between the sermon preached on the Mount, all beatitudes and tenderness, and the theology of the monks in the Middle Ages after the Christians had made their churches in such catacombs as those of Syracuse.”...

All Girgenti’s temples are wrought from this native chrome-yellow tufa; a sort of solidified sea-beach—compacted sand, pebbles, and fossil shells. The original snow-white stucco, made of marble dust, has flaked away, save here and there in some protected niche. The dry sirocco gnaws into the soft sandstone, and on the seaside of the columns show the long deep scorings of its viewless teeth, sunk in places nearly half through the huge diameter of the pillars.

Peripatetica was in two minds as to whether the temples had not been even more lovely in their original virgin whiteness. “After all,” she mourned, “they are but a frame without the pictures; for the Greek temple existed primarily to be a setting for its sculpture. Sculpture was an essential part of its planning, not a mere decoration, and without it pediment, metopes, frieze, and pedestals are meaningless forms. That sculpture that stood and walked on the pediments and gave life to the frieze; that animated the exterior, or sat calm and strong in the central shrine. To a Greek even this wonderfully preserved Concordia, bare of sculpture, would seem but a melancholy skeleton of a once fair shrine.”

But Jane was obstinately sure that nothing could be better than the natural harmonies of the naked stone.

“Nothing,” she insisted with bland firmness, “not even your blind conviction that everything the Greeks did was exactly right—just because they did it—will persuade me that they improved these temples by any marble plaster. Come over here and look at the warm red gold of those soaring fluted stems against the vivid blue! It is as if the splendour of sunset glowed upon them all day long. As if they had soaked in so much sun through all the bright centuries that now even the very stones gave it out again.”

Peripatetica had been half inclined to believe this herself at first, but of course Jane’s opposition clinched her wavering suffrages for the stucco.

“You lack in imagination,” she announced loftily. “You see only what you see. Try to realize what the marble background meant to the saffron-robed, flower-garlanded priests, and to the worshippers massed on the steps and in the peristyles in delicate-tinted chiton and chamyle—crocus, daffodil, violet-rose, ivory—like a living flower wreath from out the spring meadows encircling the white temple’s base—”

“Oh, do stop trying to be Pater-esque!” scoffed Jane, “and let’s go to luncheon. That sounds too much like sublimated guide-book, and the hotel looks miles away to my unimaginative eye.”

* * * * *

“We won’t, will we?” said Jane half an hour later, with her irreverent mouth full.

Peripatetica knew what she meant.

“Go on to-morrow? No, indeed. We’ll telegraph Cook to send our mail here until further notice—the idea of being told there was nothing to linger for at Girgenti! It’s the nicest place we’ve yet found in Sicily.”

The room was full of the munching of tourists. From the talk in German, English, and French, could be gathered they had one and all “done” the five temples, the tombs, and San Niccola that morning—would “take in” the town sights that afternoon and pass on that evening or the next morning. The two Seekers, to whom the morning had not been long enough in which to dream and dispute over one temple, felt their heads growing dizzy at the rush with which the tourist stream flowed along its Cook-dug channels, and they gladly resolved to leave the current and climb up high and dry on the bank of this inviting little backwater.

The announcement of their intention to stay on seemed to give the polite young proprietor of the hotel a strange shock. He offered better rooms looking on the terrace, and _pension_ rates if they stayed more than three days, instead of the usual week for which that reduction is commonly made. A flutter of excitement at their behaviour passed at once through all the personnel of the hotel.

First came the concierge. “You are really not leaving to-morrow morning, ladies? For what day do you wish me to get your tickets stamped?” He was startledly incredulous when told that the day was still too far in the future for a date to be fixed. The porter came to ask at what time he was to carry out their luggage in the morning—the head waiter to know for which train they wished to be called. The stolid chambermaid’s mouth fell open in surprise when asked to move their things to other rooms. The two-foot-high Buttons shifted about chairs four times his own size in the lobby to get a chance to gaze satisfactorily at such peculiar ladies, and by tea-time the German waiters were staring as they carried about tea-trays, and pointing out to one another the strangely behaving two who were not leaving the next day!

The pretty little hotel was like a railway restaurant. Successive sets of hurried tourists appeared, made a one-meal or a one-night stop, and rushed on, leaving their places to others. In a week’s time so many sets had come and gone that Peripatetica and Jane began to take on the air of pre-historic aborigines; as if they had been sitting on their sunny bank watching all the invading hordes of nations since the Carthagenians made their first raid.

