Chapter VI: Part 6

The town curves in a semi-circle around the top of the hill, behind the battered remains of stout old walls which even to-day are massive and in places almost perfect, and might be turned to excellent account in defense. Just where the road skirts the base of the cliff, one night in December of 1677, forty stout-hearted native soldiers scaled the wall--when you look up at it, it seems an impossible feat--with ropes, and surprised and captured the French garrison then in possession. The highly picturesque entrance by a carved archway under a bit of wall leading outward at right angles from the overhanging cliff is commanded by an equally picturesque evil-looking iron smooth-bore cannon.

So still is Mola that the old lines fit it perfectly:

“Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o’ertops the moldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away, thy children leave the land.”

It is literally the “Deserted Village.” Half an hour suffices to explore the Corso--even tiny Mola has its highway named for the King!--and all the silent high- and by-ways from end to end; mere _gradini_, crooked and steep, slits between out-of-plumb houses whose only occupants seem to be pigs. The biggest, blackest, dirtiest and leanest razorbacks imaginable march solemnly up and down the front steps of the best houses, or snore comfortably inside on the parlor floor. Occasionally a savage mother with her little shoats takes up a good share of the way, snapping viciously at anyone who ventures too close. Our “guide,” a mere baby, offered to go and stir up such a family when he saw me about to take its picture, and nearly lost a leg for his pains.

But in all these streets not a man is visible of adult years and able to work. Only at the “Cathedral” can vigorous men be seen, the verger and the priest. The whereabouts of the others are told in the single magic word that spells so much to all Europe--“America!” It is literally true. Of all the male inhabitants only those too poor, too feeble to make the long trip, or too young to be acceptable as toilers, have remained at home. Even the exceptions, the verger and the priest, gaze seaward with longing eyes.

The “Cathedral” is a building to make the heart ache. Poor and ignorant though they are, the people strive with cheap, garish colors and hideous decorations to please the Deity as well as to give their lowly church the air of a rich-folks’ Cathedral. What grips one most is to be found in the sacristy. Tied tightly to the arm of a much betinseled Mary Magdalen is a beautiful and amazingly thick braid of human hair. What is the tragedy behind the oblation? What poor little girl from Mola came cowering and repentant to the feet of the saint and fastened the simple ex-voto in broken-hearted gratitude to the arm of her who wept over the sacred feet and wiped them with her hair? Is it a local tragedy or one from across the unfathomable seas? The verger pretends he does not know. Yet as you wander through the unkempt streets of the deserted village, you cannot help looking curiously about for any woman whose head shows the trace of the votive shears.

Many a time throughout Italy we had been tormented by filthy beggars on the steps of the cathedrals; but it was reserved for Mola to show us a pig who owned to being a pig in such a place! As we came out a huge, lean razorback grunted in savage disapproval, lurched to his feet, and trotted heavily off down a side street.

If the ascent to Mola is difficult, what can be said of the coming down? You stretch muscles you never knew you had, all the corns in the world seem to have concentrated upon your luckless feet, and you pitch and roll and toss like a mastless ship in a cross-sea.

After that Mola trip the most energetic traveler is apt to go to bed very early, and so for the first time hears the night noises of Taormina. The town makes quite a clatter on its way to bed--the click! click! click! of hobnailed heels on the lava pavement, the light chatter and songs of the children, which for all their occasional gayety have an elusive element of the tragic in them, the fluting of some little shepherd, and the tired bray of a home-going donkey glad the day’s work is over. And every half-hour the bell-baiting! Would that Poe had heard these Sicilian bells before he wrote his tintinnabulating rhyme. Beaten, not rung, they clamor with the maddening insistence of fiends until the ear rebels and no longer notices their angry tumult. One tradition has it that there is not a bell-clapper in the island, for the returning French took the iron tongues away after the Massacre of the Vespers, to keep the people from ringing alarms. But the ingenious Sicilian found that he could make much more noise with a hammer, and though six hundred years and more have rolled by, he is still so tickled with the racket that he seems each time to be trying to break all previous records. A more plausible story is that the clappers were taken away by the Neapolitans as recently as the day of Garibaldi’s arrival with his thousand red-shirts in 1860.

Save for the bell-baiting only, silence reigns from about ten until two. Then the first donkey’s tiny little overburdened feet come ticking down the Corso, the whack of his rider’s stick and an occasional gruff adjuration to the patient little mouse-colored beast recurring in a regular work-_motif_. Slowly the light begins to come. A sleepy ringer bangs out fifty irregular notes from his bell, hesitates a moment as though not quite certain of his count, and adds one last vigorous clang for good measure. Chanticleer first awakes the echoes, in strenuous rivalry with stentorian peacocks. Again silence reigns for half an hour or so. Then Taormina turns in bed, stirs luxuriously, yawns, and “gets busy.”

Along the Corso donkeys bearing slim wine-casks and great tins of goats’ milk patter past at a smart pace; vegetable hawkers from the _piana_ shout their wares into open doorways; cats and chickens side by side strike out into the daylight from the obscurity of their shelters, stretching and flapping comfortably. Children, standing like models of Justice, scales and weights in hand, call their merchandise, weigh and measure with preternatural gravity, or eye older hucksters sharply as the latter use their own scales to weight out a “penorth” of this or a “haporth” of that.

