Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

3: Syracuse

THE TOWN SEEMED quiet and with little movement despite the earliness of the hour; there was a trifling contretemps at the hotel, where we found that the porters were on strike for the day. We had to hump our suitcases for the night.

This would not have been a very serious matter had the lift not been so cramped, and had the French diplomatic couple learned the elementary art of packing. There seemed to be something absolutely necessary to their peace of mind in each of half a dozen suitcases — so the poor husband had to make several trips. Both Deeds and I could afford to be smug, having put our night clobber in one small case, which enabled us to forget the rest. But even this small suitcase became a problem when one found oneself in the lift with the Frenchman who was humping two large ones and a dozen assorted paper bags. We collided repeatedly and at several angles, bumping first our heads (in a convulsion of reciprocal politeness) and then our booming bags. It was hard to get in and hard to get out; the doors closed automatically if one did not keep them open with one’s foot. Getting out we collided once more in the corridor, when in a sort of hissing anguish my companion said, “Cher maître, excuse me.”

My heart sank, for I had been recognized; due perhaps to too many television appearances in Paris. But he went on, “Be assured. Your anonymity is safe with me and with my wife. Nobody shall ever know that Lawrence Durrell is with us.” It was like Stendhal meeting Rossini in the lift. He almost genuflected; I suppose that I swelled up with pride like a toad. He walked away backwards down the corridor to his room — like one does for Royalty or the Pope. I went pensively to mine to unpack. Deeds came in with a hip flask and offered me an aperitif before we went down to the cold collation which had been prepared for us in the dining room of the hotel. He approved of my neat packing, and showed quite a streak of psychological insight, for when I said: “I suppose you detect the signs of old maidishness in this mania for tidiness?” he replied, “On the contrary, I detect a camper and a small boat owner. You simply have to be tidy if you are either; since you weren’t in the army I mean.”

After dinner we smoked a cigar in the garden of the hotel and I tried to divine the nature of the town by sniffing the night air — which was pure and scentless. We were on a pleasant but suburban street, made somehow agreeable by flowering oleander which reminded me of Rhodes in a way, modern Rhodes whose towns are made beautiful by this graceful and tough bush which can feast on the bare rock or the crumbling shale of a deserted riverbed — as it does in Cyprus and Sicily alike. The night was still, and balmy. As we walked to and fro the Frenchman came out and spotting us came over with his visiting card in his hand. “As an ancien préfet de Paris,” he said, “allow me to make myself known. Count Petremand at your service.” His manners were delightful and innocent of guile. Then he added, “I had the great honor once to help your friend Henry Miller, and he was grateful enough to immortalize me in a short story under my own name — imagine how that pleased me. He had been picked up by the police for not having a residence permit — after two years, mind you. Luckily I was at the Prefecture and … well, fixed him up.” I vaguely remembered him now. “But Miller was totally unknown then,” I said, “and he had published nothing.” Count Petremand held up his hand and smiled. “He was an artist,” he said, “and that was enough for us.” It wouldn’t, I thought, be enough for the competent authorities anywhere else — except perhaps Greece. He joined us in a cigar and the three of us took a turn up and down the warm still garden. “I was touched by your mention of my incognito,” I said with feeling. “I have never had any trouble with it before. Once or twice I have nearly been declared persona non grata but that is all. In fact the only cross I have to bear is that everywhere I go I am asked to sign one of my brother’s books. It is invariable.” I must have sounded rather vehement for Deeds looked at me in some surprise and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” “It will, Deeds. It will.” (Two days later it did. As usual I obliged, signing the book Marcel Proust, with the appropriate flourish.)

Our acquaintance was pushed no further that evening for the Count’s wife appeared with a sheaf of letters for him to address and stamp; and he took his leave, once more with the same exquisite courtesy.

I spent a while longer in the garden, taking the temperature of Syracuse, so to speak; sniffing the warm night like a hound, to divine (or imagine) the faint smell of brine from the invisible sea. The place gave off a feeling of peace and plenitude, and the late moon would rise long after I had drifted into sleep to touch the graceful flowering bushes of hibiscus and oleander which lined the streets. It was in a sense the real beginning of our trip, the first great city whose antiquities we were to visit in any detail; up to now we had been mobilizing ourselves, getting to know one another, improvising. But now the ice had been broken and we were a distinct party. As I came back into the hotel to go to bed I saw the Microscopes sitting in the lounge, the man with his head buried in L’Equipe (The Team) — a weekly sports paper which he had hardly left out of his sight throughout the trip. Either he had a number of copies or he was reading one special issue over and over again. But his concentration was quite ferocious and proof against any other pleasure one might offer him in the way of ruins or landscapes, even food and drink — for at meals he read at table. Well, as I passed them I saw his wife put her hand on his arm and say with real feeling, “Eric, si tu continue comme ça je sens que je perderai l’oriflamme.” It was so ridiculous as a remark that it took my breath away.

“I remember you saying once that there was something very slightly suspect about our Mediterranean raptures — I mean the islomania we invented in Cyprus and which characterized all your previous poetic transactions with Rhodes and Corfu. I suddenly recalled this remark on a sunny afternoon when I was sitting in the Greek theater of Syracuse, knitting, and reading while the children foraged for stalks of grass to chew.”

She had forgotten the provenance of the remark, but I recalled it quite distinctly. It had suddenly occurred to me that we had given very little thought to what these islands, Cyprus or Sicily, must have been like before the extraordinary efflorescence of temples and statues had taken place — all the paraphernalia of a fully-fashioned and self-confident culture which had created plenty out of barrenness, beauty out of the incoherence of a nature run wild; piety, literacy, art. It is sufficient to cast an eye over the leavings of earlier cultures to be aware of the sweeping definitive-ness of the Greek thrust — its glorious freedom from self-doubt, hesitation. But it was as much due to what they planted in the ground as to what they erected upon it in the way of cities, temples, and harbors. In a sense all our thinking about the Mediterranean crystallized around the images planted here by the Greeks — in this Greater Greece, so aptly named. In Sicily one sees that the Mediterranean evolved at the same rhythm as man, they both evolved together. One interpreted itself to the other, and out of the interaction Greek culture was first born. If it becomes clearer in Sicily than elsewhere it is because when the Greeks arrived their homegrown culture was at meridian, and the similarity of landscape and climate did not impose upon them any modifications, either of worship or of jurisprudence or of politics. Athens evolved as piously and rigorously here as it did in Greece proper. I use the name loosely for the first settlers came from various places; but the cultural problems, even to their bitter differences and disputes, were first broached in Athens and by Athens. In a sense the word Greek and the word Athens are interchangeable except for purists and historians.

Comparing site for site — Neolithic and Greek in Sicily — one stumbles upon the fact that before the Greeks came men were terrified of rapacious nature, its excesses and its unpredictability. No evolution was possible — man stayed crouched in fear under the threat of extinction. Then something happens. Hope is born. But how? And for what reason? Nobody can tell us, but with the Greeks men began to see Nature not as hostile and dangerous, but as a wife and even Muse — for her cultivation made leisure (with all its arts) possible. What we mean when we use the word Mediterranean starts there, starts at that first vital point when Athens enthrones the olive as its reigning queen and Greek husbandry draws its first breath.…

Scholars will rush in at this point with their warnings against too simplified a picture — and indeed my choice of turning point in the consciousness of man is rather arbitrary; it is more probable than certain. But there certainly was such a point and the election of the olive in Attica will do as well as any other. Of course there were Gods and beliefs of all sorts circulating at the same time — local as well as imported ones; this is what makes the case of the scholar unenviably full of contradictions and suppositions. Yet there is a case to be made for the election of the olive for it was mysteriously bound up with the fate of the whole Greek people. The sacred olive tree in the Academy was an offshoot of the original tree in the Acropolis; and throughout Attica all olive trees reported to be of the same provenance were called mortal or seeded trees. They were state property and their religious sanctity helped to conserve a great national source of wealth. They were under the immediate care of the Areopagus and were inspected once a month. To uproot such a tree made the offender liable to banishment and the total confiscation of his worldly goods. They were under the special protection of Zeus Morios, whose shrine was near that of Athens. One of his attributes was the launching of thunderbolts upon the heads of such offenders.

But even the provenance of the olive is something of an open question. Where did it come from — Egypt? We cannot be sure. Yet of the qualities which made it valuable enough to become the Muse and Goddess of the Athenian we can speak with the authority of someone who has spent more than one winter in Greece, even modern Greece. The hardiness of the tree is proverbial; it seems to live without water, though it responds readily to moisture and to fertilizer when available. But it will stand heat to an astonishing degree and keep the beauty of its grey-silver leaf. The root of the tree is a huge grenade — its proportions astonish those who see dead trees being extracted like huge molars. Quite small specimens have roots the size of pianos. Then the trimmings make excellent kindling and the wood burns so swiftly and so ardently that bakers like to start up their ovens with it. It has other virtues also; it can be worked and has a beautiful grain when carved and oiled. Of the fruit it is useless to speak unless it be to extol its properties, and the Greek poets have not faulted on the job. It’s a thrifty tree and a hardy one. It has a delicate moment during the brief flowering period when a sudden turn of wind or snow can prejudice the blossom and thus the fruit. But it is a tree which grows on you when you live with it, and when the north wind turns it inside out — from grey green to silver — one can imagine with accuracy the exact shade of Athena’s smiling eyes.

All this, and the human attitude which flowered from it, was brought to Sicily in the long boats and planted here in the thoroughly Greek cities of Syracuse, Agrigento, and Gela. To be sure, thinking of Zeus as a watcher over the olive one feels that he belonged to an older religious culture of which the oak and the other mountain trees were perhaps fitter symbols. As for the olive, it was left as a simple phenomenon, accepted as a free gift from Athena after she won the contest with Poseidon for the patronage of Attica. To the old sea god belonged perhaps the saltwater well on the Acropolis, a mysterious feature recorded in Pausanias’s account of the Acropolis. This does not help us much … though we are told that Athena herself was born from the ear of Zeus (like Gargarmelle?). As Deeds once remarked: “The maddening thing about the ancient Greeks, and one would like to kick them for it, is the capacity for believing two mutually contradictory things at one and the same time.” It comes of being as curious as one is hospitable — all foreign Gods are made welcome, whatever their origins; hence the mix-up when one tries to establish something concrete about the homegrown deities.

