Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

4: Agrigento

MARTINE: “BUT AGRIGENTO for me is the acid test and I am sure you will feel it as I have; it reminded me of all our passionate arguments about the Greekness of a Cyprus which had never been either geographically or demographically part of Greece. What constituted its special claim to be so? Language of course — the eternal perennity of the obdurate Greek tongue which has changed so little for thousands of years. Language is the key, the passport, and unless we look at the Greek phenomenon from this point of view we will never understand the sort of colonizers they were. It was not blood but language which gave one membership of the Greek intellectual commonwealth — barbarians were not simply people who lived other where but people who did not speak Greek. It is hard for us to understand for we, like the Romans, have a juristic view of citizenship — in the case of the British our innate puritanism makes it a question of blood, of keeping the blood untainted by foreign admixtures. The horror for us is the half-caste, the touch of the tar brush. It is a complete contrast to the French attitude which resembles in a way the ancient Greek notion in its idea of Francophone nations and races. The possession of the French tongue with its automatic entry into the riches of French culture constitutes the only sort of passport necessary for a non-French person whatever the color of his or her skin. It is easier to find a place in a French world than in a British — language determines the fact; yes, if you are black or blue and even with a British passport it is harder to integrate with us.

“This little homily is written in the belief that one day you will visit the temples in that extraordinary valley below the horrid tumble of modern Agrigento’s featureless and grubby slums — and suddenly feel quite bewildered by finding yourself in Greece, one hundred per cent in Greece. And you will immediately ask yourself why (given the strong anti-northern and secessionist sentiments of the Sicilians) there has never been a Greek claim to the island. You will smile. But in fact if we judge only by the monuments and the recorded history of the place we are dealing with something as Greek in sinew and marrow as the Argolid or as Attica. How has it escaped? Because the language is no longer a vital force. There are a few pockets where a vestigial Greek is still spoken, but pathetically few (luckily for the Italians). There is an odd little Byzantine monastery or two as there is in Calabria. But the gleam of its Greekness has died out; its language has been swamped by Italian. Only the ancient place names remain to jolt one awake to the realization that Sicily is just as Greek as Greece is — or never was! The question of Greekness — and the diaspora — is an intriguing one to think about. If we take Athens (that very first olive tree) as the center from which all Greekness radiates outward … Sicily is about like Smyrna is — if we take its pulse today. O please come and see!”

Not very well expressed perhaps, but the sentiments harked back to our long Cyprus arguments in the shade of the old Abbey of Bellapais. The dust raised around the question of Enosis with Greece, which constituted such a genuine puzzle to so many of our compatriots. Their arguments always centered around the relative amenities offered the Cypriots under our unequal, lazy but relatively honest regime. No military service, standards of living etc.… all this weighed nothing against a claim which was purely poetic, a longing as ancient as Aphrodite and the crash of the waves on the deserted beaches of Paphos. How to bring this home to London whose sense of values (“common sense”) was always based upon the vulgar contingencies of life and not on its inner meaning? You would hear nice-minded civil servants say: “It’s astonishing their claim — they have never been Greek, after all.” Yet the Doric they spoke had roots as deep as Homer, the whole cultus of their ethnographic state was absolutely contemporary, absolutely living. Was it, then, the language which kept it so? The more we disinterred the past the Greeker the contemporary Cypriot seemed to become.

Through all these considerations, as well as many others — for I had been living in the Mediterranean nearly all my adult life — I had started very tentatively to evolve a theory of human beings living in vital function to their habitats. It was hard to shed the tough little carapace of the national ego and to begin to see them as the bare products of the soil, just like the wild flowers or the wines, just like the crops. Physical and mental types which flowered in beauty or intelligence according to what the ground desired of them and not what they desired of themselves or others. One accepts easily enough the fact that whisky is a product of one region and Côtes du Rhône the product of another; so do language and nationality conspire to evolve ways of expressing Greekness or Italian-ness. Though of course it takes several generations for the physical and mental body to receive the secret imprint of a place. And after all, when all is said and done, countries as frequently overrun and ravaged as Greece cannot have a single “true” Greek, in the blood sense, left.

If indeed the phrase means anything at all. What is left is the most hard wearing, even indestructible part, language whose beauty and suppleness has nourished and still nourishes the poet, philosopher, and mathematician. And when I was a poor teacher in Athens striving to learn demotic Greek I found with surprise that my teacher could start me off with the old Attic grammar without batting an eyelash. Much detail had obviously changed, but the basic structure was recognizably the same. I could not repay this debt by starting my own students off with Chaucer; the language had worn itself away too quickly. Even Shakespeare (in whose time no dictionary existed) needed a glossary today. What, then, makes a “Greek”? The whole mystery of human nationality reverberates behind the question. The notion of frontiers, the notion of abstract riches, of thought, of possessions, of customs.… It all comes out of the ground, the hallowed ground of Greece — wherever that was!

This train of thought was a fitting one for a baking morning with a slight fresh wind off the sea. The little red bus had doubled back on its tracks and was heading north briefly before turning away into the mountains. Today we would climb up from sea level into the blue dozing escarpments which stretched away in profile on our left. Mario plied his sweet klaxon to alert the traffic ahead of us — mostly lorries bringing building materials to Syracuse. Roberto hummed a tune over the intercom and told us that it would be nice and cool in the mountains, while tonight we would find ourselves once more at sea level in a good hotel just outside Agrigento. Deeds felt like reading so I pursued my long argument with Martine’s ghost, upon themes some of which had invaded my dreams. I saw her irritating the Governor at dinner by being a trifle trenchant in support of the Greek claim — it made him plaintive for he felt it was rather rude of her, which perhaps it was. What could he do about a situation fabricated by his masters in London?

But in fact these old arguments had a burning topicality for me, for they raised precisely the questions I had come to Sicily to try and answer. What was Sicily, what was a Sicilian? I had already noticed the strongly separatist temper of the inhabitants which had won them (but only recently) a measure of autonomy. The island was too big and too full of vigorously original character to be treated as if it was a backward department of a rundown post-war Italy. In every domain the resemblance to Greece was fairly striking — and Sicily was politically as much a new nation as the Turk-free modern Greece was. Indeed metropolitan Greece was itself still growing — acquiring back places like Rhodes from Italy itself. All this despite the predictable tragedy of the Cyprus issue, envenomed by neglect and the insensitivity and self-seeking of the great powers with their creeping intrigues and fears of influence.

What was the Mediterranean tapestry all about anyway; particularly when it came to extending the frame of reference in the direction of art, architecture, literature? Italy, Spain, Greece, the Midi of France — they all had the same light and the same garden produce. They were all garlic countries, underprivileged in everything but the bounteous sense of spareness and beauty. They were all naïfs, and self-destroyers through every predatory Anglo-Saxon toy or tool from the transistor to the cinema screen. Yet something remained of a basic cultural attitude, however subject to modification. But why wasn’t Spain Italy, why wasn’t Italy Greece, or Greece Turkey? Different attitudes to religion, to love, to the family, to death, to life.… Yes, deep differences, yet such striking likenesses as to allow us to think of such a thing as a Mediterranean character. After all, there are many varieties of the olive tree, which for me will always mark the spiritual and physical boundaries of that magical and non-existent land — the Mediterranean. Martine was right. How I regretted not having come here before.

We passed Augusta again — how dismal it looked by daylight with all its rusty refineries and sad clumps of rotting equipment. But oil had come to Sicily, and with it prosperity and of course the death of everything that makes life valuable. They were doomed to become soft, pulpy, and dazed people like the Americans so long as it lasted. But in a generation or two, after the land had had its fill of rape and disaster the magnetic fields would reassert their quiet grip once more to reform the place and the people into its own mysterious likeness — the golden mask of the inland sea which is unlike any other. How lucky France was to have one foot in the Mediterranean; it modified the acerbe French northern character and made the Midi a sort of filter which admitted the precious influences which stretched back into prehistory. It would not be the first time or the last that a whole culture had plunged to its doom in this land. The long suppurating wars of the past — Etruscan against Italian, Carthaginian against Greek against Roman. After every outburst of hysteria and bloodshed came an era of peace during which the people tried to reform their scattered wits and build for peace. It never lasted. It never would. A spell of years with the promise of human perfection — then collapse. And each succeeding invader if given time brought his own sort of order and beauty.