These street views are keenly interesting, but after all it is Ætna that makes Taormina an artist’s paradise. Travelers and artists alike come for a brief glimpse or a sketch of Ætna, return again and again, or perchance find the fascination of hoary crown and delicate lights and shades so irresistible they settle down in the volcano’s shadow and remain for years, proclaiming Taormina to be the rarest beauty spot in creation.

One of the American artists who came twenty years ago and has never been able to tear himself away from the thrall of the great cold peak, shows his studies of its moods, a great stack of marvelous water colors made at dawn, at noon, at sunset, at every hour of day and night, with every whimsical effect cloud or sun or shadow could give as he sat at his easel in a white-walled garden with the perpetually beautiful before him as a model. Perhaps the most remarkable contrasts are from a perfectly moonlight night to a clear dawn the next morning. All night the moon, sailing in solemn round overhead, tints the peak’s snowy shoulders with a faint greenish tinge that makes it the wraith of a volcano. A little before four o’clock, slowly, tenderly, moon and pallid stars dwindle into spookish reflections of themselves as the sky lightens, the velvet blue of the night puckers into gelid gray, changes into pale turquoise through which majestically sail a vast fleet of enormous fluffy clouds, while Ætna rises dark and forbidding from the piana below.

Graciously a faint flush in the eastern sky increases in volume, deepens in tone; the grim pile of the volcano on the west darkens at the top, and as the ineffable pink spreads around behind it, the cone turns dead and spectral, and the thin, cottony tuft of curling smoke above the main crater eddies upward with all the seeming of steam on a foggy winter’s morning. These first changes come with the measured caution of a master painter working carefully lest through some hasty stroke he spoil the effect of the tone picture to come. The light spreads. Neither camera nor pen can keep pace with the instantaneous transformations on every side. The vast crimson-coppery disc sails slowly up in majesty to eye the little world of Taormina from behind the inky green shoulder of the Greek Theater’s hill. The upper edges of the clouds turn pink and silver; the lower, soft salmon pink, saffron, orange, gold. It is day!

There is something awe-inspiring, archaic, terrible about it all. It suggests the ancient Egyptian belief of Amen-ra riding through the horrible fastnesses of the Tuat in his sacred boat, and emerging in the glory of the resurrection.

It is a chilly performance of a spring morning, and a hungry one. At a quarter before six, an eight o’clock breakfast seems at a starving distance; so the best thing to do is to come down into the street to see the milk being delivered. Right, left, and everywhere are nothing but goats! goats! goats! the whole length of the Corso; by twos, singly, in herds of twenty or more, with a pair of fractious kids roped together under their mother’s usually wide open, yellow old eye, or tied one to each hind leg, very much to mother’s discomfort. They burst out upon the Corso from narrow little _gradini_ as if they had been kicked out of Mola on the crags above, and had not been able to check their speed on the long roll down. The tobacconist whose shop is directly opposite the hotel, opens at dawn to catch the early trade of the Mola goatherds in snuff and _sigari_. If you catch his eye he will throw wide both arms to include all the goats on the Corso, and exclaim: “_Latte de’capri è molto bell’!_”

Take his gracefully conveyed hint, and ask for a glass. One of the _ragazze_--two-thirds at least of the goatherds in Taormina and Mola are young girls--milks a rich, warm, foaming pint. Whatever your misgivings, the tobacconist is quite right--“Milk of goats is very beautiful!”--very grateful to a cold and empty stomach.

The hotel is quite civilized, the honest goatherd milking his animals into bottles which he carries in under the eye of a servant whose business it is to see that there is no adulteration or watering. In the private houses still more scrupulous care is observed. Many a protesting goat is compelled to scramble up as many as four or five flights of dark and difficult stairs to be milked in the “parlor” into the suspicious or indolent housewife’s own can or bottle. The Taorminians are worried by no inspectors or supervision of their milk supply, for the purchasers are their own supervisors, and milk is one thing in Sicily absolutely above reproach.

XIV

LIGHTS AND SHADES

Fountains in Sicily occupy much the same place in the life of the people that the forum occupied in a Roman community of old. That is, the fountain and its piazza are the center for exchanging news and gossip, for recreation, for all the varied diversions the people have in common. Taormina’s principal fountain lies just outside the old wall, not far from the Porta Catania, the gate facing toward Catania. About the cool and dripping basin gather the graceful young peasant girls, balancing incredibly large and heavy amphorai of water upon their well poised heads; pretty, kittenish children and grimgaunt old rheumatic gossips; loutish waterboys in from the _piana_ with their great barrel-carts to take the ichor of the gods back home; and generally the background for all is a fringe of seedy, admiring youths, casting sheeps’ eyes at the girls and wondering how long it will be until they can get married--or sail for America!

This particular fountain is crowned by the arms of Taormina, which consist of the twin castles of Mola and Taormina, and a mythological creature with the body of a bull, the tail of a fish and the head of a woman. Exactly what this beast is would tax the powers of the most ingenious of zoologists to explain--possibly a “nature-faker” could do it better.

From the Porta Catania the old town wall, perhaps twenty feet in height, rambles up the hillside in weird curves and abrupt angles, following the contour of the ground. Now that it is useless as a defense the thrifty Taorminians have built up a row of tiny houses which cling limpet fashion to the outside of the sturdy old masonry, through which windows have been driven that add greatly to its picturesqueness. Wonderful climbing bougainsvilleas and other vines have sprung up from the fertile soil and spread their graceful tendrils higher and higher until almost every window is smothered in a mass of tender greenery and blossom.