By way of emphasizing the superior intelligence of their own methods they savoured slowly and lingeringly Girgenti’s endless charms. Loafing placidly on the flowery terrace for an hour after breakfast to enjoy the distant view of the golden temples, or to watch the patient labours of ancient brown Orlando and his ancient grey ass Carlo, who spent all their waking hours in climbing down, down the precipitous road to the Fonte dei Greci with empty water-barrels, and toilsomely bringing them up full and dripping to be emptied into the terrace well with its lovely carved well head. Or they retired to the niche below the terrace stairs under the feathery pepper tree, and sat amid a blaze of poppies and mauve to write letters, punctuated by frequent pauses to look across the olive orchards and young wheat fields to the wide blue fields of the sea. And every day they strolled away through the orchard footpaths towards the temples, which were ever their goal, though they might be hours in reaching that goal because of being led away by adventures on the road.

It was by way of this footpath that they first fell into the hands of Fortunato. They were forever falling into some one’s hands and finding the results agreeable, for they kept their minds open to suggestion and abjured all hard and fast lines of intention, being wise enough to realize that what is known as “a good traveller” usually misses all the good of travel by the cut-and-driedness of his aims.

Fortunato was sure that he could “spika da Englishy,” though what led him to suppose so, other than a large command of illuminative gesture, never became clear. Some half-dozen words—adorned with superfluous vowels to a point of unrecognizability—he did possess; the rest was Sicilian, sympathy, and vivid intelligence, which sufficed to make him the perfectly delightful guide he explained himself to be. His age he declared to be fourteen, he looked all of ten, but his knowledge of the world, of life, of history, and of the graces of conversation could hardly have been acquired by any one less than forty. Within twenty minutes he had made them free of such short and simple annals of his career as he judged to be suited to their limited forestieri minds, having first firmly assumed the burden of all their small impedimenta—jackets, kodaks, and parasols. He was one of fifteen, he explained, and also the main staff of his parents’ declining years; the six staffs younger than himself being somewhat too short for that filial office. The other eight had been removed from this service by the combined ravages of marriage, the army, and emigration. When time and the growth of his juniors enabled him to lay down his absorbing duties he had the intention of joining in Nuova Yorka a distinguished barber, who enjoyed the privilege of being his elder brother. Nuova Yorka, he had been given to understand by this brother, boasted no such mountains as these of Girgenti, but its streets were filled for months with hills of ice and snow, and this information Peripatetica and Jane were regretfully obliged to confirm.

No matter! even such rigours could not check his ambition to “barb,” and as his brother had explained how necessary it was that he should be complete master of Englishy before landing in Nuova Yorka if he hoped to escape being “plucked” (great business of illuminating gestures of rapacity) he employed in guiding Americans such brief hours as he could snatch from school.

They discovered later that Fortunato snatched from school just seven entire days every week.

It had been the intention of the two to spend the morning among the gigantic ruins of the temple of Zeus, and yet when Fortunato put pressure upon their ever flexible impulses at the gate of the strange old Panitteri garden, they found themselves instead under the walls of the church of San Niccola, where the gillyflowers and wild mignonette rioted from every crevice. Meekly they climbed a great stone terrace adorned with crumbling statues and Corinthian entablatures. Meekly they examined the great baths, and delighted in the shining panorama of sea and plain and hill, with golden Concordia seen in its most lovely aspect between two gigantic stone pines.

Still sternly shepherded by the small guide they climbed down again to make a closer acquaintance with the Oratory of Phalaris. Phalaris of the infamous legend of the brazen bull, into whose heated body were cast the enemies of the ancient Tyrant of Akragas, because that humorous gentleman’s fancy was highly diverted by the similarity of their moanings, as they slowly roasted, to the lowing of kine. It is said that he fretted a good deal because nobody else appeared to think the thing as good a joke as it seemed to him, but then taste in jests _will_ differ, unfortunately. The Carthagenians when they came over and conquered Sicily were quite delighted with the ingenious toy, and carried it off triumphantly to Africa. They were finished artists in torture themselves, and appreciated a valuable new idea. Scipio found the bull in Carthage, when he made a final end of that city, and he returned it to Akragas, but appetite for really poignant fun appears to have died out by that time, and Fortunato, whom they consulted, seemed to think it was probably eventually broken up for the purpose of manufacturing braziers, or possibly warming-pans.

Memory of the Bull almost obscured the fact that the Oratory was a beautiful Greek chapel, such as was used to hold some statue of a god, and the memorials of ancestors, and served for private daily devotions without need of a priest. The Normans had the same habit of private family chapels, so the Oratory had served them in turn, being pierced by a Norman window and the square-headed entrance door fitted with an arch.