Such a brief flowering fell to the lot of Sicily when the Arabs came, during their great period of ascendancy, at the invitation of the Byzantine admiral Euphemius. It was a fatal invitation, for the island slipped from the nerveless fingers of Byzance into the nervous and high-spirited fingers of the Arabs who immediately entered the struggle and at last succeeded in mastering the masterless island. Then there was another period of productive peacefulness — just as there had been when Syracuse had enjoyed its first flowering of peace and prosperity. They were astonishingly inventive and sensitive these newcomers from over the water, people with the austere desert as an inheritance. For the Arab knows what water is; it is more precious to him almost than oxygen.

So were rural areas resettled, inheritance laws revised, ancient waterways brought back into use for irrigation. They were planters of skill and choice; they brought in citrus, sugarcane, flax, the date palm, cotton, the mulberry with its silkworms, melon, papyrus, and pistachio. Nor was it only above ground for they were skillful miners and here they found silver, lead, mercury, sulphur, naphtha, and vitriol — not to mention alum and antimony. The extensive saltpans of today date from their inspired creative rule. But they also vanished within the space of a few decades — like water pouring away down a drain; the land took over once more, trying to form again its own obstinate image.

We were entering the throat of a plain which led directly into the mountains, and here I got a premonitory smell of what the valley of Agrigento must be like — it was purely Attic in the dryness, in the dust, and the pale violet haze which swam in the middle distance foxing the outlines of things. To such good effect that we found ourselves negotiating a series of valleys diminishing all the time in width as they mounted, and brimming with harvest wheat not all of which had yet been garnered. It is impossible to describe the degrees of yellow from the most candent cadmium to ochre, from discolored ivory to lemon bronze. The air was full of wisps of straw and the heat beat upon us as if from some huge oven where the Gods had been baking bread. I expected Argos to come in sight at any moment. What is particularly delicious to me about Attic heat is its perfect dryness — like a very dry champagne. You are hot, yes, you can pant like a dog for water; but you don’t sweat, or else sweat so very lightly that it dries at once on your skin. In such heat to plunge into an icy sea is marvelous — you get a sharp pain in the back of the throat as if from an iced wine. But here we were far from the sea, and starting to climb amidst all this glaze of peacock-blue sky and yellow squares of wheat. Underneath that hot heaven the sun rang as if on an anvil and we were glad of Mario’s cooling apparatus which sent us little draughts of cool air. Dust devils danced along the plain, and the few lorries we passed were powdered white — they had left the main roads for the country paths. Halfway up Roberto announced a “physiological halt” as he called it, and we pulled into a petrol station in order to fill up and, by the same token, to empty out.

There was a canteen where we had a few moments of quiet conviviality over wine and a strange white aperitif made from almond juice and milk. Like everything in Sicily it was loaded with sugar though a delicious drink when sufficiently iced. The Petremands stood treat and Mrs. Microscope was back in sufficient form to engulf a couple of glasses before Mario honked and we all trooped back to the bus to resume our ascent which was now to become a good deal more steep as we left the plain behind. It was pleasant to look down on it as it receded, for the sinuous roads curved snake wise in and out among the hills and the fine views varied with angle and altitude. We were heading for a Roman villa where quite recently the archaeologists had discovered a magnificent tessellated floor of considerable importance to them — and in consequence to us, the curious sightseers of the Carousel. We would base ourselves at Piazza Armerina in order to see the Villa Imperiale and have lunch before crossing the scarps and descending with the descending sun upon Gela and Agrigento. This gave us our first taste of the mountains and it was most refreshing. In one of the rock cuttings there were little tortoises clicking about and Mario stopped to allow Deeds to field one smartly and hand it to Miss Lobb who did not know what to do with it. It was an astonishingly active animal and ran all over the bus into all the corners, upsetting all of us and causing a full-scale hunt before it was caught. Finally she freed it. Its little claws were extremely sharp and it fought for dear life, for its freedom. I had always thought of tortoises as such peaceable things which simply turned into stones at the approach of danger. This little brute attacked all along the line and we were glad when at last it clicked off into the bushes.

Piazza Armerina is a pretty and lively little hill town, boasting of more than one baroque church, a cathedral and a castle, and several other sites of note in the immediate environs. But it is quite impossible to convey that elusive quality, charm, in writing — or even in photography which so often deludes one with its faked images and selected angles. The little town had charm, though of course its monuments could not compare in importance to many another Sicilian town. Yes … I found myself thinking that it would be pleasant to spend a month there finishing a book. The walking seemed wonderful among these green and flourishing foothills. But the glimpse we had of it was regrettably brief; having signaled our presence to the hotel where we were to have lunch we set off at once to cover the six or so kilometers which separated us from the Imperial Villa — a kind of summer hideout built for some half-forgotten Roman Emperor. What is intriguing is that almost no ascription ever made about a Sicilian site or monument is ever more than tentative: you would have thought that this important version of Government House. Everywhere would offer one a little firm history. No. “It has been surmised that this hunting lodge could have belonged to the Emperor Maximianus Heraclius who shared his Emperorship with Diocletian.” The site they chose for the Imperial Villa is almost oppressively hidden away; it makes one conjecture why in such a landscape one should plank down a large and spacious building in the middle of a network of shallow ravines heavily wooded, and obviously awash in winter with mountain streams. Instead of planting it on a commanding hillock which (always a problem in hill architecture) drained well during the rains. There was something rather unhealthy and secretive in the choice of a site, and it must be infernally hot in August as a place to live in. It buzzed with insects and butterflies. We arrived in a cleared space where, together with a dozen or so other buses, we dropped anchor and traipsed off down the winding walks to the villa, marveling at the sultriness and the oppressive heat — so different from the Attic valleys we had traversed with all their brilliant cornfields.

We came at last to a clearing where an absolute monstrosity greeted our eyes — a straggling building in dirty white plastic which suggested the demesne of a mad market gardener who was specializing in asparagus. I could not believe my eyes. None of us could. We stood there mumchance and swallowing, wondering what the devil this construction was. Roberto, blushing and apologetic, told us.

So precious were the recently uncovered mosaics and so great the risk that they would be eaten into by the climate that someone had had the brilliant idea of covering them in this grotesque plastic housing through which a series of carefully arranged plank walks and duckboards allowed the curious to walk around the villa. It was a groan-making thing to do and only an archaeologist could have thought of it. Moreover, the mosaics, so interesting historically that one is glad to have made the effort to see them, are of a dullness extraordinary. But then the sort of people who build villas for Governors are for the most part interior decorators with a sense of grandiose banality, a sense of the expensively commonplace. Of such provenance is the Imperial Villa, though of course the number and clarity of the decorations merit interest despite their poor sense of plastic power. Historians must be interested in these elaborate hunting scenes, the warfare of Gods, and the faintly lecherous love scene which ends in a rather ordinary aesthetic experience. And all this in a white plastic housing which turned us all the color of wax. Was this the pleasure dome of an Emperor, or was it perhaps (an intelligent suggestion by Christopher Kininmonth) more the millionaire’s hideaway, constructed for the rich man who purveyed animals for the Roman arenas? The frescoes of animals are so numerous and their variety so great that it makes one pause and wonder. But as usual there is no proof of anything.

Dutifully we prowled the duckboards while Beddoes, who had culled a whole lot of Latin words from the Blue Guide, made up a sort of prose poem from fragments of it which he murmured aloud to himself in a vibrant tone of voice. Thus:

And so we enter the Atrium

By its purely polygonal court

To the left lies the Great Latrine

Ladies and Gents, the Great Latrine

For those who are taken short

But the marble seats are lost

Yet ahead of us is the Aediculum

Giving access to the Thermae

The vestibule can be viewed from

the Peristyle

Do not smile.

