Vistas in Sicily Part 14

The town is rugged and irregular and personal to a degree that captivates the most hardened sightseer--crooked, narrow streets, full of quaint buildings rich in Eastern touches: here a latticed cas.e.m.e.nt suggesting veiled women and mystery, yonder _ajimez_ windows divided by delicate little columns, farther along an harmonious blending of the Norman and Moorish on sculptured pillar capital and gallery. The people are as captivating as the town--caped men stalking to and fro like comic opera brigands, women whose loveliness has made Eryx noted.

Foliage so rich and varied that only a catalogue can describe it riots in the garden once part of the temple precincts, and sprouts between the stones of the ancient, partly ruined castle that legend would have us believe was erected by no less a personage than Daedalus himself. To-day the castle is partly used as a prison, and it is a warden who admits to the quiet precincts. Crumbling bastion and curtain, roofless hall and moldy dungeon keep, silent corridor and deserted rampart, where no Elymian spears now glisten in the occasional suns.h.i.+ne or drip gloomily with the characteristic golden fog, weave a powerful spell, so powerful, so enchanting none would be surprised in the slightest did the castle suddenly galvanize into life, and the figure of the lovely G.o.ddess of eld once more smile in the little temple whose foundations only now exist.

It is a city, a castle, a location only to be sketched. No colors, no details can at all conjure forth the charm at once so definite and so elusive. See Eryx!--even if you have no aeroplane and must either "ride or walk"--a guidebook solemnly advises this as the best way to reach the summit--up that splendid road into the very skies.

XVIII

ADDIO, SICILIA!

In Sicily all roads lead to Palermo. And if they do not, you manage to make them. And no matter how many times you return to that city of splendid light, you always find that there is some pleasant or interesting or profitable trip out from the city that you have missed before: perhaps to the picturesque Albanian colony of Piana dei Greci; or up in the hills to the suppressed Benedictine monastery of San Martino, founded by Gregory the Great in the sixth century; or to the village of Acquasanta near by for the sea-bathing; or even to the convict island of Ustica, about five hours away, whose population was killed or carried off by pirates as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century; and always--unless you have spent a year straight through in the city,--you will find some new festival to gladden your eyes and deafen your ears. It may be that after a tiresome day your matutinal slumbers are rudely disturbed by a weird clamor in the street long before getting-up time. Growlfully you turn over and try to sleep again. The racket goes right on, with darting insistence, and by and by you grow interested enough to ring for a maid and ask why in the name of Morfeo the concierge doesn't go out and put on the soft pedal if he can't entirely stop the bedlam!

"Why, _signori_!" cries the girl, astonished at ignorance of so important an event. "It is the _Festa della Madonna dei Capri_--the Feast of Our Lady of the Goats. We have it every single year. Everybody is out!"

It sounds that way! There is no use in trying to sleep, so you get up wrathfully and open the shutters. Along the dusty way in solemn processions march conscious-looking cows, wreathed and garlanded with flowers. Now and then a stately bossy ambles by, wearing a three-foot horseshoe of red and white roses, rising above her horns like a halo, and exhaling, if not the odor of sanct.i.ty, at least right sweet odors withal. Other cows have about their necks painted wooden poke-collars surmounted by floral horseshoes, or wear simply strings of flowers; and behind nearly every cow tags her mournful looking baby. The goats, fairly strutting with pride, however, are the most ludicrous members of these amazing cavalcades, for they have bouquets attached with wire and toothpicks to twisted horns and even to their sub-tails, which wig-wag signals as they bob along with arched necks. Occasionally a lone lamb, waddling toilsomely behind everything else, bleats its disgust and weariness, its immaculate wool tied full of flaring crimson or blue ribbon crosses, its tail banded with ribbons in a network until it looks like the foot and ankle of a dancing girl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Baby, tied to mother's tail, managed to get a few pints of breakfast as the crowd posed."]