Half a dozen races and centuries had each had a hand in the Church and Convent of San Niccola too, apparently. It was built from stones filched from that vast ruin of the Temple of Zeus they were on their roundabout way to see, and which has always been an exhaustless quarry for Girgenti. So late as in the last century the huge stones that formed the Porto Empedocle, a long mole from which the sulphur is shipped, were stolen from poor Zeus. Doors, windows, roofs, arches, had been added or changed in San Niccola, just as each generation needed, and each in the taste of the period. The holy-water stoup at the entrance, for example, was an enormous marble hand, taken from one of the temples. For the Greeks too had fonts of holy water, consecrated by plunging into it a burning torch from the altar, and as the worshippers entered they were asperged with a branch of laurel.

The poor Saint was not in flourishing circumstances in these later days, it would seem, judging by the bareness of his sanctuary, and the torn cotton lace upon the altars, and yet he was an industrious healer, if one might reason from the votives that hung about his picture. A few were wrought in silver, but more in wax, or carved and painted wood, reproducing with hideous fidelity the swollen limbs, the cancerous breasts, the goitered throats, the injured eyes, the carbuncles and abcesses he had healed through his miraculous intervention. Indeed, he was a general jobber in miracles, for the naïve, rude little paintings on the wall showed a spirited donkey running away with a painted cart, the terrified occupant frantically making signals of distress to San Niccola in heaven, who was preparing promptly to check the raging ass. Or he was drawing a chrome-yellow petitioner from a cobalt sea, or turning a Mafia dagger aside, or finding a lost child in the mountains. He certainly “studied to please,” and it did seem a pity he should be housed in so bare and poverty-stricken a shrine. Many less active saints lived amid welters of gilding and luxury.

In spite of Fortunato dragging them aside later to see a little “Casa Greco,” where they could trace delicate tesselated pavements and the bases of the columns of the atrium amid the grass, they still succeeded in arriving that same afternoon at their original goal.

Only the temple of Diana at Ephesus was larger than this great shrine to the spirit of the overarching sky, and even yet, though moles and churches and villas have been wrought from its remains, the gigantic ruin daunts the imagination with its colossal fragments, its huge tumble of stone, its fallen mountains of masonry. Each triglyph alone weighed twelve tons, and the enormous columns around the whole length of its three hundred and seventy-two feet were more than sixty feet high. Theron, the benevolent despot of Akragas, built it with the labours of his Carthagenian captives, and no doubt a memory of their frightful toilings in the Sicilian noons inspired the Carthagenians, when they captured the city, to their fury of destruction against the fane they themselves had wrought. It would seem as if only some convulsion of nature could have brought down that prodigious construction, but still visible upon the bases of the fallen pillars are the cuts made by the Punic conquerors, sufficient to disturb the equilibrium of even these monster columns. When their rage had at last expended itself nothing of all that incredible mass of masonry remained standing save three of the enormous Telamone—the male caryatids—that had supported the entablature. And so firmly were these built that they stood there for fifteen centuries more before time and a quaking of the earth at last brought them down.

Now the last of these lies in the centre of the ruin, perhaps the most impressive figure wrought by man’s hands, so like does it seem—blurred, vague, tremendous—to some effort to symbolize in stone the whole human race—the very frame of the world itself. Shoulder and breast an upheaved mountain range, down which the mighty muscles pour like leaping rivers to the plain of the enormous loins and thighs. Rough-hewn locks cluster about the frowning brows, as a gnarled forest grips a cliff’s edge, from beneath which stare darkly the caverned eyes. Primeval, prehistoric in form, overrun by gnawing lichens, smeared by lapse of time to a mere vast adumbration of the human form.

This temple had been the supreme effort of Akragas, the richest and most beautiful city the Greeks ever built. The stories of its wealth, of its luxury, of its gardens, palaces, theatres, baths, its gaieties, and its pomps, sound like a description of Rome under the Empire, and would be incredible if such ruins as this did not exist to attest to the facts.

Far more characteristic of the Greek were those twin temples of Castor and Pollux

—“These be the great Twin Brethren
To whom the Dorians pray”—

to which Fortunato turned their steps as a refreshing counteraction of the stern immensities of Zeus. Light, delicate, gracious fragments they were, lifting themselves airily from a sea of flowers on the edge of the ravine-like Piscina, once the reservoir for the city’s water, but now full of lemon orchards, and fringed by immense dark carouba trees....