To see these picturesque cottages is to wish to end one’s days in one, or at least to bring some of its perfume and beauty back home. Near by a steep _gradino_ is a floral waterfall. On the house-sides, festooning every post and projecting bit of masonry, brilliant flowers foam in pink spray, as from some perfumed fountain farther up the hill where roses distil their spicy fragrance from long, nodding branches.

Facing its own little piazza inside the wall, and just below the Corso, is the Cathedral, which has a fine fourteenth century Gothic side portal. Perhaps the service is fourteenth century, too. It is conducted by the parish priest, a withered old man of grim and ascetic aspect, who drones in out-of-key nasals through the ritual, his voice drowned out a good deal of the time by the wheezy old organ, played by the village cobbler. The choir consists of the verger and another man who appears and disappears like a jack-in-the-box; at no time are more than two men visible in the organ loft, but in their vigor they quite make up for lack of numbers or inspiration. On the opposite side of the choir rises what seems to be a larger and more imposing organ. It is really nothing but a huge stretcher of canvas on which an instrument is painted, evidently to impress visitors with the dignity and grandeur of this mountain church.

When we were at service the good padre was assisted in his ministrations by the verger--when he was not singing--who worked with a becoming sense of the dignity of his position, and by an impish little acolyte in flaming scarlet, who hopped about like a cricket. If ever there was a little rascal who deserved excommunication for his pranks, it was this juvenile mischief-maker, who swung his censer so as almost to choke the old priest, keeping a more watchful eye upon the strangers than upon his business, and scarcely stopping to crook an irreverent little knee as he passed about in front of the altar. Once, stooping to rearrange the priest’s robes, he did it with such a mischievous flirt, and such a droll gleam in the brown eyes fixed on us, that we half expected to be held up by a small highwayman after mass, and asked for a penny or two in token of the sacrilegious show we had been permitted to witness.

The elders of the town sit upon the long bench or dais of red porphyry where the archbishop would be enthroned should he visit Taormina. They are curious old men, gnarled, withered apples full of sun and wind-wrinkles, who wear the typical brown-gray-black shawl as a muffler. Below them, on the throne’s lowest step, squat several of the oldest women in the town. Over this seat a large and imposing shield bearing the arms of Taormina is supported by a time-stained oaken eagle, who leers with side-cocked head and an expression of inebriate gravity in his partly closed eyes. He seems more a gargoyle, a grotesque, than a strictly appropriate bit of ecclesiastical decoration.

Some of the peasant girls in the congregation are very lovely--perfect young Madonnas; sloe-eyed, raven-haired; with exquisite features and coloring, and distinctly Greek profiles. But they are not all dark; there is also the florid blonde type the Latin peoples so greatly admire, though it cannot bear comparison with the other. All of them dress with a taste and a restraint hardly to be expected among mountain folk only a few degrees removed from the primitive. Here and there a fawn-like maid has thrown a Roman scarf with broad orange bands lightly over her hair, its vivid colors in pleasing contrast with her simple dark blue dress, piped with white, and the usual black silk apron that distinguishes her as of a prosperous family.

About through the throng in the nave the worshipers’ children run freely to and fro, laughing, crying, talking, calling to one another. Some gather in little colonies on a step of the door at the foot of the church and eye the scene with baby solemnity; and even when the Host is elevated, some dainty nymph of three or four may unconcernedly clatter higgledy-piggledy across the tiles in hobnailed shoon that wake the ancient echoes, crying at the top of her small voice: “Papá! Papá!” to an old farmer entering the door.

There is an indescribably moving something in the spectacle these poor folk present as they sit and stand and kneel and make the responses with the utter devotion of ignorance and superstition. Still, the outside can not be forgotten, even in the ecclesiastical atmosphere, and as the big bell up in the campanile booms the hour clear and mellow through the sound of voice and instrument, the world, the flesh and the devil stir the worshipers with a restless little movement of anxiety to get back into the sunshine again.

The eagle over the bishop’s throne would appear to greater advantage in the funerals to be met on the Corso, conducted by the Fraternity of the Misericordia, which originated in Florence so many centuries ago. Weird indeed is one of these processions, as it ambles leisurely along through the heavy dust, often stirred by a light sirocco which flaps the robes and sends the incense smoke eddying upward in sacerdotal wreaths. Tragedy and farce clasp hands in the pitiful _cortége_. The boy members of the Guild amuse themselves and shock the beholder by pulling their ghastly masks awry, contorting their faces into uncouth grimaces, and winking portentously through the large eyeholes. The men are scarcely better--even the pall-bearers laugh, joke, turn freely to pass a word with some acquaintance in the street or up in a window, and tilt the casket so recklessly that the cross and crown on top slip about and all but fall off. Their white frocks are too short, and from beneath the skirts protrude very baggy trouser-legs, dirty socks, or even a few inches of bare leg thrust hastily into shoes donned for the nonce, and left with strings dangling in the dust. Inquisitive goats and uncertain chickens get in the way and are either lifted to one side, carried along and petted for a few moments, or gently pushed out of the way with a kindly foot.