Next comes the frigidarium

With its apodyteria

Leading onwards with increasing hysteria

To the Alepterion

Between tepidarium and calidarium

Whence into a court where the Lesser

Latrine

Waits for those who have not yet been

In construction sumptuous

As befitted the Imperial Purple

But here the Muse punished him and he wobbled off a duckboard and all but plunged down upon one of the more precious tessellations, to the intense annoyance of Roberto and the collective disapproval of the Carousel. The dentist’s lady seemed particularly shocked and enraged and flounced about to register her disapproval. “That guy is sacrilegious,” she told her companion with a venomous look at Beddoes who seemed only a very little repentant. Frescoed bathers massaged by slaves, animal heads bountifully crowned with laurel — yes, but it was a pity that so extensive and such energetic cartoons had not come from more practiced or feeling hands. The commonplaceness of the whole thing hung about in the air; I was reminded suddenly of the interior decorations of the Castle of the Knights at Rhodes — which had been hatched by a Fascist Governor of the Dodecanese Islands who tried to echo the pretensions of Mussolini in this seat of government. The same empty banality — and here it was again — an echo from the last throes of the expiring Empire. “In richness and extent the villa can fairly be compared to Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli or Diocletian’s Palace at Split.” I don’t agree, but then who am I to say? The site alone militates against this opinion. These idle thoughts passed through my brain as we slowly negotiated the lesser latrine; “whose brick drain, marble hand basin, and pictorial decoration attest to the standards of imperial Roman comfort.” Yes, but if it were just the home of the local Onassis of the day all would be clear.

The visit was long, it was thorough, and it explained why when Martine listed the places she wished that I might visit in order to write the “pocket” Sicily for her children, she had quite omitted to mention it. Perhaps she had just forgotten — such is the vast prolixity of memorable monuments in this island that one could be forgiven for simply forgetting one which made no particular mark on one’s nervous system. I write these words, of course, subject to caution and with a certain diffidence, for the finds at the Imperial Villa, the most extensive in Europe, have become justly famous and it may well be that I am putting myself down as a hopeless Philistine. But I think not. And I am somewhat comforted by the fact that Deeds gave the place a very tentative marking in his little guide. But this he rather tended to explain away over the lunch table by saying that he was so deeply in love with the little red town of Aedoni which was a few kilometers off — and with the marvelous ancient Greek site of Morgantina — that all this heavy dun Roman stuff did not impress him. Indeed opinions were rather divided generally, and there were one or two of us who rather shared my view of the Villa. The dentist’s lady was most unsparing in her open dislike for Beddoes who glimmered about everywhere like a dragonfly peering over people’s shoulders and whispering things they didn’t want to hear. “That man,” she told her dentist at the lunch table, “is a pure desecrator.” It was as good a way of viewing Beddoes as any we had invented, and her accent had an envenomed Midwestern sting in it.

The lunch was toneless but the mountain air was fresh and we drank a good deal of wine with it; one had begun to feel rather fatigued, almost sleepy. We had been on the move for what seemed an age now, though in reality it was only a few days; but we had begun to feel the stress of traveling about, even over perfect roads, and being exposed the whole time to new sights and sounds. We took off languidly in the cool air, replete with wine, and for the most part with the intention of having a short doze as Mario negotiated the hairpins and forest roads on the way down to Agrigento. The very old Italian couple who never spoke but tenderly held hands like newlyweds seemed in the seventh heaven of smiling joy. They sat back, quiet as apples, and smiled peacefully upon the world as it wheeled by. The little red bus chuckled and rippled its partridge-like way among the forests and pretty soon we once more came in view of the distant sea and the black smudges which marked the site of Gela. There was a good deal of fairly purposeful reforestation among these cliffs and scarps but I was sorry to see to what extent the eucalyptus had been used, not because it isn’t very beautiful as a tree — its shimmering spires of poplar-like green are handsome; but the shallow spread of its roots makes its demands for soil immoderate and nothing very interesting can be set beside it. I suppose that it was chosen precisely because the roots hold up the friable and easily washed-away soil. And Sicily has the same problems of reforestation as Greece has.

And so from Caltanissetta the long downswing began into the plain where Gela lay; the sea line today as misty and incoherent as only the heats of July can make it. Somewhere away to the left sweet Vittoria (another dream town of Deeds which we were going to miss) whose smiling baroque remained to this day a suitable monument to the lady who founded the city, Vittoria della Colonna — was she not once Queen of Cyprus? The slopes lead enticingly downwards towards the Bay of Gela, one of the American landing places in 1943. The dust is rich in this long valley intersected by a number of lively rivers which seemed very high for the time of the year. For a long while, half dozing, we descended along the swaying roads through vineyards and clumps of cane, olive groves, and extensive plantations of oranges. And at last of course we struck oil — as we neared the town which Aeschylus had chosen to spend his last years in, indeed to die in.

There was probably a hotel named after him — there always is such a fitting memorial of the mercantile age we live in! The last whiff of the open country is soon extinguished at the approaches to this famous town whose great complex of petro-chemical installations seems to girdle it. There is little to see save what the museum has put on view — an extensive and fine historical collection of objects both votive and utilitarian. The bald skull of the Greek dramatist should perhaps have been among the relics? The legend says that an eagle mistook his skull for a stone and dropped a tortoise shell upon it in order to break it.

Now I took this story to be simply one of those literary fables with which we are so familiar until … one day in Corfu, long ago, I actually saw a big bird, perhaps a buzzard, doing exactly this, dropping shells from a great height, on to a seagirt rock and then coming down to inspect and peck. I watched it for over an hour and in all it tried out three or four different shells — they seemed to be clams of a sort, and not tortoises. Though a tortoise would be quite a logical animal for an eagle to sweep in its claws and try to crack apart in this fashion. One Doric column is all that is left unless you like a chunk of defensive ancient wall half silted into the sand. Oil rigs off the shore with their ominous message. But the sweep of the bay is in the grand style and even in the mess of modern Gela one sees how sweet a place it must have been, how rich in fruit and vine, and how splendid as horse country because so well watered and green. Also it lay just back from the coast so that Syracuse and Akragas were in the front line as far as commerce and warfare were concerned; Gela must have been a little démodé, a little second-hand and old-fashioned, a fitting place for Pythagorean thinkers and poets who wanted a quiet life. At any rate that is what one feels even today. How ugly, though, they have allowed this important site to become (ah Demeter, where is your shrine!) with its haphazard modern development.

There was no time to go down to the sea for we were due in Agrigento that evening, so that after Gela we tumbled back into the bus and set off along the coastal road — the section leading us to Agrigento struck me as desolate and full of dirty sand dunes; even melancholy, if you like, but not melancholy and depressing as some of the later stretches after Marsala. Perhaps it was the anticipation of the Vale of the Temples which lay ahead, or simply the sun made one drowsy and content to feel the ancient pulse beat of the vanished Gela where now, off the coast, strange steel animals with long legs probed about like herons in a shallow lake. An idea came to me, and I jotted it down in order to chew it over later at leisure. (Before Christianity the sources of power were in magic, after it in money.) What is to be done? Nothing, it is too late.

On a remote country road, in the deep dust, we unexpectedly drew to a halt under a great carob tree full of fruit, which is known as the locust bean. There was an enclosure with trees and a wicket gate behind which one could see a trimly laid out little cemetery. This little halt had been organized specifically for Deeds by Roberto. It was a war cemetery which came into his purlieu for inspection. Accordingly he somewhat apologetically took himself off in the direction of the British and Canadian graves, lighting a cigarette and promising us not to be long. Roberto turned us loose in the road and we straggled about for a while like lost sheep. I walked a little way and entered a vineyard where I found a patch of grass, almost burned brown by the summer heat. Here I lay down in its warm crackling cradle, dislodging swarms of crickets which hardly ceased their whirring as they retreated. The earth smelled delicious, baked to a cinder. Ants crawled over my face. In my heat-hazed mind dim thoughts and dreams and half-remembered conversations jumbled themselves together as a background to this throbbing summer afternoon with the cicadas fiddling away like mad in the trees. Every time a light patch of high cloud covered the sun the whole of nature fell silent — or at least the crickets did. Did they think that winter had suddenly returned? And when the heat was turned on again was I wrong to detect in their fervor a tremendous relief that such was not the case? I hovered on the edge of sleep and then called myself to attention, for the others did not know where I was and it would not do to miss the bus or keep poor Mario fretting and scowling by being late.