At any rate, the olive branch with the little owl (the skops, whose pretty descendants still occupy the holes and fents of the Acropolis and utter their strange melancholy call at dusk and dawn) feature upon the coinage of ancient Athens. In modern Athens, too, the children of the Gymnasium sport a distinctive button which pictures Athena’s owlet, which has come to stand for wisdom: not esoteric wisdom necessarily but horse sense of the worldly kind. And while we are on the topic of the olive I must not forget to add that the cultivated tree, which is harvested in November and December, is grafted on to wild stock — so perhaps we should look for its origins in the historical side of grafting as a technique; it argues a highly sophisticated knowledge of agriculture in the country which first adopted the practice. Was it India? If so how did it come into the orbit of the ancient Greeks? I am not competent to answer all these questions, though my mind occupies itself with these and other questions as I travel. Indeed I hold long conversations with the vanished ghost of Martine who was always hunting for answers, and was not slow to disagree with the propositions I enunciated. I could see that she would have a hole or two to pick in my olive theories; but in fact if one were to ask how the word Mediterranean should be defined I should be tempted to answer: “As the country where the olive tree is distributed and where the basic agricultural predispositions such as the cuisine depend upon its fruit either in the form of oil for cooking, oil for lighting, or fruit to eat with bread. It has fulfilled all these functions from time immemorial and in the countries bordering the inland sea it still does.”

But I had strayed a little in my thoughts; I had not touched upon the central question raised by her remark. What happened before this—what was the island like?

Long before the owl-eyed Athene came into her own the island was settled by men whose history has been obscured by the fact that they left nothing behind for us to admire. Many strains, many invasions of tribes from different quarters must be envisaged, but the historically predominant inhabitants were the Sikels whose alphabet, if I am not mistaken, has not been deciphered as yet; nor are their inscriptions very numerous. It is a dead end where the prehistorian ekes out his scanty certainties with large conjectures; a few tombs, a few clearings and stone houses worthy of the jungle cannot go far to excite our minds or our aesthetic sense. It is really idle to dwell upon them. (I am talking in my sleep to Martine with one-half of my mind; with the other I am trying to rough in the outlines of the pocket history which she had once demanded for her children.) One should concentrate in such cases on what is striking, and leave out the rest. Good histories of the place in yawn-making detail — there are a number; but in shortening sail I would build something more like a companion to landscape than a real history.

It is not the Sikels as such, then, who are interesting; what is interesting is trying to visualize the state of the island which they inherited — a pre-Mediterranean Sicily, if I could dare to call it that. In its Pleistocene period, for example, it must have been a desolate and forbidding place with nature far outstripping man in the luxuriant prolixity of its inventions. All that man could do was to cower superstitiously under it in fear — without the tools and intelligence to shape or combat it, or even to defend himself against the wild animals which abounded in these fastnesses of oak and beech, the boars, the leopards and the stags of great tine; not to mention the snakes and wolves and insects which harried these forlorn little settlements of volcanic limestone where the only household tool was obsidian — a volcanic glass — which offered a limited scope in cutting up meat or vegetables for food. One must presume that man at this time was a debased sort of creature from the cultural point of view — unhappy on land as on the sea because he was the master of neither. I picture a sort of Caliban of the woods, living on grubs and worms when he could not find animal carcasses to nourish him. In Africa and in Australia there are such cultures existing to this day. Perhaps the Sikels were not quite as primitive, but in the absence of any firm facts about them one is at liberty to imagine; nothing they did seems to indicate that one day Syracuse would arise, white and glittering on its green and blue spur between the two perfect harbors — a home from home for Corinth, for Rhodes, for Athens.…

The imaginative jump is a big one; but it is not less of a jump to try and imagine what the landscape must have been like without most of the fruit and flowers that we see today and which characterize our notions of the Mediterranean scene. So much of what surrounds us today came to the island very late in its history, sometimes as late as the sixteenth century. The long straggly hedges of prickly pear came from the Americas, as did the agave and the tomato. The Arabs imported lemon, orange, mulberry, and sumac. Papyrus from Egypt still flourishes in some corners. The land is bounteous, and it varies in exposure and elevation to a considerable degree. But then, if one reflects, even the olive and the vine were originally not native to Athens, though where they came from we can only conjecture. But as for Sicily, everything “takes” and there is a suitable corner where soil and temperature combine to welcome almost everything. Deeds had seen tobacco as well as avocado doing well here.

Indeed a stable subtropical climate is ideal for all crops — if one wishes to enjoy the best of all worlds. Here, for example, one can see stands of banana, grapefruit, and sugarcane in the hot lowlands. Even carob trees must have come from somewhere like the Lebanon.…

But how hard it is to imagine this “granary of Rome” without lemons, oranges, or grapes, without the cactus and the sentinel aloe. While in the cool misty uplands the conifers and berries remind one of Austria or England. Even the sweet orange was brought here from China by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.

Is it any wonder that the Sikels, eking out a fearful life without all these glorious fruits in which to exult, left us nothing to admire? Not for them the final conquest of the land which brings wheat and barley, nor the control of the sea which brings the produce of other lands, other cultures to one’s door. They were locked up in their loneliness like the inhabitants of another planet and it is impossible to feel much sympathy with them, or gain any insight into their characters.

But if the arrival of the Greeks so much marked agriculture and city growth it was, so to speak, only the historical topsoil which was changed; underneath it all the island climate was that of Attica or perhaps the Argolid. The limestone valleys were quick with freshwater springs; the land was as beautiful as Greece and quite as rich. And in the first spring showers Sicily must have put forth as rich a crop of wild flowers as Attica itself for it still does to this day. The Greek garden described by Homer in the Odyssey—it could and perhaps did flourish also here in Sicily:

In this garden flourish tall trees like pears, pomegranates and apples thick with fruit, also sweet figs and bounteous olives. Moreover, a rich vineyard has been planted hard by, beyond the last row of trees; there are garden plots also blooming all year round with flowers.…

These new and picturesque additions to the domestic scene spelt leisure and plenty, and with them came the first thrust of the vase paintings and the first verses of the poets who peopled the streams with nymphs, the oak groves with dryads, the caves with Pans and centaurs, and the forests with satyrs and silens. In the culture which followed each plant and flower had its story, its link with the mythopoeic inner nature of man — which he can only realize when he has a chance to dream. Yes, Martine, that was it! A chance to dream! So Daphne turned to laurel, so Persephone broke her fast in nibbling pomegranate seeds — and poetry itself became domesticated.

But the fruits of all this were not necessarily the sophisticated blooms of enclosure, they were simply the fruits and flowers of the earth. It is significant perhaps that there were no treatises written upon gardening until the late Hellenistic era. Temple groves and gardens followed — I am thinking that Plato (who was nearly murdered in Sicily by the tyrant of the day) rejoiced when his academy in the valley of Kephissos was transformed into a “well-watered grove with trim avenues and shady walks”; nearby too was the academy of his rival Epicurus, laid out, they say, at the cost of seven thousand drachmae. (One drachma was a day’s wages.) Here he lived and taught in his three-wheeled chair, and when he died he willed the garden and the little house to his fellow philosophers. It has vanished. Everything has vanished. Fussy old Cicero was the last to set eyes on the place when, some two hundred years later, he passed it by accident while walking in Athens with friends. But the effect of shade and water and time upon philosophy — there is a whole treatise in it. Outside the city to the northeast in a large green park lay the Lyceum where Socrates taught and where Aristotle and his followers paced the walks in deep discussion, becoming nicknamed The Peripatetics. They were specialists in the qualities of shade as well as water — just like the modern Athenians and the Sicilians are. Indeed one can test the contentions of modern folklore by comparing the shade of a pine with a plane, the shade of a fig tree with that of a cypress. Try them, and see which brings the deepest siesta sleep and which troubles you with dreams and visions.…

The Hephaisteion Garden had its echo in Sicily where history recorded a sacred grove to the god on Etna. It was guarded by savage dogs which were, however, trained to welcome decent folk and only attack visitors who were either temple polluted or living under a curse for some act of sacrilege. Hephaistos (as brother?) shared the responsibility for the Acropolis with Athena and his shrine was hard by her own.

But this was public forestry, so to speak, and meant to echo public (or religious) statuary, like the grove of laurel and olive which surrounded the Altar of Pity where malefactors and runaway slaves often sought refuge; or the white poplar where thieves and other swindlers of a philosophic persuasion held their informal get-togethers. But what of the wild flowers?

In early spring, and again in the autumn, with the first rains which herald the winter, Sicily like the whole of Greece is carpeted in wild flowers — some six thousand varieties have been listed of which some few flourish only in the Arcadian valley of the Styx. They are still familiar to us, the flowers which filled Greek gardens of old — crocus, violet, hyacinth; but northerners will be fondest of the more fragile anemone and cyclamen. Sometimes one has seen the little white cusps of the cyclamen pushing up through young snow like the ears of some fabulous but delicate creature from a storybook. Then there is Star of Bethlehem, as we call it, tulip, prodigal narcissus, humble daisy, lofty lily.… But for Martine there was nothing like the rose; she loved its variety and hardiness, for she had seen it bravely flowering out of dry and bony ground, almost calcareous rock face. And she had promised herself a rose garden wherever she went. Its history is as beautiful as its flower for it goes right back into the Age of Bronze as far as fresco paintings in Crete are concerned.

It appears in the Iliad as the flower of Aphrodite who cured the wounds of Hector with oil of roses. Thus having become sacred it descended from Aphrodite to Eros and Isis, ultimately to emerge once more as the rosa mystica of the Virgin.