Strange indeed was a double funeral we saw one sultry afternoon. At the head marched the ancient Guild, bearing a curious double cross, perhaps eight feet high and apparently very heavy. Nailed to its upper limb--askew, of course--was a small light cross. Behind the men walked eighteen little girls in ordinary street dress, and after them six older girls in black, marching in couples, each pair carrying a large floral wreath. The middle pair bore their wreath with an air that did not distinguish the others, since it surrounded a framed picture of the dead man. Directly behind the picture came a priest, his hands clasped over a missal which he held firmly against his well-fed stomach.

After the living, the dead--the first of the coffins was a tiny one of flaming pink, stolidly handled by four sturdy lads of the Guild, who took as much interest in it and the proceedings as though they were bearing a crate of lemons to market. Immediately behind, four unusually tall Guildmen bore the man’s coffin, large and black, with a cross and a silver crown resting upon it. On either side trudged the womenfolk of the family, one in each file carrying a smoking plate of incense that nearly choked her, while two files of friends brought up the rear of the procession proper, followed by the usual rabble.

Through the heavy African air the cathedral bells tolled with an inexpressibly sad intonation as the little cavalcade passed along the street. But even the relatives were compelled to laugh when from the rear, running at full speed, came a panting boy of about ten bearing the canonicals of the officiating priest. The robe flapped behind in most undignified fashion, one corner occasionally raising a little spurt of dust as it swept the stones; and every few steps the boy yelped an unintelligible sound, to bid the marchers slow down and let him catch up before the priest entered the cathedral.

However, the touch of the ridiculous that turns tears to laughter is never far away in Sicily. Turning into a side street, one of those little _gradini_ or flights of slippery stone steps which make up most of Taormina’s lesser byways, and thinking only of the funeral, we were suddenly halted by two of the juvenile troubadours who lie in wait for strangers, or patrol the streets, seeking whom they may charm. They sprang out at our approach, struck tragic attitudes, and began to shout out an old pirate song at the top of their thin little pipes. Lustily they sang, till the veins in their small foreheads bulged blue with the effort, screaming out the bloodthirsty words of the ancient ditty with gusto, and acting their parts like veterans. It was all so sudden, so utterly ludicrous, that we laughed until we cried. The moment we began to laugh, the larger boy frowned, stopped singing, and shaking his pudgy fist at us indignantly, announced: “I am a singer! A very good singer--you listen to me!”

No cosmopolitan tenor could have put more outraged dignity and temperament into a protest. But sturdily they began all over. Here and there we caught a phrase about a wicked captain who stole a lovely maiden from her doting parents and took her away on his rakish barque to rove the smiling seas. Before I could reward them a large boy, who had kept away the crowd during the singing of the infant highwaymen, touched me on the arm.

“_Signore_--you should pay me all. I....”

“Oh-ho! So you think you are their impresario, do you?” I demanded.

“_Sissignore! Si! Si!_” he exclaimed joyfully, not in the least understanding anything but that I seemed willing to play into his hands.

“Are you a relative of the great Hammerstein?” I asked.

“Probably, sir. I do not know. Does the gentleman live in Taormina?”

Just then an ancient crone, toothless, and gifted, if anyone ever was, with the “evil eye,” pinched my arm with a vigor astonishing in so aged a creature, and shrilly demanded her gift. Annoyed, I asked her as gently as possible, while the crowd grinned in derision: “But what have you done that I should pay you?”

“Done!” she retorted. “Done! It is enough--am I not here?”

Declining to pay for being pinched, we worked our way slowly through the tenacious rabble--which clamored for _soldi_--down into the courtyard of the hotel that was once a pious house of prayer and fasting, the gray and ancient Convento di San Domenico. Beyond the edge of the older town it poises its massive stone bulk, whitewashed and scrupulously neat, on the ragged edge of the cliff: where fragrant roses climb all about and potted plants fringe the balustrades on all sides with rich color. It is a joy to sit here and take tea, with the marvelous panorama of storied coast and slumbering sea directly beneath. San Domenico is as cold as it is lovely, and the guests are hardly to be envied their rooms, once the silent stone cells of the monks. They are, however, to be envied the charm of the great hall with its carven choir stalls and lecturn, and the beautiful flower-decked cloisters. But where the crumbling Byzantine arcades once echoed with the Vesper, the Matin and the Ave, now is heard only the laughter of the heedless tourist, the chatter of children, the swish of skirts, and the click of the camera-shutter.

From the stone balustrades of the terrace, one gazes down upon slopes thorny with the spikes of the prickly pear, toothed and spurred with many an ugly rock that must have been there when the intrepid tyrant, Dionysius I, led his storming party up the slopes one winter night in 394 B. C., and forced his way into the very marketplace, only to be repulsed by the heroic citizens and come tumbling down--literally, it is said--six hundred feet among the rocks and thorns of the snowy ascent. No wonder Dionysius hated Taormina after that! He disliked it before, and his little impromptu toboggan filled him with a tyrant’s decision to even things with Taormina sooner or later. Four years afterward he kept his oath, in an outburst of savage fury that reduced the hamlet to ruins but failed to injure it permanently.

The moldering palace of the once mighty Dukes of Santo Stefano is also at this western end of the town. But all there is to see is a garden, tangled and sweet, a deep well whose carven curb speaks eloquently of the love of its former masters for the beautiful, and a barren earthen room under the palace, where dingy mosaics upon the stucco walls peep through the grime of ages. In one corner is a mortared pit about thirty inches deep and two feet in diameter. The caretaker is contemptuous at any failure to understand so simple a thing as an ancient bath, and displays the superior air of one who, however economical she may herself be in the use of such a luxury, is thoroughly versed in the theory of its employment by others of less Spartan virtue.

