Temples of Castor and Pollux, Girgenti“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of Flowers”
Temples of Castor and Pollux, Girgenti“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of Flowers”
Temples of Castor and Pollux, Girgenti“Lifting Themselves Airily From a Sea of Flowers”
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 passingpriest 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 oldnurse 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 bredeOf marble men and maidens, over wroughtWith forest branches and the trodden weed;Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!When old age shall this generation waileThou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“Oh Attic shape! Fair Attitude! with bredeOf marble men and maidens, over wroughtWith forest branches and the trodden weed;Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!When old age shall this generation waileThou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“Oh Attic shape! Fair Attitude! with bredeOf marble men and maidens, over wroughtWith forest branches and the trodden weed;Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity; Cold Pastoral!When old age shall this generation waileThou shalt remain, in midst of other woeThan ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“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 chasingsand 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-bookclasped 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 Iwon’twalk 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 behindtheir 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 SweetOf Enna”
“Our Lady of the Sheaves,And the Lily of Hades, the SweetOf Enna”
“Our Lady of the Sheaves,And the Lily of Hades, the SweetOf Enna”
“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 fearedthe 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 sapphiresea, 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, grownargent 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.
“E’en now the distant farms send up their smoke,And shadows lengthen from the lofty hills.
“E’en now the distant farms send up their smoke,And shadows lengthen from the lofty hills.
“E’en now the distant farms send up their smoke,
And shadows lengthen from the lofty hills.
—Now the gloaming starBids 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.”
—Now the gloaming starBids 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.”
—Now the gloaming starBids 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.”
—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.”