Before them all march the "bands," scratch organizations of amateur players who discourse painfully upon all manner of instruments, wind, string and bra.s.s. The fortunate morning we saw this unique _festa pasturale_, I really wanted to make pictures, but mindful of my chilly sunrise experience in Taormina, neither blare of bands nor tinkle of bells could move me until after breakfast. Then, alas! the decorated animals had all pa.s.sed by, and I had to be content with a plain, motherly cow, whose baby--tied to mother's tail!--managed to get a few pints of breakfast as the crowd posed. I made the picture-taking as slow as possible, to give the poor little calf five minutes for refreshments.

No one who has ever seen the pastures in and near Palermo wonders at the poor beasts' melancholy air of appet.i.te. You find some of these grazing fields on the slopes of Monte Pellegrino when you go toilsomely up to visit the shrine of the city's virgin saint, Rosalia. The little Mount of the Pilgrim has not always borne that name; only since the great plague of 1624, in fact. Before that, for ages, it was Herkte, or Heircte. Square-faced and rugged, it rises in a sheer precipice from the waves on one side, an isolated limestone crag, and slopes less abruptly down to the Conca d'Oro on the other. In 248 B. C., Hamilcar the Carthaginian, who camped up on Herkte to keep in check the Romans in Palermo, cleared and planted fields with grain to feed his hungry troops. There are still scanty cultivated fields on the mountain, and though now, from a little distance, Pellegrino seems even balder than it is, large herds of cattle manage by hard work to crop a meager living from its insignificant gra.s.s and herbage.

Visiting Pellegrino's upper slopes and the little chapel in the grotto of Sta. Rosalia is as much a part of seeing Palermo as the visit to the Colosseum is a part of seeing Rome. But it is not quite so easy as some of the other little journeys about Palermo, since the steep ascent cannot be negotiated by carriage. Either on four feet or on two the trip must be made--most people make it on four. Tumultuous donkeyboys lie in wait in the Piazza, Falde at the foot of the mountain, and "bark" the merits of their beasts with a vigor that is sometimes confusing, while the donkeys themselves--mere burros they are, tiny but powerful--gaze at their burdens-to-be with a droll air of resignation. Most of the saddles are medieval housings built of boards, over which odds and ends of coa.r.s.e carpet have been nailed until they look like Joseph's famous coat. Lucky visitors, or those who start early enough after either breakfast or luncheon to have room for choice, pick the more commonplace and comfortable leather saddles that decorate two or three of the newer donkeys. Otherwise, eating from the mantelpiece for a day or so afterward is almost a necessity!

The road up the hill is a splendid piece of engineering as well as a picturesque and romantic highway. Who but Latins would construct at vast expense a road like this simply for the ease and comfort of pilgrims to a shrine no more ill.u.s.trious than scores of others, and call it the _Via al Santuario_, the Way to _the_ Sanctuary? Partly on the solid rock of the mountain, partly on graceful arched bridges or viaducts, it leaps upward in short, acute angles, now spanning the dry bed of a _torrente_, now edging its way along the precarious parapet of a crag. Large, smooth pebbles set on edge in mortar, divided and bordered by three lengthwise parallel strips of lava or some other equally durable stone and crossed by other strips every fifty feet or so, make it apparently as enduring as Pellegrino itself. On either side rises a low, thick stone wall, and every few hundred yards are white signposts with the name in black letters.

From the Piazza Falde--_falde_, in Italian, means flank, skirt--it leads upward in an easy ascent that continues for two or three hundred yards.

But after the third turn, it takes a sudden inclination of twenty degrees or more out of the horizontal. That begins the real climb,--and the view. Palermo, the Conca d'Oro, the sea below, the mountains behind, appear and disappear with each turn, like the ever-changing film of a motion-picture.

The j.a.panese say there are "two kinds of fools: those who have never ascended Fuji-yama, and those who have ascended him twice." The proverb applies here on Pellegrino perfectly. It is as great a mistake not to make the journey once as it would be needless to make it a second time, for no one can ever forget the picturesque climb up that zig-zag road on donkey-back. When the writer went up, everybody who saw the miniature procession laughed. We three, beast, boy and man, made a sight Cervantes would have smiled to see. Equipped with a stout club, the plump boy answered very well for Sancho Panza. With my camera case over my shoulder in lieu of a target, and my tripod-legs projecting at impossible angles, I did very well as Don Quijote. And the faithful burro was surely a replica in miniature of Rosinante, long ears flopping disconsolately back over her neck.