Another day, conducted by Fortunato always, they pilgrimed to the temple of Hercules, oldest and most archaic of them all, containing still in the cella remains of the pedestal on which stood that famous bronze statue of the muscular hero and demigod. The statue which that unscrupulous collector, Verres, tried to remove and thereby provoked a riot in the city. In this temple too had hung Zeuxis’ renowned painting of Hercules’ mother, Alcmena.

It was on still another day that Fortunato led through olive groves and bowery lanes to the temple of Juno Lacina, beguiling the way with light songs—some of them distinctly light—and scintillating conversation upon all matters in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. He mimicked deliciously the characteristics of English, French, German, and American tourists, differentiating their national peculiarities with delicate acuity. He made no effort to disguise that he had pondered much upon the sexes, and opined, with a shrug, that there was a hopeless and lifelong irreconcilability in their two points of view. Marriage, he frankly conceded to be a necessity, but considered it a lamentable one. Of course one must come to it soon or late, but, for a man, how sad a fate! Then he broke off to sing of undying passion, and interrupted himself to ask if the donkeys in Nuova Yorka were as quick and strong as those of Sicily; he supposed the streets must be crowded with them, where the needs of commerce were so great.

Eventually he brought them out upon the lovely eminence of the temple of the Mother of Heaven—Juno Lacina, special deity of mothers, which crowns the edge of a sheer cliff of orange-yellow tufa four hundred feet above the sea. The sea had washed close under the cliff when the temple was first built, but now at its foot the alluvial plains stretch level and rich, bearing orchards and meadows and vineyards more fertile than any old Akragas knew, though this very shrine was built from the proceeds of exportation of oil to Carthage.

Earthquakes had shaken down more than half the tall, slim columns. Sirocco has bitten deep into those still standing, and into the fallen fragments which strew the landward slope; fragments lying among gnarled olives, seemingly as wind-eaten and ancient as themselves. Among these fluted fragments grew wild pansies and crimson lupins, from which little Fortunato gathered nosegays, as he shrilled, in his boyish falsetto, songs of love and sorrow—or sat and kicked his heels upon the margin of an old bottle-shaped cistern. Tourists whirled up dustily for a cursory inspection—Baedeker in hand—and whirled as quickly away, bent on getting through the sights and passing on; but still Peripatetica and Jane lingered and dreamed among the ruins until Fortunato, visibly bored, suggested a short cut back to the hotel. It led them by fields of lupin, spread like crimson velvet mantles on the hillside, where the contadini cut the glowing crop, heaping it upon asses until they seemed but a moving mass of blossom trotting home on brown legs. Goats, Fortunato volunteered, detested—for some curious goatish reason he could not explain—this picturesque food, but donkeys! ah, to donkeys it was—in a burst of superlative explanation—“the donkey macaroni.”

This short cut led, too—apparently to Fortunato’s surprise and dismay—directly through a walled farmyard surrounding a frowning, half-ruined casa, nail-studded of door and barred of window, and with an air of ancient and secretive menace. It was the sort of place travellers in such books as “The Mysteries of Udolpho” used to come upon at nightfall, far from any other habitation, with a thunderstorm about to break among the mountains, and the leader of their four-horsed travelling carriage hopelessly lame, so that the delicate and shrinking heroine must, willy nilly, beg for a night’s accommodation and the surly inhabitant’s sinister hospitality. Curiously enough the dwellers in this casa were, it seemed, of the exact Udolpho variety. Ringing the correctly rusty bell, and battering upon the massive gate with their parasol handles aroused a storm of deep-mouthed baying of dogs within, and a fierce brown face finally appeared at a small wooden shutter to demand the cause of the intrusion. Fortunato’s heart and legs plainly turned to water at the sight of this person, but realizing that he had got Jane and Peripatetica into a hole and must get them out, he wheedled in such honeyed and persuasive Sicilian, that at last, and reluctantly, the heavy portal

“Ground its teeth to let them pass,”

the furious dogs having first been chained. Very arid and ruined and poor this jealously guarded dwelling seemed. Nothing was visible the protection of which required those four big wolf-like dogs that shrieked and bounded and tore at their chains as the intruders passed; nor that the lean fierce man and his leaner and fiercer wife and children should accompany them like a jailer’s guard to the exit. Fortunately this nether door was unbarred before the lean man demanded money for having permitted them to cross his land, and having a sense of Fortunato’s imploring eyes upon them they made the gift a lire instead of a copper, and pushing through the door fled as for their lives.

“So there really was an Italy like the Italy of the romantic Georgian novel!” said Jane wonderingly, as soon as she could catch breath.