Beyond this--nothing! The key is in Palermo. With the characteristic fondness of Sicilians for separating buildings and their keys, the Duke leaves it in the capital, so the Greek and Roman marbles stripped ruthlessly from the Theater at the other end of town are usually invisible.

But though they may not be visible, the Theater from which they were taken is very much so. The Corso on the way is always a human and animal kaleidoscope. Here a man holds his grateful horse by the bridle while his wife lifts a black iron soup kettle to give the weary beast a drink of warm and nourishing soup made of bread, vegetables and goats’ milk. Yonder a demoralized old cat licks her kittens into shape on a shady doorstep while a venerable hen looks on and seems to have a proprietary interest in seeing the work properly performed. Cats and kittens and dogs lie jumbled together, in genial disregard of the usual enmities, suggesting the lion and the lamb parable.

Quaintly dressed peasants from the _piana_ stare at the visitor, and vendors of antiquities call lazily from their black little holes in the wall, advertising their strings of “ancient” pottery, that rattle ominously whenever a wisp of breeze playfully tugs at them. A carriage-full of tourists Baedekering through Sicily passes literally on the jump, with craned necks and vociferous consultation of the fat little red books so essential to comfort in this land where no one is willing to confess that he really knows anything positively. Water-carts creak by, a huckster whose wares are not yet all sold bellows most musical of “_A-a-ar--ca--cio-o-o--fi-i-i-i!_” and from behind comes the mellow boom of the cathedral chimes knelling away the brilliant hour. Artists with easels and sketching kits lumber heavily by on their way back from the Theater, the only great ruin of which Taormina can boast.

There is little now in the shattered playhouse to make alive its glories of Greek days, for as it stands it is largely a Roman ruin. The conquerors built amphitheaters throughout the island, but their theaters were in almost every instance merely enlargements or adaptations of older structures. Here in Taormina the building shows perfectly what the Romans did with the stage, which is in an almost perfect state of preservation. The playhouse, hewn in great part from the living rock, measures three hundred fifty-seven feet in its greatest diameter, while the diameter of the pit or orchestra is no less than one hundred and fifteen feet. The stage itself is quite narrow, with a vaulted channel or passage underneath for the water, used in flooding the arena, for the naval combats that the degenerate Romans preferred to Greek drama. Behind the stage the wall they built--of plain red brick instead of the costlier marble of early days--is still two stories high, and four of its granite Corinthian columns, with parts of the architrave, have been reërected to show the decorative scheme. Directly behind are the entrances upon the stage, one at the right, another at the left; and in the center a great ruinous breach in the wall where was once the third or central entrance. On each side are niches which contained statues, and in the side wall at each end of the stage are the _vestiaria_, the dressing-rooms of the actors. What is left of the auditorium proper--the superstructure added by the Romans is all gone--shows that the seats were divided into nine _cunei_, sections shaped like wedges; and so perfect were the acoustics that even yet, ruined though the structure is, the slightest word spoken upon the stage is distinctly audible at the very farthest extremity of the upper tier of seats.

The way up to the topmost seats is through grass and weeds starred with tiny flowerets, mantling over the scars of Time. Sitting there where Greek and Roman and Saracen in turn have mused before, he is cold indeed who does not thrill to memory and to the marvelous panorama spread below: on the right, tier on tier of the eternal hills in warm brown, their crowns of Saracenic-looking castles lending a militant air to their own stern beauty; below them, a confused medley of roofs and spires, roads and wandering walls, Taormina; through the _scena_ one of the grandest vistas in all creation--Ætna the giant holding heaven and earth apart, his feet in the mists of the low rolling farmlands, his mighty crest lost amid the clouds of the spring afternoon; and reaching away into infinity, the passionless Ionian Sea of song and story, murmuring a susurrant requiem for the vanished glories of other days.

XV

THE CITY THAT WAS

From Taormina to Messina the train hurries along at what seems breakneck speed--through vine and olive yards; past broad shallow, dry _fiumi_, dusty in summer but heavily walled on both sides against the coming of the winter and spring freshets. Now the hills rise bold and sheer, as we dash into and out of innumerable little smoky tunnels, like a firefly flashing through tangled brush. High on one hillside an old cemetery looks down--an enormous file of dusty old pigeon-holes tossed out from a Titan’s office and abandoned among the greenery.

There comes a town; a queer, quaint, smelly little fishing village--Ali--whose distinct perfume wafts in through even closed windows. Every house in it possesses atmosphere, character, a certain uncouth distinction all its own. Farther on goats--a big herd of them--munch their way along the beach undisturbed by our noisy passing, walking in the cool water up to their fetlocks, eating seaweed and wagging their cronish old heads over the salty feast. What must be the flavor of their milk! But the goats are forgotten as up the Strait from Reggio steams the great car-ferry _Scylla_, since six miles away along the sweeping curve of the Italian shore to the north, the ugly gaunt rock of Scylla herself crouches against the dun background of iron shore.