It was perhaps the only flower to be intensely cultivated and marketed. For the Romans the rose became a rage and a fad and fresh blooms were rushed to Italy in winter by fast ships fresh from nurseries in Egypt. Rhodes took its name from the roses and showed the flower on its coins; its abundance was so famous that a legend grew up that sailors approaching the coast would smell the flowers before they sighted the land. Athens — no don’t tell me, I know — was always for Pindar “the violet crowned city,” though he may have meant the violet-magnesium light which plays about Hymettus at sundown, and not the flower at all.… But here my memory recalled a warning she uttered in a later letter — the one about Agrigento where I had not yet been. “The yardstick is Athens if you like, but we always forget that almost all we know about Athens as a town comes from a very late witness, Pausanias, writing in the second century. I imagine him as portly and meticulous, a Roman Gibbon, working up his travel notes in his depressing office in Asia Minor. Thank God for him — but of course he was the first tourist and perhaps the greatest.”

Yes, the caution is worth heeding, and luckily I was able to turn to the admirably phrased introduction of Jane Harrison on the subject — for she had chosen him as the only real guide to Athens. The Emperor Hadrian (who by the way was much beloved by the Sicilians because of all he did for the island) made a valiant attempt to makeover Athens anew, to restore its former glories by the addition of new temples and restored monuments. His passion was an antiquarian one which reminds us very much of the contemporary British or German attitudes. But work as he might, the soul of the city had fled, and all he ever achieved was the snobbish embalming of a once magnificent corpse.

He supplied anew all the outside apparatus of a vigorous city life but he could not stay the progress of the death that is from within. Accordingly this prosperous period of Hadrian’s reign has the irony of a magnificence purely external. Pausanias, of course, did not feel the pathos of the situation; perhaps no contemporary thinker could have stood sufficiently aloof to see how hollow was this Neo-Attic revival. Greece endured to the full the last ignominy of greatness; she became the fashion of the vulgar.

I fear these last fine phrases could be aimed a little bit in our direction — in the direction of the little red bus with Mario at the wheel, and the twenty or so captives of tourism tiptoeing around monuments they do not comprehend with a grave piety they do not feel. Pausanias himself complains petulantly against the tourism of his day, for the Romans could not help but feel that Greece had the edge on them, that in some undefined way they remained forever provincial, out of the main swim of culture despite all their own real greatness and their own mighty and original culture. Somehow there was a tug towards Greece, and the young Romans must have made a sort of Grand Tour of the now ruined and blasted land, still eager to be accredited to the mysteries (which had lost all their numen, all their spiritual sap) or to win a prize for a chariot race at Olympia, or a derivative play in a Greek theater. They were marked by the thumbprint of an unnatural vulgarity, which they never succeeded in surmounting.

But as for Pausanias, thank goodness for his passionate antiquarianism; at least he has managed to leave us an extensive notebook of all that we have lost. It is something. For most of us tend to think of the Acropolis, for example, as a stately marble hill approached by the Propylaea and crowned by the austere, almost abstract beauty of the Parthenon’s white catafalque. But it is from the jottings of this little Roman antiquarian that we see something much closer to the original during the days when it still “worked,” still performed its vatic duties for the whole Greek race. How different a picture! In its clutter and jumble one cannot help thinking of the equivalent jumble of modern Lourdes or Byzantine Tinos today.

Only Pausanias tells of the color and life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, the golden lamps, the brazen palm tree, the strange old Hermes hidden in myrtle leaves, the ancient stone upon which Silenus sat, the smoke-grimed images of Athene, Diitrephes all pierced with arrows, Kleoitas with his silver nails, the heroes peeping from the Trojan Horse, Anacreon singing in his cups; all these, if we would picture the truth and not our own imagination we must learn of from Pausanias.

Those who tiptoe round the Acropolis today in their thousands hardly realize that they are looking at something like an empty barn.… “And by the same token,” I told Deeds, who was standing on his head on the sunny balcony next to mine, for he did yoga like most Indian Army officers, “by the same token it is the merest vainglory to tell ourselves that we are going to see anything in Syracuse as the Greeks left it — it’s simply a hollow shell from which the spirit has fled. Even the temples are for the most part wiped out, gnawed down to their foundations like the molars of some old dog.” I was repeating and improvising upon the caveat of Martine who had once written to me about Pausanias apropos of the Minoan reconstructions in Crete, saying how tasteless they seemed to her. “They robbed my imagination of its due, and vulgarized something I expected to find elegant and spare and cruel — a fit sea nurse for the mainland cultures which Minoa influenced, perhaps even founded.”

“If you tell Beddoes that,” said Deeds, “he will at once ask for his money back.” I could see that he was not going to let these grave considerations disturb his mature pleasure at sightseeing in an island which had become as precious to him as it had once been for Martine. In a sense he was right. If the Greeks were gone and their monuments were dust there were still vestiges of their way of life to be found in the food, the wine and the wild flowers of the land they had inhabited and treasured.

Today, then, Syracuse waited for us to disinter its ancient glories by an act of the imagination, aided by whatever Roberto could tell us, which was not much. Oleanders, however, and sunny white streets leading down to a bright dancing sea! There was pleasure in the air, and I did not need to sniff the horizon to determine that we were in one of those benign spots which favor happiness, encourage “all the arts — even love and introspection” as Martine used to say when she awoke from a spell of sleep on the green grass of the Abbey. Today the Carousel tackled its breakfast with dispatch and good humor; the Bishop forgot to tell the world how much he preferred bacon and tomatoes in the morning, a very good sign indeed for the rolls were not very fresh and the coffee insipid.

Even Beddoes — Beddoes had washed. He had parted his hair in the middle and combed down his thatch of wet ringlets with energy and science. He came up to me as I stood on the terrace with my coffee, watching Mario growling at the porters and feeling the fine morning sun on my fingers and forehead — omens of a good day to come. Miss Lobb was already aboard the bus, and remarking this Beddoes said: “If you asked me why one felt compelled to like Miss Lobb I should reply that it was because she was so completely herself. She has grown on me. Or perhaps it is the heat.” It was not the heat, for Miss Lobb had grown on us all. Gradually the outlines of her splendid personality had flowered in the Sicilian summer, her robust but handsome figure had emerged now clad in those rather expensive summer prints from Liberty’s or Horrocks with becoming style. There was a touch of cretonne-covered sofa about her which was somehow suitable to her general style of mind. She introduced herself with simplicity as Miss Lobb but always added the phrase “Of London” as if it were a lucky charm. She was indeed the spirit of London — the “best-foot-forward” of that rainy but warm-hearted town.

Miss Lobb was a barmaid and she worked in the Strand in what she described as a “good house”; once again adding an explanatory phrase in the words “a tied house,” whatever that was. Her warmth and good humor were infectious, and she talked English loudly but with grace to everyone, even when she fully realized that they did not understand what she was saying. “I think what I like about her,” said Beddoes, “is her way of saying ‘OOPS!’ when she trips over a bush, and then flicking up her skirts in a skittish manner.” Yes, but that was not all. She also had a way of crying “Righty ho!” which brought all hands running on deck to reef sail. Beddoes watched her fondly as she sat; reading a novel by Marie Corelli which she had stolen from the last hotel. Perhaps it was the association with bars? Though Miss Lobb did not herself drink, or so she said. Yet her frame was broad and buxom and her face large and red with a strongly arched nose and large sound white teeth. Later she was to explain to Deeds that even if one did not drink the mere fact of working near the stuff made one breathe it in through the pores — the reason why barmaids were always on the stout side. I forgot what he answered to this; but he too like the rest of us was a willing captive of her charms. And when she began a sentence with the phrase “Lord love yer now” he winced with pleasure; it was the very soul of London speaking. “I think I am deeply in love with little Lobbie; in love for the first time in my life,” said Beddoes and I gazed at him anxiously, wondering if perhaps he had been drinking before breakfast. Little Lobbie!

Such was the prevailing good humor — and I am disposed to attribute this to Syracuse itself, for the whole place radiated good humor and mildness — that even the Bishop unbent and became almost expansive; he strolled over to us and asked Beddoes what he did for a living. “At the moment I am on the run from the police,” said Beddoes unexpectedly, and after a moment’s pained surprise we all laughed heartily at the supposed witticism. “I got flung out of Dunge-ness Junior for setting an exam paper which they said was far above the heads of the children.” The Bishop looked perplexed and concerned. “But there were other reasons too,” said Beddoes and gave his yellow smile. “For instance, my paper said ‘Enumerate all the uses of adversity and explain why the hell they are sweet.’” The Bishop’s wife beckoned him, and he left us with obvious relief. It was time to crawl aboard the little bus. Today there was no problem with our gear as we were staying in Syracuse for a couple of nights or so. There was simply the organization of the medical supplies and the lunchboxes of Mario and Roberto.

So we began to sidle down the inclined planes towards the little island of Ortygia, the original site from which the ancient Syracuse had grown up into a capital of 500,000 souls — a giant among ancient cities. There was not much traffic along the broad avenues but I was glad that Mario was taking things softly — I felt that there was something precious about the place and that one should not damage its atmosphere by rushing greedily about. The modern town has spread in a smeary way towards the landward side and the little island of Ortygia is slowly becoming depopulated, though for the moment it is full of tumbledown houses of great charm — like a little Italian hill village sited upon an ancient fortress. But the presence of water, of the blue sea, gave it radiance and poise. Like so many choice Greek harbors (Lindos, Corfu, Samos, etc.) it had been sited on a spit between two perfect anchorages; owing to the stability of the Mediterranean weather, and its predictability, one could always live upon a double harbor like this, confident that when the south wind blew the north wind packed up; there was always a good lee. So with Ortygia. It must have made an instant appeal to Greeks who had known the beauty and security of Lindos in Rhodes or Paleocastrizza in Corfu. The actual soil erosion in limestone lands must always produce this sort of configuration under the rubbing of the sea; I can think of dozens of such harbors and have often wondered whether the Cretan or Minoan symbol of the double axe was not a reproduction of this sort of ideal harbor.… Alexandria too had this to offer the sailor; the safe anchorage during the winter storms and the safe lay-by for the spring and autumn squalls brought by the changing equinoxes. I made a mental note to try this theory out on Roberto when next I got the chance; at the moment he was vaguely describing the streets through which we were passing as we moved towards the narrow causeway which led to the island.