“It’s only another proof,” gasped Peripatetica, “that travellers really do tell the truth. It’s the ignorant stay-at-homes who can’t believe anything they haven’t seen themselves. Fortunato,” she demanded sternly, “who are those people, and why do they behave so absurdly? What are they concealing?”

But no explanation was to be had from that erstwhile fluent and expansive _homme du monde_. He was frightened, he was vague, and simply darkened counsel.

“I strongly suspect there is some Mafia business behind all this—you naughty boy!” said Jane reprovingly, but Fortunato only pulled his cap over his eyes and slunk away without claiming his day’s wage.

Because of this episode Fortunato found his offered services frigidly dispensed with the next day when he presented himself, Jane and Peripatetica setting out alone to explore the town of Girgenti. They were quite sure they could themselves discover a short cut to the small city which would be much more amusing than the dusty highway. It seemed but a stone’s throw distant, and surely by striking down this footpath, and rounding that rise....

An hour later, panting, dripping, and disgusted, they climbed into the rear of the town, having stumbled through the boulders of dry water-courses, struggled over the huge old rugged pavements of ancient Akragas—washed out of their concealment by winter torrents—skirted outlying villas, and laboured up steps. The short cut had proved the longest way round they could possibly have taken to the inadequate, shabby little museum they had set out to see in this modern successor of the great Greek city. Girgenti, though one of the most thriving of Sicilian towns, thanks to its sulphur mines, only manages to fill one small corner of the hill acropolis of that ancient city, which once covered all the miles stretching between this and the temple-crowned ridge of the southern boundary of cliffs. Akragas found space for nearly a million of inhabitants where Girgenti nourishes but twenty thousand or so.

It was not till 580 B.C. that this Rhodian colony was founded, so Akragas was a century and a half younger than her great rival, Syracuse—the offspring of Corinth. But that site on the steep river-girt hill, rising from such fertile country, proved so favourable to life and commerce; trade with the opposite coast of Africa developed so richly, that Akragas’ rise to wealth and power was rapid, and she was soon pressing Syracuse hard for the place of first city. Her temples were the greatest of all Sicily, almost of all Greece. The city’s magnificence became a bye-word, and accounts of the wealth and prodigality of its private citizens read like Arabian Nights imaginings. In the public gymnasium the people used golden strigils and gold vessels for oil. One rich Akragantine kept slaves in waiting all day at the door of his great mansion to invite every passing stranger in to feast and repose in his spacious courts, where there were baths and fresh garments always waiting and slaves to entertain with dance and music; flower garlands and food and wine unlimited at his call. There was wine in the cellars by the reservoir full—three hundred reservoirs of nine hundred gallons each—hewn in the solid rock! This same genial Gelleas, when five hundred riders came at once from Gela, took them all in, and, it being the dead of winter, presented each man with new warm garments.

They delighted in pageants and splendid public festivals, these splendour-loving Akragantines, of whom their philosopher Empedocles said that they “built as if they were to live forever and feasted as if they were to die on the morrow!” We know they went out to welcome young Exainetos, victor at the Olympian Games, with three hundred glittering chariots drawn all by milk-white horses; we know of the wonderful illuminations that lit all the city, from the monuments of the high Acropolis to the temple-crowned sea-rampart, when a noble bride passed at night to her new home, with flutings and chorus, and an escort of eight hundred carriages and riders innumerable.

Now the town seemed to be mostly a winding tangle of steep stairs—with houses for walls—and these stairs were bestrewn with ancient remnants of vegetables that had outlived their usefulness, and a swarming population of children. Fazelli mentions an Agrigentian woman of his time who brought forth seventy-three children at thirty-three births, and judging from the appearance of the streets that rabbit-like practice still maintains. Way could hardly be made through the swarm of juvenile pests, clamouring for pennies and offering themselves as guides, until a boy in slightly cleaner rags was chosen to show the way to the Cathedral. Once given an official position he furiously put his competitors to flight, and with goat-footed lightness flitted before up the ladder-like alleys, while the two panted after until it seemed as if they should be able easily to step off into the sky.

A queer old Fourteenth Century campanile, with Norman ogives and Moorish balconies, still gives character to the exterior of this thousand-foot-long Cathedral of San Gerlando perched aloft in the windy blue, but inside the Eighteenth Century had done its worst. Baroque rampant; colossal stucco mermaids and cupids, interspersed with gilded whorls and scrolls as thick as shells upon the “shell-work” boxes of the seaside booths. A giant finger could flick out a dozen cupids anywhere without their ever being missed. Yet it stands upon the ruins of a temple to Jove, and here for more than two thousand years have prayers and praise and incense gone up to the gods of the overarching blue that looks so near, so that even stucco and gilding cannot render it irreverent or lessen its power to brood the children of earth beneath its wings.