I hoisted myself sleepily to my feet and crossed the field back to the road where Roberto, who had been trying to explain something about the carob tree to the rest of the party, had run into vocabulary trouble. Here I could help a little, for these great strong carob trees were a handsome feature of Cyprus with their long curving bean. When wind or lightning broke a branch of the tree one was always surprised to see that the wood revealed was the color of human flesh. The locust bean, Roberto was trying to explain, was highly nutritious. He was picking a few — they were dry and snapped between his teeth — and handing them round for the party to try. We had often done this on picnics in the past and I was pleased once more to make the acquaintance of this noble tree whose produce is “kibbled” (an absurd word) very extensively in Cyprus for animal fodder. By now Deeds had sauntered back to us in time to take the long seed in his fingers and try it with his teeth. “Can I bore you with a story?” he asked diffidently. “Some of the boys in that cemetery came from a commando I trained in Cyprus. Now among our training tips was to keep an eye wide open for carobs if short of food. You can live almost indefinitely on carob seed and water, and for a commando in this theater it was most essential gen. In fact several of those men were lost between the lines during the first assault for about ten days, without rations of any sort. But they found fresh springs and they found locust beans and lived to tell the tale. Alas, they were killed later in a counter-attack. But if we had been training a commando in the U.K. we would have forgotten about the nutritive qualities of the carob. I always think of Cyprus in those days when I inspect this little cemetery.” He had been quite a time and seemed a trifle sad, and somewhat glad to pile back into the bus with us and start off again down the long roads which led onwards to Agrigento and the Temples which for Martine (and not ruling out Taormina) had been the great Sicilian experience. So, on we sped now, eating carobs.

The land had gone yellower and more ochreous; the valleys had become longer and more spacious. It had a feel of wildness. But there were strings of lorries loaded with dust-producing chemicals which floated off into the air and powdered the bus until Mario swore and shook his fist at them. Somewhere some Herculean constructions were being mounted — I hoped it was not Agrigento which had come under the scourge of urbanization. On one of these long declines we slowed down for an accident involving a lorry and a large sports car. A very definitive accident for the sports car with its occupant still in it had been pushed right into the ditch on one side, while the lorry responsible for the push had itself subsided like an old camel into the ditch on the opposite side. As in all scenes of terror and dismay everything seemed to have settled into a sort of timeless tableau. The police had not yet arrived. Someone had covered the form of the lorry driver with a strip of sacking — just a bare foot sticking out.

But the occupant of the sports car was a handsome blond youth, and he was lying back in his seat as if replete with content, with sunlight, with wine. The expression on his face was one of benign calm, of beatitude. He wore a blue shirt open at the throat. There was no disorder in his dress, nor was he marked by the collision; he seemed as if asleep. The light wind ruffled a strand of blond hair on his forehead to complete the illusion of life, but the little man whose stethoscope was planted inside his blue shirt over the heart, was shaking his head and making the traditional grimace of doctors the world over. The front of the sports car, the whole engine, was crumpled up like a paper bag. Yet there was no blood, no disorder; the young man had simply ceded to the demands of fate. It was a death by pure concussion. He lay, as if in his coffin, while around him stood a group of half a dozen peasants who might have been chosen by a dramatist to give point and resonance to this classical accident in which so unexpectedly death had asserted itself. No one cried or beat his breast; the women had drawn the corner of their head shawls into their mouths and held them between white firm teeth — as if by this gesture to allay the possibility of tears. Two peasants, with mattocks held lightly in hands wrinkled as ancient tortoises, stared at the young man and his sumptuous car as one might stare (the operative phrase is perhaps “drink in”) at a holy painting above an altar. Their black eyes brimmed with incomprehension. They did not try to understand this phenomenon — a dead boy in a brilliantly colored car with yellow suede upholstery. But there was no sorrow, no breast beating, no frantic curiosity such as there would have been in the north or in Greece. Nobody crossed themselves. They simply stared, without curiosity, indeed with a kind of stern bravado. You felt that they and death were equals. It was simply that the island had struck home once more. This was Sicily! And one realized that even death had a different, a particularly Sicilian resonance. The groups of black eyes remained fixed and unwinking whereas the Greek or Italian eye is forever darting about, restless as a fly. In the background there was an older man with a mane of white hair, who stared as hard as the others — indeed with such concentration that his little pink tongue tip stuck out and gave him an absurdly childish expression. But no fear.

It was we in the bus who felt the fear — you could see gloom and dismay on every visage as Mario drew up in a swirl of whiteness and leaned out to inform himself of the circumstances. Was there anything we could do? Nothing. An ambulance was on the way from Agrigento, also the police. The doctor with his open shirt looked more like a youthful vet. He had managed to edge his tiny Fiat right off the road into a nook while he examined the young man in the car. Nobody used the word for death either: the fact was conveyed with gestures of the fingers or the head. The whole thing was amazingly studied; it was as if all of us, even us in the bus, had been chosen by a dramatist to fill a part in this tableau. The Bishop had put on an expression which read as: I told you so. He seemed rather like the chief cashier of a great Bank (Death Inc.) who had a good deal of inside knowledge. The old Italian apple people stayed quietly smiling; perhaps they did not understand or remained locked in their dream of Eden. Renata, the German girl, closed her eyes and turned her head away. Miss Lobb looked severe, as if it reflected discredit on the tourist company to let people who had paid good money suddenly come up against this kind of thing. Beddoes straightened an imaginary tie furtively; you could see that death was for him a headmaster in Dungeness. How did I look? I caught sight of my reflection in the dusty glass and thought I looked a trifle sick — I certainly felt it; it was so unexpected on that brilliant afternoon with the sun sliding down into the mist-blue waters of the Underworld. Would we arrive before dark? We had gathered speed now, and had at last cleared the long file of lorries which were causing all the dust. The air was dry and hot; the limestone configuration of the land spoke of water and green, of spring and rivers and friendly nightingales. Deeds seemed rather remote and preoccupied by his own thoughts and I did not subject him to mine which as usual were rather incoherent and muddled — across the screens of memory old recollections of Athens and the islands came up like friendly animals to be recognized and stroked. Yes, we were in Attica, there was no doubt about it; just north of the capital, say in Psychico or perhaps east near Porto Rafti … I must not hurt Roberto’s patriotic feelings by all my Greek chatter. Sicily after all belonged to neither Greece nor to Italy now (geographical frontiers mean nothing) but strictly to itself, to its most ancient and indestructible self. On we sped, skimming the hills like a swallow.

It came in sight slowly, the famous city; at first as a series of suggestive shapes against the evening sky, then as half dissolved forms which wobbled in the heat haze to settle at last firmly into the cubist boxes of a modern city — and with at least two small skyscrapers to mark the ancient (I supposed) Acropolis. But as we approached, a black cloud of a particularly heavy and menacing weight began to obscure the sun. It was very strange — the whole of heaven was, apart from this cloud, serene, void, and blue. It was as if the thing had got left over from some old thunderstorm and lay there undissolved, drifting about the sky. It was not to be regretted as it was obviously going to cause a dramatic sunset, threshing out the sun’s rays, making it seem like the lidless dark eye of a whale from which stray beams escaped. If I make a point of this little departure from the norm of things it is because as we journeyed along we saw to our left a small cottage perched on a headland with two wind-bent pines outside it — the whole hanging there over the sea, as if outside the whole of the rest of nature. There was no other sign of human habitation save this desolate and memorable little cottage. With the black sunlight it looked deeply tragically significant, as if it were the backdrop for a play. Hardly anybody paid attention to the little scene, but Roberto with an air of sadness, announced over the speaker: “The birthplace of Pirandello. A little hamlet called Chaos!” He looked at his watch. The museum would be shut he thought. Perhaps one might just stop for a moment? If the idea was tentative it was because he knew that hardly anyone in the bus knew or cared much about this great man, this great original poet of Agrigento. We risked, by a detour, to arrive a trifle late and perhaps prejudice a trip to the valley of the Temples which were floodlit at night. Would anybody care to … but only three or four hands were raised so it was decided to press on.