“I have a nagging memory about the word Ortygia,” I told Deeds; “I think that somewhere I saw that it really meant ‘Quail Island’ and that it was one of the possible sites where Ulysses (always accident prone when it came to females) ran into a lot of trouble with Circe.” It would need the Lexicon to check this vague and irritating notion. Deeds said that in the islands off the coast of Turkey there were some small and remote ones famous for their quails; and that the women hunted them with a curious kind of little net like a lacrosse stick which had two large eyes painted on it. It resembled a strange savage totem. When the quails saw the eyes they crouched down and seemed hypnotized, and they were easily netted. He had often wondered whether this was an ancient survival, this curious hunting art.

Today, however, Quail Island was agreeably crowded with loafers drinking lemonade and waving to us as we passed over the narrow causeway and slowed almost to a halt in front of the Temple of Apollo — disappointingly battered and placed all askew with reference to the modern town in which it had got itself stuck — it seemed almost by accident. It had a forlorn benignity in the sunlight but it would need a very advanced state of rapturous romanticism to feel deeply moved by it. Mario drew rein for the statutory pause and himself rested with his forehead on his arms; he did not give poor Apollo as much as a glance. I think that he never had given it a glance or a thought. Was he right or wrong, I wondered? Here we were all politely craning our necks, while the more industrious had their noses buried in their guides. The bus had attracted a crowd of children who were equally indifferent to Apollo and found us much more interesting; they proposed to try and stick us up for the price of a drink. Negotiations were opened in a strange lingua franca which seemed part Swedish and part English. They did not get very far, for suddenly, like a lion waking and bounding from his lair, Mario rushed out of the bus and after them with a deep and frightful growling which sent them rushing widdershins. It was as decisive as the Battle of Himera, the enemy forces were scattered and ran screaming down the side streets while Mario with a grin like a harvest moon, regained the bus and started up the motor again.

Deeds’s Guide was all carefully marked up with symbols which strongly suggested the Sikel alphabet or Linear B. Intrigued, I asked him what they represented. “I am evaluating my own Sicily,” he said. “There are four terms, four values for the monuments. Together they form the word Moss. M is for must, O is for ought really, SH is for should really, and SK is for skip. Over the years my taste has varied a little but not so much. I see for example that for old Apollo I have given him an ‘ought really’.… We can’t afford to skip him outright on historical grounds, but he doesn’t invigorate one. But just you wait a moment.” I waited and it was not for long, for Mario crawled down a couple of streets so narrow that we could have touched the walls without leaning forward — and at last into the fine airy cathedral square. It was not only spacious but it was smothered in oleander blossom — full-grown trees this time and in full flower. It was no surprise in this halcyon air to hear a girl singing, the cooing of doves, and the brisk clip-clop of the little colored fiacres which plied for hire in this enchanted corner of Quail Island, as I dared to call it in my own mind — until either Liddell or Scott or both told me I was all wrong. We drew up outside the cathedral and Roberto had a sudden access of hopelessness. “There is so much to tell,” he said wringing his hands at the immensity of the task, “we should really stay a week or a month.… But the important thing is to look first!”

It was a happy injunction, and we clambered down from the bus in a sunshine fragrant with flower smells to follow him into the deep booming warmth of the old church which was surprising and unreal — and above all sublimely beautiful. One felt that little knock at the heart which told one that we were really visiting the heart of the island — the quick or quiddity of Sicily. Why is it so astonishing a place? It takes a moment’s thought and a hundred paces down the side street to analyze its singularity. For the ancient Greek temple, or what remains of it (the remains are really considerable), has been comfortably and capaciously cocooned in the Christian edifice without attempting to disguise the modernity of the successor to Gelon’s noble construction.

You would think that this simple but daring idea would result in a dreadful fiasco. But you are astonished to find the result deeply harmonious and congruent; it has a peaceful feeling of inevitability, as if it had been achieved during sleep, unerringly. I think everyone in the party felt a strong tug of admiration at these fine proportions, and the simple dignity of the whole conception. It was also a sort of living X-ray of our whole culture, or let us say, the history of the religious impulse in one vivid cross section. Usually the age that succeeds manages to smash everything and sweep it, if not under the carpet, at least into the new construction. Here we were standing on a spot which had been consecrated ground before the Greeks, then during the Greek reign, and finally for the Christians.… The past had been not razed but accepted and accommodated with reassuring tact and ampleness. I felt suddenly like chuckling as I walked about inside this honeycomb — so full of treasures, a real Ark of the human covenant. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel anti-Christian. Roberto must have been used to seeing the impact of this lovely spot upon his tourists for he did nothing, said nothing, just stood by with his hands in his pockets, waiting to brief us when we so desired.

In one side chapel there was some sort of office being read aloud by a young sleek priest. His only congregation consisted of two old washerwomen who seemed to be half-asleep. But in the duskier hinterland of the church there were children skirmishing and their sharp little voices made the priest half cock a reproachful eye in their direction. But the reading went on with a suavity which suggested not only his pleasure in language but also the knowledge that he had a fine voice for poetry. He was clad all in green, a color which I usually associated with Byzantine robes. He looked like a slim and self-possessed green lizard standing at the elaborately carved lectern.

But while we were all marching about the great cathedral, full of the pleasant inner disturbance which comes from a shock of aesthetic pleasure, it was Miss Lobb who hit upon the most appropriate gesture with which to acknowledge it. She walked quietly away into the body of the church and, kneeling down in a pew, covered her face to pray. It was rather moving, the simple inevitability of the act. After a moment of hesitation the dentist and his lady followed suit. It was then that I saw the Bishop’s throat contract with sympathetic emotion, and he gave a distinct sob on a funny juvenile note — like a boy of fourteen. It was another revelatory moment of insight, the little gesture of concern and affection sketched by his wife in taking his arm. That sob of a choirboy with an unbroken voice somehow made me see in a flash that he had been wrestling with weighty inner stresses, problems, in a word, Doubts. Later when Roberto told me about his nervous breakdown — his losses of memory, nagging insomnia, bursting into tears in the pulpit … it all related itself back to that moment of stress and the little sob. Yet — am I wrong? — I felt that he had an overwhelming desire to imitate Miss Lobb and kneel down in prayer but was held back by some unconscious and unformulated scruples against the heathen relics embedded in the church walls; the presence of Athena, in fact. But perhaps not, perhaps I am just romancing. At any rate the fact remains that he watched Miss Lobb with a kind of hungry envy, but just stood there, with his wife’s sympathetic and restraining and comforting hand on his arm.

I was not too sophisticated to follow suit though what prayers I had to offer up were addressed rather in the direction of Athena than in that of the Virgin. But the pleasure in the graciousness of the building persisted. And it was here that Martine had tried to interest her children in the history of Greek Sicily — which is really to say Syracuse, for everything started here on this queer little island. At first she was exasperated by the flatness of the guidebook accounts, but gradually as she went on trying to make the history come alive to the children she began to “see” it herself as something real and full of color. It is not the fault of the guides for they are forced to be dryly accurate; they cannot afford the coloring matter which gives such pith and vision to master journalists like Suetonius, who knows exactly when to add that small distinguishing visual touch which brings the subject alive. With a harelip, a mole, a squint, a tonsure … with one little attribute the whole portrait breathes. But now, in Syracuse, reading about the great Gelon of Gela all the guide book is allowed to do is to repeat the name of this remarkable but unknown man — the man who began everything here that gathered weight and shaped itself into the great efflorescence of Greek culture which even today as a relic quickens and moves us. Who the devil was Gelon when all is said and done?

The ambitious and energetic tyrant of Gela had already shown his restlessness and administrative skill by making a diplomatic marriage to Damarete, the beautiful daughter of a neighboring tyrant at Akragas, Theron by name. But his real chance came when he received an invitation from the aristocratic party in Syracuse to come and govern the city. He seized it with both hands, happy to see his powers extended further still in a three-cornered diplomatic federation which was to stand the acid test of the Carthaginian assault at Himera.

The numerologists insist that both in individual lives and in the lives of nations there are fateful days and fateful years; for England 1066, 1588, 1814, 1940.… For ancient Greek culture there came such a day in 480 BCE when the Greek spirit asserted once and for all its powers of light and its resolve to flower into its prime. On this same day while Gelon and his confederation were securing for Sicily almost a century of peace and security, the Athenian forces were defeating the Persian armies and clearing themselves a same sort of space in which to grow and flower and assume their birthright as a mature nation. It is not recorded whether the astrologers played any part in predicting these two immortal victories. Even at this remove in time they seem by no means a predictable thing — when one considers the massive forces ranged against the Greeks, both Sicilian and metropolitan. Yet the historians do not seem to be unduly surprised, or perhaps we do not catch their tone correctly. But nothing more decisive could be imagined, and in the aftermath of victory there came a flush of triumphant and triumphal building, of which this fine cathedral is one of the late results. Thousands of slaves were taken prisoner after Himera and set to work on these projects. The new temple of Athena was especially designed to reflect and celebrate the decisive battle. Gelon’s reign was astonishingly short — as short as it was decisive. Yet he had burst open the doors of Greek history.

As for the famous temple, he did not live to see it completed as he died in 478, but he bequeathed all he had to his brother Hieron I who had been his deputy at Gela. His was not a long rule either but such had been the decisiveness of the victory over the Carthaginians at Himera that he could afford to draw breath. A period of peaceful prosperity and culture dawned in Syracuse; Hieron showed himself a discriminating patron of the arts and the list of visiting luminaries is impressive; it allows one to have some reservations as to the appalling portrait of Hieron painted by worthy Diodorus, who says he was as avaricious as he was violent, and an utter stranger to sincerity and nobility of character. We must weigh this bit of character assassination against the fact that Pindar, Aeschylus, and Simonides all found a generous welcome at his court. Pindar (am I wrong to think of him as a somewhat laborious poet?) stayed a whole year and extolled his host’s skills in several unusual domains like chariot racing. Aeschylus seems to have had quite a love affair with Sicily; it is believed that he had the luck to get his Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Freed produced in the theater here, presumably at a time when his work was still felt to be modern and rather revolutionary in style. But then there is so much that we don’t know, presumably may never know. Eighty of his plays are known only by title, and a mere seven survive. In the puzzling epitaph he wrote upon himself he seems to extol his military service at the expense of his art — which makes Deeds rather distrustful of his sincerity. The soldier has an absurdly high opinion of men who can write, and not much use for the “service mentality” as he calls it. But then civilians are always prouder of having borne arms than regulars are. At any rate the dramatist actually retired to Gela to live out his declining days; perhaps the very things which made old Gelon fume with impatience — the absence of a harbor, the seclusion of the quiet little town on its promontory high over the sea, its remoteness from the bustle of everyday politics … were the very things which made it precious in the eyes of Aeschylus. Or was it perhaps something else of which the tyrant himself may never have been aware? I mean the existence of the secret religious sect professing a Pythagorean life and principle? We know that there was such a sect of philosophers in Gela.