Scylla and Charybdis, those fabled monsters of early Hellenic legend, apparently had no terrors for the pirates of Kymé who, Thucydides tells us, planted the first nursling settlement of Zankle, later Messina, in one of the most splendid natural locations ever utilized by man--a long, narrow strip of flat shore along the Bay, where the mountains stand well back, and only the foothills come near the water. Before the town shimmers one of the finest harbors in the world, a big circular bay fenced in by a low and sandy strip curved like the sickle the Sicilian Greeks called Danklon or Zankle. The site was a natural emporium at the point where the East and the West meet and are one; an ideal location for a great strategic, commercial and social center.

It has always been a notable city. Now we see it in the scarlet page of history as the home of the pirate, the prey of the Carthaginian, the bandit stronghold of the Mamertine, the first glorious conquest of the dashing Norman; then glorying in the wealth the Crusades poured into its lap as the kings of the earth passed by in their search after the impossible and unattainable. Now we hear of it as the prey of a despot, an absentee monarch; now as the favorite of a king who loaded it with privilege; now as the bulwark of all Sicily against incursion from the mainland when Charles of Anjou, after the Vespers, came down upon Messina like Byron’s Assyrian. Every man became a soldier, every woman in the city--ladies accustomed to ease and luxury as well as their less fortunate sisters--a worker. A song still popular in Sicily runs:

_Deh com’ egli è gran pietate_
_delle donne di Messina,_
_veggiendo iscapigliate,_
_portando pietre e calcina!_

“Oh, what a pity ’tis to see the ladies of Messina carrying stones and chalk!”

One of the things that brought disaster upon Messina was its location upon the line of contact between the primary and secondary formations of Ætna and Vesuvius, where the shock of earthquake is necessarily the most violent and frequent. And during the last two centuries or so every misfortune that could befall a city has befallen it--siege, bombardment, fire, inundation, cholera, plague, earthquake. Yet through it all, however severe the visitation, the city has been great and undaunted, rising heroically from every catastrophe to begin anew; great in commerce, too, as well as in the heroic spirit of its citizens. Notwithstanding its tragic story, of late years it was a dusty, commercial town, eminently set upon minding its own business and giving little heed during business hours to anything but business.

In the evening, however, the whole town was out of doors, gathering in a dense throng to listen to the band concert in the Piazza di Municipio. Grave and reverend seigniors puffing at black Italian cheroots, fat wives on their arms or waddling behind under the weight of their wonderful jewelry; young sparks who wore their hats rakishly and eyed the daughters of families with roguish airs of expert judgment in petticoats; flashy corner loafers whose visages betrayed their character--or lack of it; solemn family parties to whom this open air concert was the diversion of the week; and scores of impish little ragamuffins whose specialty seemed to be vociferous appeals to smokers for cigarette stubs. But the crowd was very Italian, very good-natured, very indolently happy. _Dolce far niente_ ruled, save for the industrious bandsmen, and everybody enjoyed himself in his own way.

In the eighteenth century the wide and handsome promenade along the clear waters of the Strait was named _La Palazzata_, because the stately _palazzi_ of the nobility lined its entire length, and each palace was equal in height, style and construction to all its neighbors. But slowly there crept into the city the sneaking spirit of commercialism. The haughty nobles fell upon evil days and died. Their palaces became shops, hotels, stores; the old glory was fading fast, and the new was a tawdry imitation. The splendor of the _Palazzata_ waned before the vigor of expanding trade that filled the wharves with casks of spoiling lemons for the manufacture of acids and essential oils. The very air of Messina became impregnated, redolent of the pungent essence of fruit turning into gold.

But that was not the end. The _Palazzata_--aye, all Messina--was doomed to fall in the crowning misfortune of the centuries. The terrible earthquake predicted almost to the minute by Mr. Perret of the Vesuvius Observatory, smote the city while it slept, on the morning of December 28, 1908. The earth became a shaken old carpet, ripping, tearing, rending apart hideously, crumpling upon itself. The sea receded and heaped itself in mountains of waters, the beach lay bare. The grim gods of the nether world smiled; they piled the sea and the waves higher into an Olympian bolt, hurled it resistless and foaming upon the helpless town, again to take toll of man’s rashness. Palace and hotel, shop and church trembled--vacillated--crashed down into agonizing ruin, burying half the city in their débris. In the city alone 77,283 persons perished. Humanity stood aghast before a catastrophe so tremendous that the intelligence could not grasp its full significance of horror. And when the final relief work was completed, the last reports tabulated, the toll of Ætna on both sides of the Strait--in Calabria as well as in Sicily--mounted up to two hundred thousand--nearly a quarter of a million lives!

Sleeping and praying, weeping and cursing, unconscious and paralyzed with terror, Messina died in the murdering cruelty of the most appalling of all the disasters the heroic city had ever known.

The Cathedral, which was begun in 1098 and finished by King Roger, had shared the misfortunes of the city. Earthquake and fire and the still more vandal hand of the restorer had robbed it long before of almost all semblance to the plans of King Roger’s architects. And the gods of the earth, being no respecters of buildings, hurled it down into ruin like the commonest hut in the city. Not all its massiveness and splendor could save it from the common fate; not all its treasures of goldsmith’s work and sculpture and art. But though it fell, the people of the dauntless city did not blench. Crushed and dazed as they were, one of the first buildings they put up was a new house of prayer. Hastily knocked together of rough boards, the triumphant symbol of hope and faith nailed firmly above it, that pitiful church spoke dramatically of the spirit that defies defeat and honors victory.