Instead of beating his beast as almost every other boy does when the animal balks at the steeper part of the ascent, "Sancho" ran lightly forward and began picking up wisps of the straw gleaners had dropped on their way down the mountain. When he had a handful, he held the bunch of fodder out temptingly, and yelled "Aaaaaa-ah-ah!" "Rosinante" snorted, sniffed suspiciously, and with a suddenness that almost slid "Don Quijote" over her haunches into the road, bolted forward for the tidbit.

A mouthful at a time it was given to her, and thus the hardest part of the way was quickly pa.s.sed over without a blow being struck.

"Do all the donkey-boys do this?" I asked, surprised at the humanity of the proceeding.

"Sancho's" reply was disconcertingly frank. "Oh, no, _Signore_. I am the only one. I can't afford to buy a new donkey, and if I _wear this one out_, how can I bring _forestieri_ at Pellegrino? The other boys beat their donkeys--yes! But then, they can get new ones every little while!"

Once above the long series of viaducts that keep the road on an even plane of ascent over gullies and chasms, the way ceases to be so steep.

On the rocky slopes, hardy Swiss cows graze among stones that seem incapable of yielding even thistles. When all the spa.r.s.e gra.s.s is gone, with muzzle and hoofs the hard-working cows turn over boulders of considerable size and eagerly lick up the meager, pale blade or two of gra.s.s they conceal, finis.h.i.+ng the attack by calmly devouring the fat little snails that cling to the moist earth and the under side of the big stones--I saw this myself. The cows have a hard time of it indeed, trudging out from the city every morning, grazing and rooting all day among the rocks, and then going down at night to be milked from door to door.

But the goats have an even harder time. Some are seen every day on the very apex of the mountain, mere black specks against the sky. They clamber up there opposite the telegraph and semaph.o.r.e stations without a thought of the journeys they must make in the evening. On coming back into town with heavy bags, their owners drive them ruthlessly up four or five flights of stairs to give some lazy customer as little as half a pint of their strong, rich milk.

Near the top of this Via del Santuario is the roofless chapel of Croce, the Cross, which projects bastion-like from the jutting brow of the hill. Here every year a priest from the monastery on the heights, standing where he can see the whole splendid sweep of the Golden Sh.e.l.l below, a rippling sea of green and gold, returns thanks for its fertility during the past season, and beseeches heaven for a continuance of it for another year.

The chapel of Santa Rosalia is in the gloomy cavern to which the lovely maiden fled to escape the temptations of her uncle's court in Palermo; a court full of the fact.i.tious splendor and richness of the East, with Saracens all about and an atmosphere which, to say the least, was probably not conducive to saintly meditation. She is a mysterious and interesting figure, this daughter of the mighty Duke Sinibaldo and niece of King William the Good. How could she ever have cast aside the ease and luxury of the elaborate civilization in which she had been reared, and come to this stalact.i.te grotto, dripping and cold, where her companions were no lords and ladies in waiting, but only the bats and small mountain animals seeking shelter from inclement weather?

Exactly how long Rosalia maintained herself here in holy seclusion no one knows, but the date of her death seems to have been about 1170. In any event, she lay peacefully in oblivion until in 1624 some bones were discovered in the cavern. At that time a plague was raging, the city panic stricken, and when the bones were brought in to the Cathedral, the plague stopped. Such a coincidence was too striking to be ignored by the simple-minded, so Rosalia was canonized and appointed the patron of the city, because of her gracious intervention on behalf of the people against whose ancestors she had shaken off the dust of her feet.

Filled with that dramatic religious fervor which has found its expression in so many wonderful pilgrimages, from the Crusades to the present, all Palermo toiled up the trackless hill to wors.h.i.+p before the niche in the grotto where she died. Miracle after miracle was performed; and to-day the whole city, whether religiously inclined or not, is devoted to its female saint, whose relics are believed to be preserved in a huge funerary urn surmounted by her statue, and kept in the treasury of the Cathedral. The monument, which is solid silver, weighs more than fourteen hundred pounds. Every year her festival is celebrated with great pomp, a huge car, fifty feet high and as big as a house, being dragged through the streets amid the acclamations of the faithful.