But enough of these idle imaginings; one day (I made a mental note) I would ask Martine’s daughter just how much she remembered of the history of Sicily — the potted history her mother had once given her as they sat in the cool darkness of the great church listening to the cooing of doves in the brilliant sunshine outside.

So bright indeed was it that those of us who had dark glasses must have been glad of them. Mario had gone off with the bus telling us that he would pick us up by the Fountain of Arethusa in an hour or so — leaving us time to loiter away a moment in the museum which stood just opposite the cathedral — or in any other place of our choosing. The Microscopes, for example, recoiled at the very word Museum and retired to a pleasant bar, and I may have well done the same, but as Deeds had marked the place with an “Ought” I thought I would please him by giving it a look over. To be truthful, despite its handsome rooms with their fresh and open views over the harbor it is rather disappointing — a prodigious jumble of bits and pieces of pottery and stone, for the most part without any kind of aesthetic importance but simply preserved as a historical illustration of an epoch or a trend. Yes, there is an elephant’s graveyard of such vestiges and one cannot help feeling a certain sympathy with Martine’s contention that “we are in danger of preserving too much worthless stuff.” However, it gave me pleasure to watch Beddoes staring vacantly at the Paleolithic fossil of a dwarf elephant and then turning to Deeds with a “I can’t see any point, can you?” It was all right, I suppose.

I even did my duty by the famous Venus Anadyomene in Room Nine, which the guide assured me was remarkable for “its anatomical realism” which is a polite way of dealing with the more vulgar aspects of its style. Haunchwise, as they would say in New York, she is anything but kallipygous. She is softer than cellulitis and her languorous pose feels debased in a fruity sort of way. She could have gone back into stock without the world needing to feel too deprived. The fame of this insipid lady is due not to the poets but to the historians.

There were indeed one or two fine smaller pieces but truth to tell it was the cathedral which was nagging at me and I could not resist slipping away for another quick look round in it. The service was over but there were still candles burning in the side chapels with their characteristic odor of waxen soot. A fly flew into the flame of one and was burnt up — it expired with the noise of a match being struck. What was it that was really intriguing me? It was the successful harmonization of so many dissimilar elements into a perfected work of art. It didn’t ought to be a work of art but it was. It is true that the builders of the great cathedrals did not live to see their work completed but they were operating to an agreed ground plan; here the miracle had been achieved by several sheer accidents. And with such unlikely ingredients, too. Start with a Greek temple, embed the whole in a Christian edifice to which you later add a Norman facade which gets knocked down by the great earthquake of 1693. Undaunted by this, you get busy once more and, completely changing direction, replace the old facade with a devilish graceful Baroque composition dated around 1728–1754. And the whole thing, battered as it is, still smiles and breathes and manifests its virtue for all the world as if it had been thought out by a Leonardo or a Michelangelo. I caught them up in a side street wending their desultory way to the point of rendezvous with Mario.

Not many had taken advantage of the pause which we had devoted to culture; the French ladies had bought thousands of postcards, and were clucking with pleasure like hens because they were so cheap. The Bishop — where was the Bishop? I had not noticed him in the museum, and I wondered if he had really stroked the haunches of Venus in passing. Beddoes swore that he had seen him do it, but then he was not really to be trusted. But when we got down to the little square where the fountain stands we found that they were all already there, hanging over the railings. It was here that tragedy was to overtake them. The Bishop, like a sensible man, had brought along a tiny pair of opera glasses with which he examined architectural details with scrupulous attention—”standing off,” as he would put it, from them, and taking up a special stance, as he gazed up at the gargoyles and saints in remote corners of the edifices we visited. It was really sensible; how else, for example, can one really take in places like Chartres? I regretted my own heavy binoculars as being too big and clumsy for this function; they were good on landscape, yes, but too unwieldy for niceties.

His meek wife had already been down to touch the waters of the fountain and proclaim them rather cold; for my part I had lively regrets that the Italians were in danger of turning the place into a rubbish tip — I exaggerate, but there was a Coke bottle and a newspaper floating about in the swirl of the fountain, which had quite a strong central jet and must obviously have been rather pretty when kept in better trim. I leave aside all the nympholeptic legends concerning it for they can be found in all the guidebooks. But there were some large darkish fish with speckles — they looked rather like trout — which sported with the brisk current, turning and twisting and taking it on their flanks with obvious pleasure. There were also clumps of healthy papyrus growing in the fountain. The site was also charming, being as low as a reef at the sea level, which suggested that the slightest wave would bounce into the fountain and disturb the peace of Arethusa, if indeed she still lived there. But leaning over the parapet in a trance of pleasant sunlight the poor wife of the Bishop suddenly let slip the little opera glasses and, stiff with horror, saw them roll down the stairs and tumble into the fountain. No one spoke. She turned pale and the Bishop had a look of uncomprehending rage — as if this injustice had been wished upon him by the Gods, perhaps by Arethusa herself. His wife had simply been a passive instrument of the Nymphs. (Perhaps it was a punishment for stroking the amenities of Anadyomene?)

The silence of doom fell over us. It was clear that here was a matter for at least a divorce. The poor lady, her face worked, as they say in the popular press: she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came save a terrified smile of pure fright and idiocy.

Our hearts went out to her as we turned our gaze upon the Bishop and saw his own grim expression. All this, which takes so long to describe, passed in a second. Then came Mario to the rescue with a whoop of joy — as if he had waited for a half-century for the event. He clattered down the steps and, tucking up his trousers, shed shoes and socks and waded into the place, wincing with cold but grinning with pleasure. He restored the glasses to the Bishop who thanked him warmly and declared that they would have to be dried out, and even then one could not be sure (a glare at his wife) whether they would ever work again without being completely taken down and cleaned. It remained to be seen.

And on that note Mario whiffled and we straggled back to the bus which was drawn up in a shady corner — the heat had really begun. We made a slow circuit of the little island, which reminded me a little of the circuit one can make round the town and battlements of Corfu. The sea glittered and winked and here and there in a shady nook there was a sudden blaze of bougainvillea or oleander to temper the stone. But everything seemed deserted — all the raffish lower life of the town centered upon the Apollo square; up here the buildings opened inwards; they were full of the inner reserve which is expressed in courtyards and patios. The answer of course is the sea with its salt which rots everything. I am thinking among other things of the huge Castello Maniace which offered a total contrast in epoch and style to all the Greek remains we had been concentrating upon. It was, according to Roberto, only one of many such features on the island, and if people were not so damned obstinate about Greek remains they would really profit by having a good look at the palazzi of Ortygia. We only got a glimpse of two of them but they certainly bore out his contention by their reserved nobility. And so through a network of narrow streets which Mario navigated with an effortless skill which was quite astonishing: in places his outside mirror passed within a couple of centimeters of the street wall without ever grazing it. Presumably long practice was responsible for this. I wondered how many carousels a season fell to his lot. We rolled back across the causeway into fairly dense traffic and bore steadily right, gradually emerging from the press of buildings until we reached the sea, and a pleasant-looking fish restaurant placed right on the beach; with its own little jetty too, and wooden diving pontoons floating off shore. A swim in that blueness would cure all rumples, I felt, and indeed most of the party must have felt the same to judge by the alacrity with which they alighted and sought the terrace where, while sorting out where to change, we all profited by a shrewdly aimed aperitif which the good Roberto paid for out of his own pocket, though he swore, without much conviction, that he would get it back from the Company. He was so happy; our behavior had been decorous; there had been no scenes and no bad blood. Lunch stretched before us, and it was one of the better and more characteristic Italian meals — mixed grilled fish of every variety with fresh lemon followed by an eggplant pie which reminded me more of Greece and Anatolia than Italy. And then the wine was potable red with a slight “nose”—it avoided fruitiness, that besetting sin in lands where people seem to adore drinking pure diluted sugar with just a sniff of alcohol in it. We hailed the wine and behaved like masterful Sileni, smacking lips, holding it up to the light. Vino! Not all of us bathed, so that we had to wait for the general assembly of all before the hot food could be served; amuse-gueules of cucumber and radish staved off that caving-in feeling. The light was prodigious, the light wind off the lustrous sea made everything throb with importance. Whatever we might forget about Sicily we would remember this newly minted day.

The caverns and the quarries called the Latomie are nowadays one of the sights of the city; once they quarried stone from them for their temples and palaces. But since they were abandoned for this use they metamorphosed to underground grottoes thick with a luxuriant vegetation so dense that it needed the skilled services of landscape gardeners to control — and indeed the work of engineers to cut paths and asphalt them securely down so that the public could take extensive strolls through this underground jungle. But this excursion was planned for the cool of the evening, and the general idea was that we should have a siesta after lunch back at the hotel. Nothing more pleasant to think of — that seemed to be the generally accredited view. The French Count was pleased when I said how much I regretted that we did not have a quirky guide of Sicily by Stendhal to match his Walks in Rome. Indeed he would have been the ideal companion for the trip — perhaps with Goethe as well.

There would probably have been a good Sicilian candidate also, but our ignorance of the island’s letters was abysmal. Yes, Pirandello and Lampedusa, and someone that Lawrence translated successfully; I had heard of others whose renown was also widespread but could not recall their names. Roberto was impatient too and ate in a boneless exhausted sort of way. He had had a long morning march and was not disposed for any more casual gossip before his nap.