Meanwhile, staring across the dusty bled on my left I saw the sunbeams lengthen and sink, like stage lights being lowered for a play, while suddenly from the beaches behind the silhouette came a stream of grinding laboring lorries, like a string of ants upon a leaf. I suppose they were doing nothing more sinister than bringing up sea sand from the beaches, but the clouds of whiteness they sent swirling heavenwards contained so many tones of pearl, yellow, amber that the whole display, with the sunlight shining through it, was worthy of a nervous breakdown by Turner. It made my heart beat faster, it was memorable and at the same time a little ominous — as if by it we were warned not to take the famous city we were about to visit too lightly. To bring to it our real selves. Yet it was all over in a matter of half a minute, but it had a sort of finalizing effect on our decision, for we turned our backs upon this vision and set about climbing into the sky, towards the town whose shabby outlines and haphazard building became slowly more and more evident as we advanced. Roberto uttered its name with a small sigh of fatigue.

I had not conveyed my impressions to Deeds believing him to be otherwise occupied, but the all-seeing eye had taken in the headland and he said now: “Pity about Pirandello. The little museum is very touching. But what a strange light. And the small scale is striking — like the humbleness of Anne Hathaway’s cottage.” It was an apt comment on the origins of greatness.

But by now the cloud had mysteriously vanished backstage and all was serene, a transparent, cloudless dusk with no trace of wind; and as we followed the curves and slants of the road up to the town it became slowly obvious that what was being unfolded before us and below us was a most remarkable site. Successive roundels led in a slow spiral up to the top of the steep hillock upon which once an Acropolis had perched, and where now two parvenu skyscrapers stood and an ignoble huddle of unwarranted housing did duty for the old city’s center. We had reached by now the commercial nexus of the new town which lies a bit below the city, makeshift and ugly. But the light was of pure opalescent honey, and the setting (I am sorry to labor the point) was Hymettus at evening with the violet city of Athens sinking into the cocoon of night. I tremble also to insist on the fact that from the point of view of natural beauty and elegance of site Agrigento is easily a match for Athens on its hills. Just as the ocean throws up roundels of sand to form pools, so the successive ages of geological time had thrown up successive rounds of limestone, rising in tiers like a wedding cake to the Acropolis. From the top one looks down as if into a pie dish with two levels, inner and outer ridges. It is down there, at the entrance to the city, that all the Temples are situated, like a protective screen, tricked out with fruit orchards, with sweeps of silver olives, and with ubiquitous almond trees whose spring flowering has become as famous as the legendary town itself.

We climbed down into the twilight with a strange feeling of indecision, not knowing exactly what was in store for us. It was only after a brief walk across a square, when we found ourselves looking down into the tenebrous mauve bowl where the Temples awaited us that we realized that our arrival at that precise time was an act of thoughtful good sense on the part of Roberto. “Before the city lights go on you may see more or less how the classical city looked at sunset.” The air was so still up here that one could catch the distant sounds of someone singing and the noise perhaps of a mattock on the dry clay a mile below us. At our back the streets were beginning to fill up for the evening Corso, the tiny coffee shops to brim over with lights which seemed, by contagion, to set fire at last to the street lamps behind our backs and set off the snarling radios and jukeboxes and traffic noise. Ahead of us the darkness rose slowly to engulf us, like ink being poured into a well; but it was a light darkness, slightly rosy, as if from a hidden harvest moon. But we belonged to the scattered disoriented city now with its stridulations of juke.

We were about to turn away from this slowly overwhelming darkness and back into the raucous streets when Roberto, who still peered keenly down the valley, implored a moment’s patience of us, for what reason I could not tell. He seemed as keyed up as if we were to expect something like a firework display. But it was better than that; presently there came the swift wing beats of a church bell which sounded like a signal and soundlessly the temples sprang to floodlit life all together, as if by a miracle. This was aerial geography with a vengeance, for they were to be our after-dinner treat tonight! But there were signs of raggedness and fatigue in the party and I could see that some of us might prefer to stay in the hotel and sleep. The Count’s wife looked really ill with weariness and I wondered why they had embarked her on such a journey. Mrs. Microscope too looked crusty though we had had no more news of her spleen. But there was to be a bit of delay as yet for our schedule called for half an hour’s shopping halt in the town, to enable us to buy curios and generally take a look round. Not all set off for this treat; many stayed in the bus. While, rather cowardly, I took myself off with Deeds to a bistro where I anticipated dinner and the fatigues of temple haunting by a couple of touches of grappa which was like drinking fumed oak in liquid form. Heartening stuff. Deeds fell into conversation with a eunuchoid youth who brought us coffee with a kindly but disenchanted air.

In the far corner, however, there was a small group of middle-aged to elderly men who attracted my instant attention by their hunched-up look and their black clothes and battered boots. They were gnarled and leathered by their avocation — could they have been coal miners, I wondered? Dressed awkwardly in their Sunday best with heavy dark suits and improbable felt hats which looked as if very seldom worn. Or perhaps they were mourners attending the funeral of some local dignitary? They spoke in low gruff tones and in a dialect Italian. The sister of the eunuch served them exclusively and with such obvious nervousness that I finally concluded that they must be a group of Mafia leaders on a Sunday outing. Their little circle exuded a kind of horrid Protestant gloom, and most of their faces were baneful, ugly. They were drinking Strega as far as I could make out, but the massive sugar content was not making them any sweeter. It was a strange little group and all the other customers of the place beside ourselves shot curious glances at them, wondering I suppose like ourselves, what and from where.… The mystery was only cleared up when Roberto appeared in search of a quick coffee and caught sight of us. He seemed not unprepared for the question, and it was clear from his way of looking at them when Deeds pointed them out that they did seem singular, almost like another race. But no, that was not the case. They were simply sulphur miners on a night out in town.

THE TEMPLES OF JUNO LUCINA AND CONCORD AT AGRIGENTO

“They are Zolfataioi,” said Roberto with a smile. “We have been shielding you from the uglier side of Sicily, but we have our own black country here like you have; only it’s not black, it’s yellow. The sulphur workers live a sort of grim separate life except for their occasional excursions like this — though it’s usually to Caltanissetta that they go. It’s the headquarters of the trade.” The men looked as if they were waiting anxiously for transport and those at the two tables playing cards were doing so abstractedly, as if marking time. They were as impressively different from the other Italians as would have been, say, a little group of Bushmen, or Japanese. But they drank with precision. One of the elder ones with a leather face and expressionless eyes had the knack of tilting and emptying his glass in a single gesture, without swallowing. He looked like Father Time himself, drinking a whole hourglass of time at each quaff. I watched them curiously.

At that moment there came a diversion in the form of a large grey sports car which drew up outside the cafe. From it descended a couple of extremely well dressed and sophisticated youths of a vaguely Roman allure — I put them down as big-city pederasts having a holiday here. But their manner was offensively superior and they acted as if they owned the place. They were fashionably clad in smart colored summer wear and open collars, while their hair was handsomely styled and curled. They wanted to leave a message for some local boy and they engaged the flustered eunuch in conversation. Meanwhile, and the touch had a somewhat special insolence, they had left the car’s engine running so that the exhaust was belching noisome fumes on to the terrace and into the cafe itself. One felt resentful; it was as if they were deliberately flaunting not only their classical proclivities but their superiority as well. Their tones were shrill and their Italian of the cultivated sort.