The float is also brought out in solemn procession whenever her intercession is especially desired for the city.

No attention has been paid to the gratuitous information of a scientist that the saint's relics are really only animal bones. The late Andrew D.

White, in his "_History of the Warfare of Science with Theology_," says: "When Professor Buckland, the eminent osteologist and geologist, discovered the relics of Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the slightest diminution of their miraculous power."

Certainly no Palermitan to-day would listen to any Goth who attempted to tell him such a story as this; and even to heretic Americans, the "scientific" att.i.tude which delights in iconoclasm is hard to comprehend. Why should the scientist who claims that his only wish is to benefit humanity, take from the poor and miserable any belief that heals them, however idle or superst.i.tious that faith may seem to him?

[Ill.u.s.tration: "All Palermo toiled up the trackless hill to wors.h.i.+p in the grotto where Rosalia died."]

Eventually up on the mountain a chapel was constructed whose artificial wall meets the edges of the grotto, enclosing it completely. There is no roof to this outer section except over the front door; and the suns.h.i.+ne, falling upon the floor between entrance and choir, gives this open court the air of a pleasant vestibule roofed only by the azure, and throws into strong, shadowy relief the cavern beyond, with its candles twinkling in the dusk before the altars. A handsome black iron screen divides outer court from inner grotto; and both are paved with big, uneven stones worn to gla.s.sy slipperiness by the knees of the devout.

The natural rock roof is weird and fantastic, covered with stalactic pendants, colored in all the shades of brown and green by the highly alkaline water that whispers perpetual requiem into myriad leaden gutters which carry it to the sides, and so preserve the decorations from destruction. Bent and twisted and angled, the gutters seem the branches of so many dead trees sprawling high among the jumbled rocks.

At the rear of the chapel is a handsome white marble and mosaic altar, and nearer the front, enclosed in a gla.s.s case under an elaborate and ma.s.sive shrine of highly colored marbles, is the figure of the saint over which Goethe rhapsodized. By the light of a flickering taper thrust between the marble bars, little by little the image within takes shape in the gloom. The head and hands are marble, the robes gilt. She seems to sleep naturally, a young girl of eighteen or twenty, her head easily disposed upon the pillow, her lips just apart; exactly, as the great German expressed it, as if she might breathe and move at any moment.

Upon her breast blaze the crimson jewels of the Cross of Savoy, presented by Queen Margharita herself, and innumerable other tokens, among them a huge golden heart, the gift of a Palermitan cardinal. Gold and silver watches, jeweled rings, loose precious stones, bracelets, necklaces, and other ornaments by the dozen lie about the gla.s.s casket or upon the gilded robes, which are exquisitely worked with lacelike tracery. And to one side is a gilt scepter fully five feet long.

Opposite, on the wall, a white marble slab marking the niche where the bones lay, bears the words:

VT QVO LOCO, ET SITV D. ROSALIAE SACRVM CORPVS ADMIRABILI OPERE LAPIDEIS THESIS INSERTVM ANNOS FERME CCCC DELITVERIT, QVOD MAIORES NOSTROS LATVIT, n.o.bIS DIVINITVS INNOTVIT POSTERI NON IGNORARENT: IPSIVS EXPIRANTIO IMAGO VBI IACVERAT SITA EST: ARA SUPERIMPOSTA ANNO IVBILAEI M DC XXV

From the grotto-chapel, past a group of goatherds' houses and through their attendant flocks, it is only about a quarter-mile stumble to a jutting spur which forms the highest crag of the mountain. Perched there between the halves of a dismantled arcade of plaster columns, stands a colossal figure of Santa Rosalia, hundreds of feet above the sea. Lightning has beheaded the statue twice, and the two marble heads lie in a little hollow at the saint's feet. After the second bolt from the heavens the Sicilians, who are not by any means a wealthy people, put on a third head--a cheap plaster one; and though many a fierce storm has raged about Pellegrino since then, not once has the lightning struck the statue--perhaps the plaster head is not worth destroying.