So we returned, well fed and rested by a bracing cold swim in the sea. By contrast with the sea coast the hotel which was a little way inland was somewhat hot. I opened my shutters and stepped out on to my balcony to judge what siesta conditions were to be like. To my left a thoughtful Deeds was hanging up a bathing costume; to my immediate right the Bishop’s opera glasses had been placed on the balustrade to dry out; they indicated his presence next door. Beyond the Bishop stood the figure of Beddoes engaged in some domestic pursuit — he seemed to be darning a sock. I set out these dispositions in some detail because a small incident took place which lent depth and perspective to the portraits of the ecclesiastical pair — putting them in a somewhat intriguing light. Neither was on the balcony but their shutters stood open. Beddoes was about to address some cheerful remark to me across the gap when I shut him up by pointing to the Bishop’s balcony and miming people asleep. He duly broke off and it was at that minute that we heard the voice of the lady lifted in plangent rebuke. She said: “O yes, you are and you know it, you are against the whole universe!“ This sublime accusation, searing enough to become the foundation of a new Council of Nicea, reverberated on the silence and hung there, so to speak, unqualified by further noise or gesture. Beddoes and I gazed at one another. Deeds discreetly withdrew. I was about to do the same when a slap rang out, a distinct and unmistakable slap, followed once more by a wave of silence. We hovered there for a moment, Beddoes and I, like figures hastily improvised with the airbrush, or graven images reflected shimmering in a sunbeam. Nothing further happened after this and we both beat a tactful retreat into our rooms where in a matter of moments I was asleep, having set my little alarm for four. I wondered for a moment which of the two had slapped the other — had she swiped him? It was hardly conceivable that he had landed her one for such an impudent remark. And anyway what did it mean? Have women no innate respect for the Cloth? But sleep came to dispel these useless questions, and it came on bare feet, noiseless on the tiled floors. The alarm set me by the ears with a shock of surprise — it was like being hit by a thunderbolt.

When I got down to the terrace we were nearly all present tucking into an excellent tea with several kinds of cake. The transformation in the Bishop was marvelous to behold; he was expansive and smiling and relaxed. He caressed his wife’s arm like a clumsy but affectionate gundog. She too had a touch of red in her pale cheeks — had she made up? At any rate she was less pale than usual. Beddoes caught my eye from a neighboring table and gave us a wink of complicity which Deeds did not acknowledge; but undaunted he came over to us and whispered hoarsely: “After the slap they made love all afternoon in a disembodied way — perhaps for the first time since their marriage fifty years before; but I couldn’t make out who hit who, could you? At any rate that humble slap uncorked an unearthly lust….” Deeds got angry and said, “I wish you would go away and take your rumors with you.” Beddoes looked hurt. “It’s not rumors,” he said, “I watched them through the keyhole.”

The man was incorrigible and Deeds told him as much with a vehemence controlled only by good breeding; but undaunted by this the fellow followed us still and took a seat near us in the bus. The ride was not a long one, though my sense of direction was fazed and I could not tell if we went east or west. But today was to be a great treat for we were decanted upon a shady walk where another guide awaited us — to the relief of Roberto. This was an elderly man in dark glasses who looked like a policeman or a spy in a story of detection or espionage. Dark glasses — but so dark you could not see his eyes. He wore a bow tie and a Homburg hat with his well-cut but rather weary suit. Cufflinks, also. He was rather hard to place at first for his manners were somewhat seigniorial; was he an aristocrat down on his luck, and doing this job for the tips? But I think that Deeds had the right idea when he insisted that he was a university professor in classics who had become bored with retirement and was glad to use his knowledge in this way. He was certainly a most instructed and knowledgeable man, and his English and French were extremely good despite a bit of an accent. Moreover, he was mad about his subject and knew how to convey his enthusiasm. We were in good hands for a visit to the Roman and Greek treasures — the Roman amphitheater and the Greek theater which lay there, so fortunately rump to rump although belonging to different epochs of time. To have them both under our noses for comparison was a bit of luck — and the old guide told us as much….

But I am going too fast, for our attention was first directed to the huge altar to Zeus built by Hieron of which nothing remains save the stone emplacement with a few shattered stone suggestions as to its erstwhile function when it was used for the giant sacrifices to the god. There was still the ramp up which the animals were driven to the place where the priests waited to dispatch them. This gave our guide the chance of a little disquisition upon the nature and function of the Greek sacrifice — and of course here one could see all the difference between him and Roberto. He knew his Ancient Greece and had extensively visited the modern one — so he had a yardstick with which to compare Sicily. (Diodorus records a sample sacrifice here as counting 450 oxen, a prodigious number.) But our guide made haste to point out that there was nothing gloomy, or cruel or depressing about such a custom — for the whole town ate the sacrifice after it had been consecrated by the priests. It was a Bank Holiday celebration with everything on the house. “Greek writers of the fifth century have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion which is wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the Gods whose service is but a high festival for man.” He was quoting, of course, and Deeds, who had already been on this tour once before whispered to me that it was from Jane Harrison (peace be to her shade!). But the guide was in full spate now and we got a chunk of Xenophon thrown at us which later I noted down from his little black notebook. It was very much to the point, running: “As to sacrifices and sanctuaries and festivals and precincts, the People, knowing that it is impossible for each poor man individually to sacrifice and feast and have sanctuaries in a beautiful and ample city, has discovered by what means he may enjoy these privileges. The whole state accordingly, at the common cost, sacrifices many victims, while it is the People who feast on them and divide them among themselves by lot.” The old guide made no bones about the fact that he was reciting, for he beat time with his fingers to the English text; and added in English and French: “It was a great fiesta, religion, then. Nowadays, we Sicilians still keep quite a shadow of the sentiment — unlike the Italians.” O dear, another fanatic nationalist!

But he was the complete master of his subject and in that hot afternoon light, westering now, he gave an expressive account of these once beautiful monuments which now lie, shorn of all decoration, unprotected by shade and stripped of all statuary. It is hard work, too, to try and visualize the great altar as it once must have been. All the statues have vanished and also the pillars. But even if they had survived they would presumably have been like those in the existing Sicilian temples — stripped of their false marble surfaces and now the color of dry tobacco. “I suppose it is silly to regret the wholesale destruction of fine objects as one culture succeeds another; after all, if nothing ever got destroyed where the devil would we put everything?” The musings of Deeds as we sat in the hot Roman amphitheater, chewing blades of grass and smelling the rich resinous smell of the hot pines which instantly brought to my memory the slopes of Acropolis or Lycabettos where as a young man I so often slept out on warm windless summer nights, brilliant with star fall. It must be the same here.

But the guide was harping on our good luck to have the Roman and Greek cultural world set side by side in Sicily as nowhere else. “The very architectural shape will tell you of two different predispositions. In this great amphitheater the Romans were organizing for the eye, for a show, a public show. Now just a few yards away you have the Greek hemicircle, organized in a different age for the ear. The difference between art as a quasi-religious intellectual event and a popular spectacle. Aeschylus and his Gods against bread and circuses. Here you can study both predispositions as if they were historically coexistent while in fact they are separated by centuries.” It was astute and highly suggestive as a way of looking at these now shadowy monuments of a lost world. The heat of the declining sun still throbbed, the rocks were dazing. Capers grew in the white rock as they did in Athens. There was even a little owl which flew into a cypress tree with the unmistakable melancholy little whoop of the skops. But what is astonishing is the speed with which the exact nature and function of things becomes forgotten; the archaeologist tries to read a sort of palimpsest of superimposed cultures, one displacing or deforming the other — and then tries to ascribe a raison d’être, function, to what he sees. In vain. Or at any rate in Sicily, and more specially here in Syracuse. The ruins keep their secret. The monuments have been worn down like the teeth of an ancient jawbone; what was exportable was expendable, what was beautiful had a value worth despoiling. Only the hot bare rock still contains the imprint of a half-obliterated inscription here or there, or the pedestal of a vanished statue, or a carved hole to admit the locking elbow of a stone mortise. It had all been eaten up as flesh is eaten up by the ground. Yet sitting in this old Roman theater it takes no great act of the imagination to reconstruct the crowds, themselves now swallowed up by the centuries, as they watched the sports offered to them by the state — sports of blood.

All round the arena were the gloomy and secretive cages where the lions and tigers for the combats were lodged; the gladiator or the slave had to open the door of his choice — and here luck took a hand, for not all had animals in them. I did not know this. According to the old guide the crowds respected a lucky choice and set the slave free if he did not wish to exhibit his skill. Nor, he went on, need one imagine that in terms of danger this sort of combat represented anything peculiarly terrible for the experienced gladiator — usually an ex-soldier in retirement. It was not more dangerous to take on and dispatch a lion than it would be today for a boxer to undertake to win a match against a heavyweight champion. I wondered. The German girl appeared to disagree with this; she had become quite perked up by the discovery that one of the rather duller looking sandy men of the party (I took him to be Dutch) was actually a compatriot of hers, and an architectural student who had done a sketch of her on a paper napkin during the seaside lunch. This sudden rapprochement had thrown a spanner into the works of Roberto who had been gradually cementing his acquaintance with the blonde beauty by judicious gifts of sweets and bulletins of special information intended for her alone. All this quite decorously — a mere sympathy had flowered between them. They bent their heads over a map or a plan until they just touched … by accident it would seem. And now this damned German student with freckles and knock-knees.…

“We do not know enough about the matter but there is no reason why the gladiators should always die — some more lucky or more skilful must even have made a living with the sword. Why not?”

My mind went back to those modern versions of the Roman gladiator — the razateurs of Provence who make a good living in prize money from the dangerous game of cocarde snatching, the bull dusting form of bullfight which does not kill the bull and which is widespread in the Midi.

“Even the slave or the Christian lucky enough, say, to open two successive cages with no animal in them — almost certainly he benefited with a thumbs-up, was released. Underneath it all must have been a respect for destiny or luck — there was a certain magnetism in chance—rouge ou noir, life or death.…”

The German girl had descended now and stood in the center of the amphitheater to test the acoustics. She sang a little bit of a folksong in a beautifully modulated contralto which made Roberto’s blood fairly whistle in his veins. Then she turned smiling to the awful compatriot and patted his arm. She patted his arm! Miss Lobb got a stone in her shoe.