Their arrival produced a little ripple of interest in the circle of sulphur miners, though the general tone was apathetic and not resentful. They eyed these two butterflies in their expressionless way and then looked at one another with a kindly irony. It was not malicious at all. Then the old man set down his tiny Strega glass and, wiping his moustache, said in a firm audible tone, “Ah! pederastici!” It was not offensive, simply an observation which classified the two, who must have overheard for they shrugged their shoulders and turned back to the eunuch with more questions about their friend Giovanni. Moreover, the word fell upon the silence with a fine classical limpidity — five lapidary syllables. It was perfectly summed up and forgotten — the whole incident. The one eloquent word was enough. No further comment was needed, and the miners turned back to their inner preoccupations and sank ever deeper into their corporate reserve while the two turkeys gobbled on.

A Greek root with

A Latin suffix

A Grecian vice

A Latin name

But at last it was time to take ourselves off to the gaunt restaurant where a single long dinner table had been prepared for us. There were to be some casualties among us, and about six of the wearier, as predicted, decided on an early night. We were anyway to have another look at the Temples by daylight on the morrow so that they were not to lose very much. It was only annoying for Mario, for the hotel was in the valley, some way off, and he would have to ferry them and then come back and ferry us to the Temples, going without dinner in the process. But he took it all with grave good humor and that undemonstrative courtesy that I was beginning to recognize as a thoroughly Sicilian trait. The weary therefore moved off, content to eat a sandwich in bed, while we doubled up our ranks and did our best to look joyfully surprised by yet another choice between spaghetti and rice. But the wine was good in its modest way. And we did full justice to it telling ourselves that we owed it to our fatigue, though Roberto warned us that we were only going to have a sniff at the Temples and not attempt to “do” them thoroughly until tomorrow. It was to see them floodlit, that was all. But how grateful one finally was for the glimpse, however brief, and how sorry one felt for the absentees.

We had hardly finished dinner when impassive Mario appeared with the bus and we were on the way down the hill, curving away upon the so-called passe-giata archeologica, a beautiful modern road which winds in and out of the temple circles; one by one these great landmarks came out of the night to meet us, while a thousand night insects danced in the hot light of the floods. The bare ground — yes, it smelled of Attica again. The whiffs of thyme and sage, and the very soil with its light marls and fawn-colored tones made the island itself seem like some huge abstract terracotta which by some freak of time might give birth to vases, amphorae, plates, craters. An ancient Athenian must have walked here with the sympathetic feeling of being back in Athens. And it was extraordinary to realize that this huge expanse of temples represented only a tiny fraction of what exists here in reality, and which remains to be unearthed. The archaeologists have only scratched the surface of Agrigento; stretching away on every side, hidden in the soft deciduous chalk through which the twin rivers have carved their beds, there lie hidden necropolises, aqueducts, houses and temples and statues as yet quite unknown to us; and all the wealth inside them of ceramics and jewelry and weapons. It seems so complete as it is, this long sparkling ridge with its tremendous exhibits. Yet Agrigento has hardly begun to yield up all its treasures, and in coming generations what is unearthed might well modify all our present ideas about it. Long shadows crisscrossed the night. Leaving the glare of the floods one was at once plunged into dense patches of fragrant darkness. There was another busload of dark figures round the Temple of Concord, all down on their knees. Were they praying? It seemed so.

In the circumstances, with the massive and blinding whiteness of the floodlights, the magical temple looking down upon us from some unimaginable height of centuries, the activity of the group of persons clustering about the stylobate, kneeling, bending, crawling, seemed to suggest that they were engaged in some strange archaic rite. Was it a propitiatory dance of some sort, an invocation to the God of the site? But no, the explanation was more prosaic. Yet before it was given to us the strangeness of the scene was increased by the fact that, as we approached upon the winding paths, punctuated by lanterns, we saw that they were Asiatics — Chinese I thought. Their faces were white in the white light, and their eyes had disappeared with the intensity of their concentration upon the ground. Our groups mingled for a moment to wander about on this extraordinary headland over the brimming darkness of the valley. Their guide was an acquaintance of Roberto’s and provided a clue as to the mysterious behavior of his group. Two of the more ardent photographers had lost their lens caps and everyone was trying to help them recover these valuable items. It was extremely hard. The floods were pouring up into the sky with such power that unless one was directly in their ray one could see nothing; one became a one-dimensional figure, a silhouette. They cast an absolutely definitive black shadow.

Even if you held out your hand in the light the underneath, the shadowy side, was plunged into total blackness. Thus to pick up something small from the ground just outside the arc of white light presented extraordinary difficulties. Which explained all the crouching stooping peering people. Standing off a little from them, feeling the velvety warmth of the night upon my cheek, I felt grateful to have outgrown the desire to photograph things; I had once been a keen photographer and had even sold my work. Now I preferred to try and use my eyes, at first hand, so to speak, and to make my memory do some work. In a little schoolchild’s exercise book I occasionally made a note or two for the pleasure of trying to draw; and then later I might embark on a watercolor which, by intention, would try to capture the mood or emotion of a particular place or incident. It was a more satisfactory way of going about things, more suitable to my present age and preoccupations. The photograph was always a slightly distorted version of the subject; whereas the painting made no pretensions to being anything more than a slightly distorted version of one’s feelings at a given moment in time.

Our Japanese couple seemed disposed to exchange a word with the Chinese, but the attempt made no headway and they retired into their shell once more, having pronounced the other group to be North Koreans. Some of us, with simulated good will, tried to join in the search for a moment, but it did not last long for we were now a little tired. Indeed we were glad to regain the bus, and after one more brilliant glimpse to coast quietly down the sloping roads towards the hotel where doubtless the others were already fast asleep. Fatigue lengthens distance mentally — we felt now as if we had been to the moon and back. And yet, despite it, a queer sense of elation and of freshness coexisted with the fatigue. The darkness was sort of translucent, the air absolutely warm and still; the hotel was rather a grand affair pitched at a main crossroads and obviously laid out for tourism. There was a huge swimming pool, and its lights were still on. A few people still lounged by it in deck chairs or swam; and so warm was it that several of our party, notably the German girl and her boy friend, elected to have a dip before going to bed. I hesitated but finally decided upon a whisky on the balcony before turning in; Deeds had retired sleepily, and I did not fancy the company of Beddoes who had doubtless been peering through keyholes already.

In the little file there were no letters actually written from Agrigento though she had had plenty to say about the place which she had visited on numerous occasions with her little car. “In early February it is pure wedding cake with the almond blossom of three tones and the fabulous later flowering of an occasional Judas. That is the real time to come, though of course it will be still too cold to swim.” I had missed it, but I already had the configurations of the Temple hills clearly in mind and could visualize easily how they must look — like a series of flowered panels, Chinese watercolors, with the mist-mauve sea behind. From my balcony I could sit in the warmth of the scented night and see the distant moth-soft dazzle of the temples crowning the lower slopes of Agrigento; immediately underneath me in loops of artificial light swam the fish-white bodies of northern bathers who as yet had not become nut brown with Sicilian sunlight. A slight splashing and the murmur of voices was rather agreeable from the second storey of this comfortable if nondescript building. I read for a little while, dipping here and there among the letters to recover references to the temples, and listening with half an ear to the voices in the pool.

Whole conversations at Bellapais in Cyprus came back to me when I visited the Temples at night — they have only just started to floodlight them, and the result is marvelous — the whole of nature takes part; every insect in creation, every moth and butterfly comes rushing to this great kermess of light, like people impelled to go to war, only to perish in the arcs. In the morning they are swabbed off with cloths. I picked up a most beautifully marked moth which looked as if it came from India specially to see Pythagoras or the other one — who is it? The one you find so great with his two-stroke universe, operating like a motorbike on the Love and Hate principle? O and yes, when I saw the ring of the temples, the so obviously defensive ring of them here on the outer slopes of the town I thought of your notions of ancient banking.