The city has arisen anew in a metropolis of more than 65,000 souls, with suitable churches now. Moreover, the commercial spirit of the people asserted itself almost immediately, and exports began with scarcely any delay. In the new Messina that has sprung up--a little to the south and a trifle farther inland--away from the chaos of wrecked buildings and blasted hopes, there is at least a measure of safety. It is largely a wooden city; the buildings are restricted in height, and no fires are permitted expect in the kitchens, which are built of brick.

The American relief work is especially interesting to us. No less than 1336 two-room-and-kitchen houses were put up by American hands and with American materials and money in the new Messina, and five hundred more across the Strait in Reggio di Calabria, a total of 1836, capable of housing more than 12,000 people. Each family is bound under pain of expulsion to observe stringent rules for public safety and sanitation, approved by Queen Elena herself. In places these low, white clapboarded cottages, shaded by mulberry trees, have a decidedly New England town appearance. Beside these, American funds built an hotel with seventy-five rooms and thirteen or fourteen baths; a church where some 350 people can worship; two schools that care for eighty children each, and the Elizabeth Griscom Hospital, in which every available resource of modern sanitary engineering in design and construction was employed. White-walled and red-roofed, it stands high on the hillside, a very attractive sight from the Bay, its windows commanding a sweeping view which is a tonic in itself.

During the reign of horror that followed the fall of the city, fire and snow, rain and pestilence added their agonies to the already overflowing tragedy. But British and American, Russian and French bluejackets toiled heroically, regardless of personal danger from falling ruins or infection from the stench of thousands of unburied corpses, to help their Italian brethren succor the wounded and rescue the dying. King Victor Emmanuele himself, disregarding comfort and personal safety, hurried to the scene and risked his life in superintending the work of rescue, endearing himself to the Nation by his cool bravery and resourceful tenderness to the sufferers. And not only the King, but Queen Elena, who accompanied him, struggled through the ruins day after day, braving hardships and danger, aiding the wounded and dying with her own hands. All Italy arose and called her blessed. They gave her a new name. She was no longer merely _Regina d’Italia_--Queen of Italy--but _Regina di Pietà_--Queen of Pity.

XVI

THE NORTHERN SHORE

Along the northern coast from Messina westward to Palermo, almost every foot of the way has some historic interest. High among the precipitous cliffs above the present station of Rometta, the Christians held out against the invading Saracens--who had entered the island in 827--until 965. Rometta was the last place to fall. A little farther along the rocky shore Sextus Pompey was annihilated by Agrippa in the battle of Naulochus in B. C. 36. Milazzo, sixteen miles from Messina, is the site of ancient Mylæ, Messina’s first colony, which had a stirring time of it through all the centuries. The last big event in her history was Garibaldi’s victory over the Neapolitans, freeing the city from the hated Bourbon rule.

The train runs over _fiumare_ after _fiumare_--riverbeds dry in Summer, rushing torrents in Winter--and vineyards stretch beside the track in vast expanses of low, bushy vines, ripe with promise. Then, with a shriek, the engine drags us in a cindery cloud of smoke through the promontory on which stood Tyndaris, the Greek colony founded by Dionysius I. The town stood nine hundred feet above the black hole into which we plunge. What would be the sensations of this swash-buckling Greek could he see the rock to-day, with the trains, black worms darting through the solid rock he never dreamed of penetrating! More tunnels follow fast, then another cape, and a stretch of glad, open, smiling country that makes one think of the orchards at home.

Picturesque towns, groves of oleanders, battered old Roman bridges and medieval castles in which life is still of the Dark Ages, flit by rapidly until Caronia is reached. Here, nearly 2,600 years ago, a Sikel settlement called _Kalé Akté_--Beautiful Shore--was made under an ambitious leader named Ducetius, who hoped to save the remnant of his people who were still free in the interior, from absorption by the Greeks. A single defeat, however, crushed this native rising, and all hope of Sikel independence vanished in 444 with the death of Ducetius. “Beautiful Shore” withered away until to-day Calacte is a commonplace Sicilian town with even a commonplace name, and only its memories to save it from utter insignificance.

And then we come to Cefalù, a town whose reputation depends on its dirt, its beggars, and its Cathedral. And there is no excuse for either dirt or mendicants, since it is a thriving commercial and manufacturing city with ample resources to keep itself clean, and purged of begging pests. The name tells its location--_Kephalé_, in Greek, meant head; that is, promontory in this case, and the old Sikel city occupied the crest of the big jutting headland thrusting straight out into the sea and rising over 1,200 feet in height. On this elevation--seventy minutes now of stiff climbing it takes to reach it, over boulders and the detritus of centuries--the Sikels built them a safe city, and swept it about with massive battlemented walls, carried clear down to the sea. Parts of them are still in very good condition; no doubt through the centuries they have been restored again and again.

The “Head” is bald now--a snowy pate with only a sprinkling of grass--and but one building of uncertain age remains to testify to the different races that have ruled upon this lofty spot. After its acquisition by the Greeks it was important as their western outpost on the northern shore of the island. The one small ruin still standing seems to be that of a Sikel building, of unique structure and great interest. The huge irregular stones in part of it indicate its original appearance, while all about them the decently cut and shaped blocks show an Hellenic restoration. From this height the view is all-embracing--Pellegrino towering above Palermo forty miles to the west; the gaunt black fire peaks of most of the Lipari Islands--once the windy isles of Æolus--straight out to sea in the northeast; and behind us fertile stretches of rolling country checkered with farms and vineyards; town after town set upon impossible rugged peaks, mountains whose tops tear ragged holes in the mist clouds.