“Before we leave the Romans — this is one of the largest amphitheaters in existence — I have to confess that we still cannot deduce everything we would like from it. For example, that little water tank in the middle of the arena — too small to be of any aquatic significance. A holy water stoup? We don’t know.”

Here I had a brainwave, for back in the Midi, apart from the professional Spanish-style bullfights they also have the odd evening of bull dusting where they try out the baby bulls and cows and then young people are invited to leap into the ring and have a go. The horns of the young bulls are padded so they can do no harm. These evenings of absurdity and fun are called Les Charlotades in memory of Chaplin, and indeed a couple of village boys often dress up as Charlie and enter the ring with umbrellas in order to do battle with the bulls. The antics of both bulls and Charlies provide great fun and an occasional brisk knock in the behind from a frisky young cowlet. Now one of the special features of these evenings is the piscine, a water tank in the middle of the arena over which and into which the young amateur bullfighters jump. The antics of the bull, puzzled by the water and with its attention scattered by all the yelling children, are amusing to behold. But the piscine is a regular feature of an evening of charlotade and all the posters announce the fact—course libre avec piscine—which makes one wonder whether the Romans themselves were not given to bull dusting and whether the faint echo of their passage in Provence (a country still sown with their grandiose monuments) has not remained in this puzzling feature of the ancient bullfight. But it was not the moment to try out my knowledgeable theories on the old guide who was now showing a little bit of well-earned fatigue, and so I let the matter pass, promising myself to investigate it in detail when I got back to Provence.

At last, when the cameras had stopped clicking, we straggled back the hundred yards or so into another world — so different in its white presence that the whole Roman venture in its vastness and impersonality seemed hopelessly debased in comparison with this white almost prim little theater which expressed a world of congruence and vital intelligence where the poets were also mathematicians — the imaginative link had been made which we are only just beginning to try and recover. The blue infinity of sky and the white marble were the keynotes to the Greek imagination; somehow one associates the Roman with the honey-colored or the dun. A massive eloquence which was intended to outlast eternity. The Greeks felt time slipping through their fingers — one had quickly to seize the adventive minute before it trickled away like quicksilver and was lost. Yet there was strictness in this urgency — the singing for all its purity (perhaps because of it?) was based on an equation which linked it with its celestial parentage, the harmony of the all.

Martine:

I don’t know what you will make of the quarries. Holes in the ground have always had a depressing effect upon me, and the Latomie proved no exception, specially as I wandered about them in the afternoon with a westering sun and lots of dense shadow which gives off waves of humidity. Beautiful yes, the gardens and their luxuriance. But once or twice when I found myself alone on the asphalt paths among the dense lemon groves with their great clutches of fruit.… I felt a kind of panic, a sense of urgency, a premonition of doom. Almost the desire to cut and run back, back into the warm sunlight of the open earth above. It was the original ‘panic’ sense about which you talked — but in Greece proper it is that moment of noonday when suddenly silence falls, the cicadas stop, the sea subsides, the whole of nature holds its breath. And you hear the breathing of Pan himself as he sleeps under an olive tree. We have all experienced it. It is a terrifying experience. Well, down here in the Latomie I experienced it all over again, and cried out to call the children who were clambering about in the Ear of Dionysos testing the echo. Whew! I was glad when they came running.

So Martine on the subject of these singular caves — the one we visited was precisely the Paradiso which contained the strange feature which Caravaggio is supposed to have christened The Ear of Dionysos.

Our guide, now somewhat exhausted by his long and admirable disquisition of the monuments above ground, led our loitering crocodile down the sloping ramps and paths into the Paradise Quarry where I looked forward eagerly to encountering Martine’s version of the Great God Pan. Certainly it was a little heavy and tideless as a place but there was no doubt about its singularity — one almost felt that it had been designed this way, and not just carved out in haphazard fashion by the architects who had other things in mind. It was not simply the layout of the gardens — which had an almost Turkish prolixity and richness. There was water here and shade and humidity below ground where every sort of fruit and flower flourished in a luxuriance which was really paradisical. But the actual cuttings themselves seemed somewhat artificial, in the sense that everywhere there were grottoes and caverns, pediments and columns holding up large sections of undercut ground in the most precarious fashion. It was very much after a sketch by Doré or Hugo.

But of Pan himself honestly no trace, alas; I thought it might perhaps have been the time of day — perhaps she had been down here at high noon? But no, for she had spoken of a westering sun. For my own part, apart from the luxuriance — you could see vines literally leaping up into tall green trees to dress themselves on their outspread branches — I felt most the heavy melancholy of the passages in Thucydides describing the fate of the prisoners who were once herded here. There was even a passionflower which had wound itself about a young cypress — its flowers giving the tall tree the strangest appearance. As to the prisoners, in their time these quarries must have been bare; all this luxuriance is relatively modern. In the great battle against Athens some seven thousand prisoners fell into the hands of the Syracusans; there was nowhere to put them, so they were shoved down in these ready-made cages, easy to guard. One thinks of the Mappin Terraces in the London Zoo with their puzzled-looking inhabitants. But here life was no joke for the prisoners. The historian who records the Athenian defeat in great detail — Deeds had the advantage of reading Thucydides during the Eighth Army’s advance through Sicily — made no bones about the great heat during the day, and the great evening damps which followed, particularly in the autumn with the turn of the equinox. Illness ravaged them. “During eight months the daily allowance per man per day was half a pint of water and a pint of corn,” he adds.

Later, one supposes, when the war had been won, these prisoners were either sold as slaves or used as directed labor on the new monuments which celebrated another era of peace and plenty.

The so-called Ear of Dionysos is hardly less of an enigma than so many other features among the monuments of Sicily. The echo is prodigious. And it suggested immediately the cave of the Gumaean sibyl (my guidebook told me it would). But our guide had other notions, based on the fact that the issue of the cave comes out just above the prompter’s place in the Greek theater and he seems convinced that the two things are somehow connected. The cave for him was a sort of sound box — his image is the case of a violin or the body of the cicada. As far as I could understand his notion the echo of the cave lent strength to the acoustics of the theater — but somehow this pretty theory seemed to me a little doubtful. I preferred the sibyl as a notion. But of course unless some literary reference is unearthed we shall never really be sure. For my own private satisfaction I did what one should do in sibyls’ caves — I addressed a direct question to the nymph which concerned Martine. It was to be answered if she so pleased with a yes or no, and I would count ten words along in the leading article of the daily paper on the morrow in the hope of an answer. In part it was silly, I knew that; but I am superstitious. So had she been.

Moreover, on reflection I had come to the conclusion that the panic which Martine had felt was not that of Pan but that of Persephone — the horror of the deep ground in contrast to the pure open air, the flowers and trees of our mother, the earth. All grottoes and caverns and labyrinths have this enormous brooding melancholy about them, and this huge prison with its grotesque name is no exception.

Yes, we were all glad to regain the outer air, to be liberated from that hangover-like presence of darkness and shadow which reigned below ground. When the wind swept through it the foliage shuddered and twittered — it sounded like the souls of all the prisoners who had died here, so far from baking Athens. Whatever one may say to oneself it is hard to swallow the fact of death — the blank white space that follows a name about for months and years after its owner’s disappearance. I saw the German girl Renata with her burnt-sugar tan and blonde bell of thick hair walking lightly down the paths ahead of me with her little finger linked to the little finger of her compatriot as they talked about Greek tragedy; I wished my German were better for he spoke with great animation and eloquent gestures. For my part, in searching for a definition of what constitutes the tragic element in people and situations, I had evolved an explanation which seemed to me to meet the theatrical case as well. It is not the simple fact of great beauty being wantonly, mindlessly destroyed by a cruel force called Nature. We would by now have become blunted in our feelings about the matter — the poignancy of this inevitable destruction. No. The Greeks had from early on transplanted the Indian notion of karma to Greece, and in Greek tragedy what assails us is the spectacle of a human being trapped and overthrown by the huge mass of a past karma over which he has no control. Beauty is born of the spectacle of a perfect life or a perfected action in this life doomed by something emanating from an unknown past. The accumulated weight of — no, evil is not the word — of misconduct in the pure sense which occurred far beyond the range of his present awareness. In the shadows of a past which he has forgotten and which he once inhabited under another name. The Hero’s fate is the past, the unknown past; and in watching him sink and fall under the blows of destiny we feel how inexorable is the nature of process. The satisfaction, the Aristotelian catharsis is contained in the fact that in its realization we feel we know the worst about life and death — and once you know the very worst about anything you are automatically comforted, delivered.

I did not think this a suitable line of talk to embark upon with my companion, for he was full of funny little inferiorities, and tended to panic in the face of an abstract idea. No, I held my peace as we returned to recover our coach in which Mario and Roberto were playing cards.

We had made good time apparently and our next port of call was to be the network of Christian catacombs which honeycombed a whole sector of the town not far distant from these broad and smiling slopes. It was so well grouped — the cluster of monuments — that there was time for one swift parting glimpse of the theater which was now cooling rapidly in the westering light. In ancient times the whole auditorium, which could seat up to fifteen thousand people, opened upon the slopes leading to the harbor of Plymerion — a wonderful backcloth as in almost every ancient Greek theater in Greece as well. It is always a little pang, and indeed a sense of puzzlement, to realize that there was always a backcloth to the stage, shutting in the action, condensing and concentrating it, I suppose. One wishes one could read a little more accurately into the monuments and their ancient functions. Who produced, who stage mounted these strange hieratic pieces of theater? It could not have been a committee. Perhaps a small group of select priests? There is something we have not yet grasped, and it has to do with a different notion of the sacred and the profane from our own.