It was not simply banking, though we had canvassed pretty thoroughly the notion of the temple as a safe deposit of values, both sacred and profane. I had been trying to sort out some muddy notions about the idea of Beauty, and its origins in history and myth. You could not well take on a more intractable field to hoe — for we cannot even establish a working notion which defines excellence (“purity of function?” “congruence?”) let alone something as absolute as an aesthetic ideal of Beauty. Greece was an appropriate place to chew such an idea to death, since it was in Greece that all these unanswerable questions had first been ventilated. But riffling a large book of ancient Greek sites drawn and described for architects, I had been struck by the frequency with which the temple or the sacred fane had found its place, not in the interior of the city or fortress, but along its defensive walls. The temples with their magical properties were a more efficacious defense against piracy in a world of superstition than bolts and bars and moats even. And thinking over the theory of value as another mystery of our time (unless you accept the Freudian or Marxian notions which oppose each other) it seemed to me that in ancient times the whole notion of sacred and profane had not been separated; the riches of the temple were protective; and a site protected by the magic of its temples and its Gods would encourage investment in the form of artisanship — workers in metal and precious stones and furs. The numen would protect them and let them work in peace, while in their turn they would render the city rich and notable with their products. There was an underground connection between the Bank and the Temple and it has cropped up over and over again. In the Middle Ages the Order of Templars, themselves vowed to frugality and poverty, became the bankers of kings, and their temples the actual banks where treasure was deposited for safety.

The Greek temple implicated the whole of nature in its magical scheme — the world of animals as well as Gods. The notion of value was twofold, namely, material gain and also a degree of beauty which enslaved and ennobled, which enchanted and enriched on the spiritual plane. But how inadequate words were when it came to trying to point up the difference between these two degrees of excellence. There was, however, a continuity between the Greek temple with its ex-votoes and the modern Christian or Orthodox Church with its same pathetic objects of gratitude or propitiation. And the notion of beauty worshipped in icons, in paintings, in holy relics. One thinks of the golden statue that Cicero found “beslubbered by the kisses of the faithful who loved its unique beauty”; today the icon is still kissed, but not for its beauty. For its power.

Martine took the idea and played with it for a while, making fun of my woolliness and vagueness — it is impossible to be too precise, for so many fragments of the jigsaw are missing. Everything is supposition.

But we have had enough experience now of the thought schemes of savages to be thoroughly on our guard when it comes to trying to imagine how primitive peoples think, how they associate. Were the ancient Greeks, with their highly organized and, to them, very logical superstitious systems, any different? I don’t think so. Why, the notion of gold being valuable may well have come from the first golden Aryan head which the Greeks saw, with its marvelous buttercup sheen. The men went mad over this hypothetical girl — Circassian or Scythian or British perhaps? Gentlemen preferred blondes even then, so it became necessary to manufacture golden wigs, or tresses of beaten filigree gold as a head ornament. We know that prostitutes in ancient Athens were forbidden by law to imitate the blandishments of respectable married women by wearing rich gold ornaments, fillets, or clips, in their hair. That is probably why they set about finding cheap dyes in order to effect a transformation that was legitimate. They tried saffron and, like the modern Egyptian of the poorer classes, common soap with its strong bleaching agent. The story of Goldilocks. A theory of how beauty came to be evaluated. But where, then, did the metal come into this scheme of things? These matters we used to argue to the point of sheer irritation with each other. In one of her letters she records our violent disagreements.

I couldn’t help thinking of you and your wretched relativity notions the other evening when I went to see Loftus Adam who now lives here, just down the coast from me. He too said how irritated you made him by trying to subject everything to the merely provisional: and all truth as subject to scale. Yet he himself at last admitted that if you selected your coordinates you could prove anything from any evidence; he wants to write a modern history of Europe based on three coordinates, namely the moustaches of Hitler, Marinetti, and Chaplin, which have formed our unhappy age. They were all the same little smudge moustache which must prove something. And between them the new European sensibility was forged and founded. It sounds highly fanciful but why not? He is going to call the book The Moustache; and Why.

I went to sleep quite late that night and had a dream in which I recovered the name of the philosopher which had escaped her — the great Empedocles who was a native of the town and around whose name and memory gathered so many tales of necromancy and witchcraft as to almost obscure his real fame as a philosopher as eminent and as fruitful as any of the great men of his time. Is it nothing to have won the respect of Aristotle, or to have influenced Lucretius? Moreover, enough of his system remains extant today for our scholars to evaluate and describe. Why has he been written off as a mythomane? In the case of Bertrand Russell the reason is plain; great as Russell is, he was, in the affective and intuitional sense, colorblind. He is no poet but a geometer. And it was inevitable, given the type of temperament that was his, that he should be as unfair to Plato as he was to Empedocles. Then one recalls the gibes and sneers of Epicurus when he referred to Plato’s attempts to systematize reality and to comprehend nature. To him everything that Plato beheld was the purest illusion, the purest self-deceit. He believed in a world which held no mysteries and in consequence no great dangers. Temperamentally Empedocles lies on a tangent between the absolute behaviorism of one and the pure subjective vision of the other. To each his truth, and qui verra vivra to adapt the phrase to suit philosophers who are also visionaries (charlatans to the Russells of this world and the last). The two functions, however, the two arts of deduction and of intuitive vision must be complementary at some remove. Plato to Aristotle, Freud to Jung.… In this sharp diversity is born the marriage of true minds.

For Empedocles also the world was arranged in not too mysterious a fashion, though it was far from an impulse-inhibition machine run by invisible and soulless engineers. One could best comprehend it as a sphere ceaselessly agitated by two primordial impulses or dispositions which in turn acted upon four primary roots of all being — fire, air, water, earth. This joining and separating motor (the Love and Strife machine) in its quite involuntary convulsions manipulated matter and shook it out in a million differentiated patterns and mixtures like a kaleidoscope shakes out pictures at the slightest jog. The arch movers of all process were Love and Hate — the joining and separating impulses. The domination of one or the other produced quite recognizable effects in nature, alloys of the four basic elements. It seems fair enough.

The original condition of matter was to be envisaged as a sphere in which Love played the dominant role and where the four basic elements were perfectly accorded and mixed. Into this primordial harmony entered the principle of Strife, which set off the whole dance of process and foxed up the original harmony of things. First air became separated, then fire, then earth — the motion acted like a milk separator, forging unexpected unities and dissonances; and the effects of these changes were reflected in every department of man’s life and thoughts. Quantity was all-important — a hint perhaps of a Pythagorean influence? The present world — the world he knew and which has not noticeably changed since his time — is a theater where Love is being everywhere assailed by Strife; and where Strife becomes dominant species and sexes become separated, lose their coherence and identity — it is matter in a state of hysteria. But at the other end of the cosmic seesaw — for the gain of one element turns to loss by over plus and gives ground to its opposite — the overwhelming force of undiluted love could bring about bizarre physiological changes in nature. Empedodes, in his vision of the disorder brought about by the mixture of unequal quantities of the four elements, speaks about separate limbs being begotten, arising and walking around, as in the canvases of Dali; hands without shoulders and necks, bodies without hands. And all sorts of singular combinations like oxen with human heads, fishes with breasts, lions with hands, birds with ears.… A chaos of undifferentiated forms ruled.

But nature aspired to the functioning rule of the sphere, and only the sphere mixed the elements rightly, in the proper proportion and harmony. Yet the slightest push from one side or the other and one got an imbalance in nature which only hazard could redress. This then was the reality of things as we were living it, for we were part and parcel of the whole convulsion, our thoughts and feelings were all influenced by it. As for thought, Empedocles was convinced that we think with our blood, and more especially with the blood around the heart, because in the blood here all the elements are more correctly fused than in other sectors of the body. What is endearing, and indeed peculiarly modern, is his interest in embryology and in the growth systems of plants; whenever possible he drew his analogies from this department of knowledge. For him thought and perception were materially functions of our bodily constitution. All this was down to earth, was perfectly functional, was the fruit of sweet reason and not of fantasy; somewhere at heart he was temperamentally akin to Epicurus.