In the near distance is the Punto della Caldara, where the shrewd and wily sons of Tyre and Sidon, full of the instinct of commerce, not combat, beached their frail craft and sat down at the feet of the Sikel natives for barter, within easy eyeshot of this eyrie. No doubt from the battlements the natives peered down with less of an eye for the splendid view than for the marketplace of the swarthy, black-bearded Canaanites; and thither they were lured by tempting displays of the royal purple of Tyre, the gold of distant Tarshish far to the west, and the glass and ornaments and statuettes that the Phœnician tempters knew how to make and to market so much better than their uncouth selves.

As we came down from the desolate heights, it began to rain. Within a few hundred yards of the town we passed the house of an old _contadino_ who sat calmly inside his jute-walled goatpen meditating. In the kitchen door stood his brawny wife, feeding the unkempt, shrewish looking old goat with soup full of green onions from her husband’s bowl, and diverting herself betimes by lashing the gentle philosopher vigorously, after the fashion of Mrs. Caudle.

In 1129 King Roger was returning from the Italian mainland--whither he had gone to whip into docility sundry recalcitrants among his unruly barons--when his vessel was overtaken by a violent storm of the sort that so often lashes the Mediterranean into fury. The King, greatly alarmed, vowed a fine church in honor of the Christ and the Twelve Apostles if he and all his company were permitted to land unharmed. The ship made Cefalù head, and everyone came ashore safely. Two years later King Roger fulfilled his vow, by establishing a town at the foot of the cliff, and beginning to rear the most magnificent sanctuary that had been built in Sicily since the Greeks constructed their massive Doric temples.

Tremendous and massive are the only words that fit this building, and the enormous hewn stones upon which the façade rests seem to indicate that here must once have stood some ancient fortification which offered the Norman architects a permanent base upon which to build their shrine. The twin spires, the play of the interlacing arches, the round-headed portal--it is especially worthy of notice, by the way--all spell the cool and coherent genius of the northern French architect. Indeed, it is, like King Roger himself, of the Norman brood, but thoroughly adapted to its Sicilian environment.

Within, one realizes how royally Roger fulfilled his vow. What miracles were wrought by these hard-living, hard-fighting, hard-worshiping souls who took their religion with such mighty seriousness that it became an integral part of themselves and their daily lives! The main body of the Cathedral is plain white and generally barren. But no pen can describe in detail the blazing mosaics in the tribune without heaping color upon color, design upon design. The colors of the pictures were executed by artists who were almost tone impressionists, so delicate are the soft shades they used to set off the more primitive hues of the borders.

From the floor of the chancel the flying ribs of the roof seem sections of delicate enameled work. The farther away one stands the more perfect the illusion becomes, to the point where the designs lose their identity. Indeed, no master jeweler could produce a more harmonious effect with his intricate interweaving of colors and blending of tones. But the crowning wonder of the Cathedral--as in the Cathedral of Monreale and the Cappella Palatina--is the enormous mosaic bust of the Christ which fills the vault of the tribune. Built up like its fellows of the brilliant bits of colored glass that adorn the rest of the apse, it seems a portrait of encrusted gems, a human conception of the Godhead that flashes inspiration from myriad delicate facets.

Nevertheless, Cefalù Cathedral fails to impress the beholder as do the other two in which there is not a jarring or inconsistent note from pave to rooftree. Here in Cefalù the bare and dingy plaster walls of the main body--adorned with dubious figures of saints of both sexes, covered with dirt and cobwebs and minus certain of their limbs--make a contrast so glaring as to strike dismay to the most appreciative spirit.

Old as the Cathedral is, the beach at Cefalù is strewn with curious craft that seem even more ancient: queer old feluccas, cask-like smacks with barrel bows and truncated sterns swept by huge tillers, bottle-nosed xebecs with staring painted eyes for hawse-holes and central sideboards in lieu of keels. And nowhere else in the island are the different types of the forefathers more numerous and distinct: here a distinctly Semitic type, with the swart face, black beard and piercing eyes of the Phœnicians; here a pure Greek face worthy of the sculptor; there a burnt-up son of the desert, and yonder a Roman beside a Gaul. Busy and prosperous they seem, for all their dirt and indifference to squalor and evil smells; and moreover, contented. Their fishing smacks bring in tons of herring which by euphemy go out of Cefalù in cans of oil as the best sardines. The chief industries of the town, after the selling of clothes and notions, seemed to be the manufacture and sale of cheap perfumes and footgear, so far as I could see.

From Cefalù westward the railway runs beside acres upon acres of artichokes and whole fields of crimson sumac, while the “donkey ears” of the prickly pear form spiky hedges and great pin cushions everywhere. For these are the _Campi Felici_, the Happy Fields of Fertility, whose fruitful farms give back rich returns for the labor spent upon them, and which murmur always with the creaking music of huge wooden wheels over which run the endless strings of irrigating buckets introduced ages ago by the Arabs. Another of their importations is manna. On the slopes of Angels’ Peak--otherwise Gibilmanna, or Manna Mountain--these trees still grow, as they did in Africa and Araby, and the people gather considerable quantities of their exudations of gum.