Deeds went to some trouble to explain the intricacies of the Athenian war and the resounding defeat of Athens by the Syracusans; it was a homely way to do history, describing how Alcibiades, that “disreputable feller got a bowler hat and was sent back under arrest, only to escape to Sparta.” This exposition only elicited a grave and sympathetic clicking of the tongue from Beddoes, who added under his breath something about not being able to trust a queer. But all these speculations were pushed awry by the Bishop who suddenly announced that there never had been any prisoners in the Latomia del Paradiso — they had all been herded into another and more sinister cutting not far from Santa Lucia — the church of which, with its famous Caravaggio, we had been hoping to catch a glimpse. Here indeed some asperity had developed as it was not on our official itinerary and the lapse seemed inexcusable. Was it not a renowned set piece for the curious tourist? Roberto was plaintive at first — the tour had not been arranged by him personally. But after more argument in which almost everyone seemed to have something to say, he agreed to foreshorten the catacombs and try to cram in a brief visit to the Saint before we were expected back at the hotel for dinner. This little argument occupied us while Mario grimly circled the town and finally drew rein before the catacombs. There was an unhealthy-looking monk on duty at the picture postcard stall. He looked as if he had just been disinterred himself. The catacombs were not unimposing, but to tell the truth it took a good deal of imagination to re-people them with the stiffening dead in their winding sheets — a coal mine would have offered the same spectacle, really.

Moreover, if we had found the gloom and shade of the Latomie disagreeable how could we be disposed to relish the even more absolute gloom of these long sinister catacombs with their marker points of light and their dank pesty atmosphere. Nor was the wretched church where St. Paul is supposed to have preached of any great aesthetic interest. This is the whole trouble with guides and guidebooks — the difficulty of disentangling what is historically important from what is artistically essential. So far the annotations of Deeds seemed the best way of dealing with the problem; though it must be admitted that the great Baedeker did his best in this field of appreciation with astonishingly good insight and great care. But ages change, and taste which is so unstable an element changes with them. There is no certainty to be found in judgment. We were glad when at last we assembled at the little postcard kiosk with its hangdog monk, where the French ladies once more slaked their unquenchable thirst for picture postcards.

And so downwards, seawards, to keep our tryst with Santa Lucia, the patron saint of the town who was done to death among these peaceable streets and squares in 304. The church is supposed to mark the site but … there was a surprise in store for us. It explained why the tourist itinerary had left out this object of veneration; everything was all closed up for repairs. The two ancient and queer crucifixes which one has seen on film and read about so often had both been carted off for cleaning; worst of all, so had the Caravaggio. We hung about in the neighborhood of San Sepulcro (also closed) and felt rather sheepish about having complained so bitterly to Roberto about the shortcomings of the trip. Nor did he himself crow — he was too nice for that; he looked as chagrined as the rest of us by this unexpected vexation. There was nothing to be done. But at least he had kept his word and tried to show us the great painting.

Dinner was some way off as yet so we took a brief stroll among the network of pleasant streets leading down to the waterfront and it was on our return to regain the little red bus that a new diversion was presented to us by the female Microscope who was taken suddenly ill. She had been eating sweets or cough drops all day, and also drinking iced almond milk. Suddenly she turned an anguished, pewter-colored visage towards us and took a few lurching steps forward to fall flat on her face at our feet, shuddering slightly as if with an attack of epilepsy. Roberto showed great consternation, and Mario positively bounded from his perch in the bus to help lift her. She was trying to be sick it appeared but without result. Everyone fussed. Her pulse was faint and her gunmetal color was far from reassuring. Roberto decreed that we must get back to the hotel with all dispatch and ask a doctor to come at once and examine her. Her husband who showed little alarm put his arm round her and said: “It is nothing. It will soon pass. It is just a little aéro-phagie to which she has often been subject.” This is an extraordinary French disease which is quite common in the Midi and is based on the notion that there are some people so singularly constituted that they involuntarily keep on swallowing air until it gets to such a point that they either go off with a bang or develop a tremendously painful series of symptoms like colic and gastritis. I have known a number of cases of this scourge; and here was another virulent example of air swallowing which had turned this harmless lady into a gulping, pewter-colored wreck with heaving stomach and rolling eyes. She really did look awful and I wondered what sort of remedy might be proposed by an Italian medical man — perhaps to give her a potion of castor oil and then stand back with his fingers in his ears? But it was all very well to joke — poor Roberto was in a fearful state and with reason. He was more or less in charge of us and naturally dreaded anything going wrong which might hamper the smooth working of the tour. We had, after all, embarked so lightly on the Sicilian Carousel, giving hardly a thought to doctors or undertakers or insurance lawyers. And here we were with this cautionary attack of air tightness.

The lady was now moaning slightly and rocking and had folded her hands across her middle in a childish (and curiously reassuring) gesture like a small girl who had eaten too many green apples. But Mario got us back to the hotel in record time and here everyone showed anxiety and concern for the patient as we helped her out of the bus and up the steps into the hotel. The infant was there, all eyes, but playing no part. It was one huge gape — if a microscope can be said to be a gape. Our faces would have made an interesting study in concern — selfish concern, for we did not know whether this attack of illness might not prejudice the tour. Also, as almost nobody in the group liked the Microscopes there was a good deal of hypocrisy mixed into our concern and perhaps clearly decipherable in our expressions. There was general movement to get the lady up to her room where she could be undressed, but perhaps this is what she feared for she refused to move off the sofa in the lounge and elected to treat with the doctor there, upright and in full public view. It was not satisfactory from a medical point of view but as she was French and extremely obstinate there was little to be done about it. Here she waited then, gulping and closing her lidless eyes like a sick lizard, and here we hovered around the outskirts with well-meaning solicitude, waiting for the doc who would certainly be called El Dottore and would flourish one of those continental-type thermometers which are large and impressive and have to be operated in an embarrassing posture.

He was some time coming, but come he did at last and it was clear that he had dressed for the event for he wore an elaborate outfit topped off by a sort of white silk stock. The material of his dark suit was of obvious weight and quality — it made one perspire just to look at it; but the whole ensemble was beautifully tailored, while his small feet were encased in elastic-sided boots. He was youngish, a man in his forties, with a large dark head, furry as a mole, and skin the color of plum cake. He had a singular sort of expression; a sort of holy expression which one suddenly realized came from the fact that he was scared stiff in case someone asked him a question in a foreign language. His cufflinks gleamed, so did his teeth. He carried pigskin gloves. But he was scared. He looked in fact as if he had just emerged after partaking of the Eucharist with Frank Sinatra. He sat down uncomfortably facing his patient and put a bag containing his instruments on the floor. Roberto now intervened with a spirited outline of the case and everybody’s hands began to move in rhythm with their inner rhetoric — Roberto staggering, falling, holding his stomach.

The lady was looking less alarmed and seemed rather pleased to have merited such a lot of attention. El Dottore listened with a dark and disabused air, nodding from time to time as if he knew only too well what made people fall about and hold their stomachs. From time to time he allowed one hand off the leash, so to speak, and allowed it to describe a few eloquent gestures to illustrate his discourse — he had a rich and agreeable voice as well. The hand evolved in the air in a quite autonomous sort of way and if one had not been able to understand what its owner said one might have imagined it to be picking a grape or milking a goat or waving goodbye to a dying patient. It was expressive and strangely encouraging, for he did have a definite presence. He produced a stethoscope and after waving it about as he was talking made a sudden dart for his patient’s wrist. This she did not mind. He planted it on her pulse and listened gravely and for a long time to her cardiac performance. He nodded slightly. They had now got on to trying to explain to him what her illness was and how she had come to catch it. He did not understand. So everyone, led by Roberto and the woman’s husband, began to make as if to swallow air like the French do. The doctor swallowed with concern as he watched them; he did not seem to have heard of this disease — are Italians immune to it because they talk too much: the air can’t get in? At any rate he did not get it. He raised a carefully manicured finger and scratched his temple as he thought. Then he bowed once more to his pulse, hearkening with great concentration. Ah! After a long and pregnant pause the truth dawned. He put away his little stethoscope with a snap and locked his bag. Sitting well back and with an aggressive tilt to his chin he came up with a remedy which certainly matched the singularity of the disease. “In my opinion the spleen must come out at once,” he said. The translation was handed about to the party in several tongues. The spleen! So that was it!

The only person who refused to register surprise whatever happened — nothing could surprise him, it seemed — was the male Microscope. The spleen, pouf, of course he had heard all about it before. She had always been splenetic — if that is the mot juste—and had had numberless attacks which always wore off after she had been treated in the ordinary way for wind in the rigging. One gathered that there was some immense mauve suppository manufactured in Geneva which would meet the case. Nor were we wrong for the doctor produced a gorgeous fountain pen and wrote out a prescription with untrembling hand which he handed over to Roberto who glanced at it and offered to send someone out to the chemist at once. And the spleen? One could hardly launch her into an operation of that order while we were on the move. She would have to go into hospital. Roberto’s perplexities were grievous to behold. Would her damned spleen hold up until he could get shot of her, could push her over the border? That is what he wanted to know. The doctor shook his head, smiled persuasively, and said that it was up to God. Strangely enough the woman’s husband took the whole matter with a philosophic optimism which seemed rather noble. Or perhaps he had been through these storms often enough to know that they subsided as quickly as they arose? But nobody thought of invoking Santa Lucia — had we been in Greece it would have been the first, the most urgent thing to do, for were we not in her domain? It was just a small indication of the degree to which we, so-called “evolved” Europeans, had become demagnetized to the sense of pagan realities. Spleen!

Well, the doctor, having pronounced upon his client, rose to take his leave; he did not elaborate about taking out the spleen — one could hardly do this in the lounge. He simply shook hands all round, discussed his fee in a gruff tone with Roberto, and slid through the tall doors of the hotel into the sunlight. Much reassured by such a matter-of-fact approach, the female Microscope rose to her feet looking very much better. Her husband, in a surprising gesture of sympathy, put his arm round her and led her up to her room to lie down. Yet all had ended on a note of interrogation, nothing finally had been decided. But Roberto sent a hotel messenger out for the medicine and we all hoped for the best. “In my experience,” said Deeds, “the French have only one national disease and it is not the spleen — it’s the liver. And a more honorable thing than a French liver you could not have. It comes from them being the most discriminating people on earth when it comes to food and drink.” He did not want to labor the point for he saw Beddoes hovering around with the intention of making some dastardly remark, probably about morning sickness. It was time for an early dinner and bed, for we planned an early start on the morrow — unless hampered by the spleen of the French lady.