Even so it seemed to-day, for merrily and thickly as the throngs of naked little stucco cupids chased each other on the walls, infants of flesh and blood in gay rags and heavy hob-nailed shoes swarmed over the marble floor. As if it were a kindergarten small boys played games of tag around the columns, small girls trotted about more demurely, or flocked like rows of perching sparrows around the numerous altars. The church resounded with the hum of their voices and the patter of their feet; yet the old women at prayer continued their devotions, quite undisturbed, and no passing priest or sacristan did more than shake a gentle finger at some especially boisterous youngster.

The sacristy holds the jewel of the Cathedral, a ravished jewel which does not belong at all in this ecclesiastical setting—the lovely Greek sarcophagus portraying the passionate story of Hippolytus and Phædra. This is the one remnant now left to Akragas out of all her treasures of Greek art. Found in the temple of Concord, where the gentle St. Gregory had probably cherished it, the Girgentians offered it to their Cathedral, and in that most tolerant of churches it served for long as the High Altar until influx of the outer world made some sense of its incongruity felt even here. At one end of the tomb Phædra swoons amourously among her maidens, their delicate little round child-like faces and soft-draped forms melting into the background in exquisite low relief. Two of a more stately beauty hold up the Queen’s limp arms and support her as she confesses to her old nurse the secret passion consuming her for that god-like boy, son of her own husband, whom with all her fiery blood she had once hated as illegitimate rival to her own children, but now had come to find so dear that she “loved the very touch of his fleecy coat”—that simple grey-and-white homespun his Amazon mother’s loving fingers had woven. In high bold relief of interlacing trees Hippolytus on the other side hunts as joyously as his patroness Artemis herself. Opposite, arrested among his dogs and companions, he stands in the clear purity of his young beauty, like “the water from the brook or the wild flowers of the morning, or the beams of the morning star turned to human flesh,” turning away his head from the bent shrunken form of the old nurse pleading her shameful embassy. And on the other end is carved the tragedy of his death, the revenge of Aphrodite in anger at his obduracy against herself and her votary Phædra. “Through all the perils of darkness he had guided the chariot safely along the curved shore; the dawn was come, and a little breeze astir as the grey level spaces parted delicately into white and blue, when angry Aphrodite awoke from the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface; a great wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the little shore, and was surging here to the very necks of the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying so pleasantly with him the caress of the morning air, but now, wholly forgetful of their old affectionate habit of obedience, dragging their leader headlong over the rough pavements.”

Life seemed to breathe from the ivory-coloured marble. So vividly had its creator’s hand carried out the conception of his brain that all the elapsed centuries since the vision of beauty had come to him were but as drifting mists. Races, dynasties, powers, the very form of the earth itself, had altered, in the changing ages, but the grace of this little dream was still a living force.

“Oh Attic shape! Fair Attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens, over wrought
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waile
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

* * * * *

On the steps of the Cathedral they witnessed a pretty sight.

“Peripatetica,” announced Jane, “I will not walk back to the hotel! It may be only one mile from town, by the high road, but it was certainly four by that short cut, and all this hill-climbing on slippery cobbles has turned my knees to tissue paper. The boy must get us a cab—how does one say it? You tell him.”

The boy hesitated at first at Peripatetica’s request, but went off in obedience to the firm command of her tone.

Accustomed to the ubiquitous, ever present and ever-pestering cab of Taormina and Syracuse, they expected his instant return. But the minutes passed and passed, and sitting on the parapet of the Cathedral steps they had long opportunity to watch the world wag on. Apparently it was “Children’s Day” at the Cathedral, to which they were being mustered for catechism. The swarms inside were now explained. Though it had seemed as if every child in town must already be there, they were still flocking in.

Mites of every size and sort between the ages of two and ten, small things with no accompanying elders, came toiling up the steep streets Cathedralwards, climbing the long flights of steps and boldly shoving into the great doorway.