That _all forestieri have money, so why shouldn't they pay_? is the logic of the Italian, and everywhere except in Sicily he carries it to the absurdities; and even in this blissful isle an individual sometimes forgets his geniality by turning highwayman for the nonce. A tatterdemalion goatherd, for instance, charged me sixteen cents for a milked-to-order pint of goat's milk.

"Sancho" regarded the transaction with undisguised scorn. "By Bacchus, but all _forestieri_ are fools!" he said. "Why didn't you tell me to get it for you? I could get all you wanted for four cents!"

Yet notwithstanding his philosophizing "Sancho" generously let me off with only the usual gratuities.

A day or so later--with so much yet undone--grieving that we must leave the island which had taken so mighty a grip on our hearts, we rolled down, for the last time, through the Place of the Four Winds, and went aboard the beautiful little _Marco Polo_.

Half a dozen Nations decorated the Bay with their colors from a score of mastheads. Here lay a filthy little Greek tramp whose faded blue and white stripes fluttered limply from her steam-spitting stern; there a s.m.u.tty white trading barque with gaping red seams and burnished copper, hairy a foot below the water line with gra.s.s and moss; yonder trim white steamers of the N. G. I. Disconsolate we sat on the promenade deck watching the lively scene along the Scala Florio. A tiny breeze was stirring, and the slip of new moon came staggering up the blue vault with the rotund body of her deceased mother in her thin little wide-stretched arms, followed at a respectful distance by a winking, blinking satellite. Pellegrino and distant Grifone showed soft and dim in blue and pink and gray, like the too closely cropped hide of a young donkey.

On the wharf were tears and laughter. An eager crowd drove up in ever increasing numbers and thronged the s.p.a.ce about the gangplank to give their friends a hearty send-off. Farther out a young girl sang atrociously to a wheezy handorgan, while a small boy, cap in his teeth, clambered over the _Marco Polo's_ rail and begged for pennies. A gold-laced official, with an important beard and furious mustachios, marched aboard with as dignified a stride as his five-feet-two permitted, and instantly the quiet s.h.i.+p became alive. Boatswains bellowed gruff orders, a steam-donkey somewhere forward chattered right merrily, and down in the hold the _ingegniero_ "turned over" his engines to make sure everything was working properly. A serpentine hawser slipped from its bitt on the wharf and splashed writhing into the water at our feet--we were sailing.

But no--at this very last instant a shout from the empty Place of the Four Winds a block away, stopped us. The heartiest send-off of all was yet to come. Roaring and spitting fire and smoke, a huge automobile in gray warpaint tore through the square, skidded to the edge, stopped as though it had rushed into a stone wall, and fairly shot a young man out upon the gangplank just as it quivered on the rise, while women shrieked and men laughed.

His two companions were on the dock in a second, seized his s.h.i.+ny little black box-trunk, swung it to and fro once or twice, and hurled it after him with such precision that it caught the unlucky pa.s.senger in the small of his back and bowled him over squarely. As he was rising to his feet, white with astonishment and rage, his heavy handbag, thrown with the same forceful kindliness, knocked him down a second time, and s.h.i.+p and dock chorused happily together. Meantime the automobile panted contentedly as the fasts were cast off bow and stern, the screw began to revolve, and the white _Marco Polo_ slipped out into the gathering night.

Silently we fled the harbor, dotted now with myriad dancing lights; curtseyed gracefully out past Santa Rosalia's statue, nine hundred feet aloft on the crag; dashed by small cl.u.s.ters of lights in a shadowy pocket of the outer hills, and were at sea again. Once more the long, slow roll of Mediterranean was under our feet, its grateful salt breath in our nostrils.

A boy with the dinner-gong came yam-yam-yamming down the decks. We did not heed him. The whirling screw was throbbing a different refrain in our ears--

"Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields or Nature can decree; E'en in thy desert what is like to thee?

Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste More rich than other climes' fertility, Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which cannot be defaced."

THE END