But the different manner of their coming! The unfaltering steady advance of the devout—heads brushed, shirts and frocks clean, faces set and solemn, no words or smiles for their companions, minds fixed on duty. Little girls came in bands, tongues going like mill-hoppers even as they plunged within the sacred portal. Little boys enlivened their pilgrimage with chasings and scuffles. Wee tots, timidly attached to the hand of some patriarch of eight or nine; receiving therefrom protecting encouragement, or being ruthlessly dragged along at the top speed of chubby legs, regardless of their streaming tears. Loiterers arriving with panting pink tongues, stockings half off and dragging, clothes all in disarray from some too delightful game on the way, plodding breathless up the steps with worried rubbings on clothes of dirty little paws; still casting reluctant looks at the sunshine before they made the plunge behind the dark leather curtain. Reprobates, at the very last refusing to enter at all; refusing to exchange the outer darkness of play and sunshine for the inner light of wax tapers and the Catechism; giving themselves boldly over to sin on the very Cathedral steps in merry games of tag and loud jeerings and floutings of the old beggar men who had given up their sunny posts at the doors in attempts to drive these backsliders in. And the Reluctant, coming with slow and dragging feet; heads turned back to all the mundane charms of the streets, lingering as long as possible before final hesitating entrance. For these last it was very hard that, straight in their way, just in front of the Cathedral, a brother Girgentian, whose very tender age still rendered him immune from religious duties, was thrillingly disporting himself with an iron barrel-hoop tied to a string, the leg of a chicken, and two most delightful mud-puddles. The care-free sportings and delicious condition of dirt of this Blessed Being made their own soaped and brushed virtue most cruelly unsatisfying to many of the Pilgrims. But there was the Infant Example, who, with crisp short skirts rustling complacency, and Mother’s large Prayer-book clasped firmly to her bosom, climbed the steps with eyes rolled raptly heavenwards and little black pig-tails vibrating piety. And some little boys with both stockings firmly gartered, jackets irreproachably buttoned, and a consciousness of all the answers to the Catechism safely bestowed in their sleek little heads, made their way in eagerly, wrapped in the “showing off” excitement. These little Lambs passed coldly and disapprovingly through those who had chosen to be goats in the outer sunshine. But many small ewes sent glances of fearful admiration from soft dark eyes at those bold flouters of authority, and many proper youths looked sidewise at them so longingly it was plain that only the fear of evil report taken home by sisters in tow, kept them from joining the Abandoned Ones.

Peripatetica, amused and interested, forgot the flight of time. Jane, suddenly realizing it, cried:

“That boy has been gone a half hour—do you suppose you really told him to get a cab? I believe you must have said something wild and strange which the poor thing will spend the rest of his life questing while we turn into lichens on this parapet.”

Peripatetica, indignantly denying this slur on her Italian, insisted she had clearly and correctly demanded a cab, and a cab only.

“I remember,” she reflected, “the boy looked very troubled as he went off—and now that I come to think of it, we haven’t met a horse in this town to-day. The Romans must have looted all the conveyances in their last sack of the city; the only one left is now kept in the Museum in a glass case, and allowed out for no less a person than the German Emperor—but I _won’t_ walk back. I should suppose the boy had deserted us, except that he hasn’t been paid.”

“Poor little wretch! That was why he looked so troubled,” exclaimed Jane. “He knew the long and difficult search he was being sent upon, and perhaps thought it was a mere Barbarian ruse to shake him off, so that we could get away without paying him.”

As she spoke the sound of thudding hoofs echoed from the walls of the Cathedral, and the white anxious face of their guide appeared on flying legs. The reassurance that changed his expression into a beaming smile at sight of the two still there, made it clear that Jane’s supposition had been correct. He had evidently feared to find both his clients and the silver rewards of his labours vanished. The relief with which he gasped out his explanation of having had to go all the way down into the valley to the railway station to get a carriage which was now on its way while he had dashed ahead on foot up a short cut, was so pathetic they gave him double pay to console him for his worry.

And then with a noise between the rumble of a thunderstorm and the clatter of a tinman’s wagon came their “carrozza.” Its cushions were in rags, the harness almost all rope, one door was off a hinge and swung merrily useless—but two lean steeds drew this noble barouche and two men in rags sat solemnly on its ricketty box with such an air of importance its passengers felt as if they were being conducted homeward in a chariot of state.

* * * * *

Fortunato, restored to favour, was leading them up the Rupe Athena, that rose steeply immediately behind their hotel; he was leading them not straight up, but by a series of long “biases”—as Jane expressed it. The end of the first bias reached the little lonely church of San Biago, dreary and uninteresting enough in its solitary perch, save for the fact that it stood upon the site of a temple to Demeter and Persephone:

“Our Lady of the Sheaves,
And the Lily of Hades, the Sweet
Of Enna”

placed here no doubt because this high spur was the only point in Girgenti from which one could catch a glimpse of the lofty steeps of Enna-Castrogiovanni.

Turning at a sharp angle again they went slanting up across the bare hillside, the wild thyme sending up a keen sweet incense beneath their climbing feet, until they came to the verge of the great yellow broken cliff that shot up more than a thousand feet from the valley below. Some crumpling of the earth’s crust, ages ago, had forced up this sheer mass of sandstone, hung now with cactus, thyme, and vines, which served as one of the natural defences of Akragas, behind whose unscalable heights the unwarlike city had been enabled peacefully to pursue its gathering of wealth and luxury.

Fortunato, leaning over the marge, clapped his hands suddenly, and a cloud of rock pigeons flew forth from the crevices, to wheel and flutter and settle again among the vines. Probably descendants of those pigeons who lived in these same crevices in the days of the monster Phalaris, and helped to compass his death.

Pythagoras—that strange wanderer and mystic, whose outlines loom so beautiful and so incomprehensible through the vagueness of legend, was first flattered and then threatened by the Tyrant, who feared the philosopher’s teachings of freedom and justice. At one of those public discussions, so impossible in any other country ruled despotically, and yet so characteristically Greek—Pythagoras rounded a burst of eloquence by pointing to a flock of these pigeons fleeing before a hawk.

“See what a vile fear is capable of,” he cried. “If but one of these pigeons dared to resist he would save his companions, who would have time to flee.”

Fired by the suggestion the old Telemachus threw a stone at the Tyrant and despite the efforts of his guards, Phalaris was ground to a bloody paste by the stones and fury of the suddenly enfranchised Akragantines.

* * * * *

“It is our last day,” Jane had said; “we will go and bid the temples good-bye.”

Which was why she and Peripatetica were scaling in the sunset the golden cliffs which Concordia crowned, having come to it by a détour to Theron’s tomb.

They drew themselves laboriously up to the crest, and sank breathlessly upon the verge among the crumbled grave pits, where the Greeks buried their dead along the great Temple road. Not only their beloved human companions they interred here, but the horses who had been Olympian victors, their faithful dogs, and their pet birds. It was in rifling these graves, in search of jewels and treasure, that the greedy Carthagenians had reaped a hideous pestilence as a price of their impiety. Now the graves were but empty grass-grown troughs, and one might sit among them safely to watch the skyey glories flush across the sapphire sea, and redden the hill where the little shrunken Girgenti sent down the soft pealing of Cathedral chimes from her airy distance. Beside them Concordia’s columns deepened to tints of beaten gold in the last rays, and across the level plain far below—already dusk—the people streamed home from their long day’s labour. Flocks of silky, antlered goats strayed and cropped as they moved byre-wards, urged by brown goatherds who piped the old country tunes as they went. The same tunes Theocritus listened to in the dusk thousands of summers since, or that Empedocles, purple-clad, and golden-crowned, might have heard vaguely fluting through his dreams of life and destiny as he meditated beneath these temple shadows as night came down.

Asses pattered and tinkled towards the farms, laden with crimson burdens of sweet-smelling lupin. Painted carts rattled by with oil or wine; and cries and laughter and song came faintly up to them as the evening grew grey.

“How little it changes,” said Peripatetica wistfully. “We will pass and vanish as all these did on whose tombs we rest, and hundreds of years from now there will be the same colours and the same songs to widen the new eyes with delight.”

“Let us be grateful for the joys of Theocritus, and for our joys and for the same joy in the same old beauties of those to come,” said Jane, sententiously. “And let us go home, for the moon is rising.”

Large and golden it came out of the rosy east, the west still smouldering with the dying fires of the ended day.

Their way led through the olive orchards, grown argent in the faint light, and taking on fresh fantasies of gnarling, and of ghostly resemblances to twisted, convoluted human forms. Among the misty olives the blooming pear-trees showed like delicate silvery-veiled brides in the paling dark, and with the falling dew arose the poignant incense of ripening lemons, of blossoming weeds, and of earth freshly tilled.

Wandering a little from the faintly traced path, grown invisible in the vagueness of the diffused moon-radiance, they called for help to a young shepherd going lightly homeward, with his cloak draped in long classic folds from one shoulder, and singing under his breath. A shepherd who may have been merely a commonplace, handsome young Sicilian by day, but who in this magic shining dusk was the shepherd of all pastoral verse, strayed for a moment from Arcady. Following his swift light feet they were set at last into the broad road among the herds and the asses and the homing labourers—Demeter’s well-beloved children.

“E’en now the distant farms send up their smoke,
And shadows lengthen from the lofty hills.

* * * * *

—Now the gloaming star
Bids fold the flock and duly tell their tale,
And moves unwelcome up the wistful sky.
. . . . . . Go home, my full-fed goats,
Cometh the Evening Star, my goats, go home.”

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