Yet in spite of this rational disposition the visions kept intervening — Nature kept unfolding itself before his eyes, delivering its secrets to his curious and poetic mind. By some strange alchemy, too, he somehow managed to include a purely Orphic notion about the transmigration of souls into his system, where it sits somehow awkwardly. But so much of his work is missing that it is really a miracle that the extant remnants present as coherent a view of things as they do. It is rather like trying to reassemble a beautiful vase from a few recovered bits and pieces of it — the task which faces the archaeologist. Inevitably there will be here and there a shard which does not fit. In the case of this great man I was always struck by the fact that he felt that he himself had forfeited the final happiness; he describes himself as an “exile from a possible Bliss,” because he had put his trust in “senseless strife.” Was there any way to escape from such spiritual contamination? Apparently there was — by fasting, abstention from animal flesh, and the performance of certain mystical rites….

For him also the first completely realized forms to grow on earth were trees in whom male and female sexuality were so perfectly conjoined. And so on. Apparently the intoxication of these high thoughts was matched by a brilliant fuliginous style which made Aristotle christen him the first of rhetoricians or the father of rhetoric.

Yes, it is not hard to see why the notions of magic, of necromancy, clung to the name of old Empedocles — one thinks of his final leap into the maw of Etna. A suitable way for a great magician to take his leave of his fellow Sicilians. But the truth appears to be that he actually died far away, in the Peloponnesus. He must have been a very dramatic figure, this great rhetor, poet, visionary. In my mind’s eye I see always someone of the aspect of the modern Greek poet Sikelianos, who so charmed and bewildered us all with his strange mixture of greatness and histrionic absurdity. He became as much beloved for his aberrations and exaggerations as for his truly great verse which he insisted on declaiming at gale force and with gestures — which so often all but disguised its real merits. He too chose “big” subjects like his contemporary Kazantzakis — St. Paul, Buddha, Socrates.… They were grist to his poetic mill. I remember how Martine used to adore anecdotes about the Greek poets of our time — she was fully aware of their European stature in a period when Greece had yet to find its immortal echo outside Athens and Alexandria. Sikelianos at that time was already a walking reincarnation of an ancient God. He had founded the Delphic festival not as a piece of tourist folklore but, in true Empedoclean fashion, because he believed that the spirit of place was ever present, and that Delphi despite its silenced shrine of the Pythea was still pregnant with life. The meeting of great European minds at this sacred spot could have an incalculable effect on the poetic destiny of Europe — so he thought. He did not lack detractors, as may be imagined; but the incontestable greatness of his poetry silenced them. But sometimes he got so carried away by his vatic role that people thought of him as a mountebank. Yet the peasants at Delphi saw him as a sort of magician of today.

He was a strange mixture of vagueness and gentleness; and his great unassuming physical beauty made one sit up, as if in the presence of the Marashi. Nor was he foreign to the most endearing absurdities. One hopes that there will soon be a biography to enshrine the many anecdotes born of his flamboyant life and thought. One that Martine particularly enjoyed was concerned with death, for old Sikelianos believed so firmly in the absoluteness of poetic power that he went so far as to declare that a great poet could do anything, even bring a dead man to life by the power of his mind and vision. He was rather belaboring this theme while sitting in a little taverna, having dinner with Kazantzakis and, I think, Seferis, when the waiter, who had been listening to him with sardonic disgust stepped forward and informed him that someone had just died on the second floor, and if he wished to prove his point he had a subject right under his hand. Everyone smiled at this but Sikelianos appeared enchanted with the chance to show, not his own greatness, for he was a modest man, but the greatness which resides in poetry. Moreover, he believed in what he said, he could bring the dead man back to life as he had promised. They did not ask how he proposed to do such a thing. But anyway, the poet rose and asked to be taken to the room where the corpse lay. In a resigned mood the others continued their dinner; they were not entirely unconvinced that the old poet might, by some feat of magic, actually be as good as his word and make the dead man breathe again. But he was a long time gone. They listened but there was no sound of poetic declamation. He must have chosen some other method of raising the dead. Well, after quite a time a crestfallen Sikelianos made his appearance once more, deeply disappointed. Pouring himself a glass of wine he said: “Never have I seen such sheer obstinacy!” He was very sad about the failure of the Muse to come to his aid. This was the delightful man whom once Seferis brought to meet me — indeed it was to chide me for a bad translation of one of his great poems. I was terrified, but he rapidly put me at my ease by his gentleness. He had just come from the doctor where he had been informed that he was in danger of a thrombosis. A vein in the brain.… But far from being despondent he was wild with elation. “Think of it,” he said to Seferis, “a little gleaming swelling in there, shining like a ruby!” And he placed his long index finger upon the supposed place in his skull where the swollen vein was situated. He should have disappeared into Etna like Empedocles, or have been found half eaten by the Minotaur in Crete, or suffocated by the Pythean fumes at Delphi. But his death was the more tragic for being so banal. He suffered from a chronic sore throat and to soothe it drank quantities of a glycerin mixture the name of which differed by one letter from that of Lysol. He sent a boy out to the pharmacy for a bottle of his medicine and by a tragic mishearing the boy bought instead a bottle of the poisonous detergent. Without thinking the poet raised the bottle as he had always done with his throat mixture and half drained it before he realized the full horror of what he had done. By then it was too late.

I could not sleep, with all these thoughts fluttering about in my mind. I lay for a while on the balcony quietly breathing in the warm unmoving night air; it was strangely light, too, as if from somewhere offstage there was a bronze moon filtering its light through the vapors of the night. But before I realized it the dawn had suddenly started to come up, the distant sea lines to separate from the earth like yolk from white of the cosmic egg. The hills with their soft chalk tones rose slowly, tier upon tier, to where the city stood once more revealed with its two baleful skyscrapers. But an infinity of pink and fawn light softened every outline; even the huge boxlike structures looked well. I slipped down and coaxed the night porter to open the changing room door; the pool was delicious, not a tremor of coolness. I was swimming in something the temperature of mammals’ blood.

Yes, Sikelianos belonged to that old assured classical world where only great men wrote great poetry — there was an assumed connection between the power to write and orate great verse and the power to be morally and psychically superior to one’s fellow men. Greatness, though thrust upon one by the Muse, did not absolve one from being a great example to one’s fellows. An epic grandeur of style was believed to match an epic grandeur of insight and thought. They were another race these men — they were bards, whose sensibilities worked in every register, from uplift to outrage. The poet was not cursed, but blessed in his insight; and his themes must be equal to his mighty line. It is probably a fallacy to imagine that with the Symbolistes, with Baudelaire, there comes a break and the poet becomes a passive object of suffering, a sick man, a morally defective man like Rimbaud, like Leopardi. His work comes out of sickness rather than an over plus of health. Swinburne, Verlaine.… No, this is donnish thinking, for Sikelianos existed side by side with Cavafy, just as Mistral lived in the epoch of Apollinaire. But we should avoid these neat ruled lines between men and periods. The distances are much vaster than that and the poetic constellations move much more slowly across the sky. I betook myself to the coffee room where the majority of my fellow travelers were hard at work on breakfast, and where Deeds had emerged in some magical fashion with a brand new Times. This always made him vague, and over his coffee he was repeating “Sixty-three for five — I can’t believe it.” It seemed that a disaster had overtaken Yorkshire, and that Hampshire….

It was by far the hottest day yet, and brilliantly invigorating; there was no wind, the sea had settled into long calms like a succession of soft veils. Agrigento glimmered up there on the sky and Mario in some mysterious fashion had succeeded in giving the bus a wash and brush up for the floors were still moist from his mop.

The temples were bathed in an early morning calm and light, and there were no other tourists at the site, which gave us the pleasant sense of propriety, the consciousness that we could take them at our ease. Drink them in is the operative tourist phrase — and it wasn’t inapposite, for the atmosphere on this limestone escarpment with its sweeps of olive and almond, and its occasional flash of Judas was quite eminently drinkable. The air was so still one was conscious that one was breathing, as if in yoga. The stolid little temples — how to convey the sense of intimacy they conveyed except by little-ising them? They were in fact large and grand, but they felt intimate and life-size. Maybe the more ancient style of column, stubby and stolid, conveys this sense of childishness. It was not they but the site as a whole which conveyed a sense of awe; the ancients must have walked in a veritable forest of temples up here, over the sea. But one slight reservation was concerned with the type of light tufa used in the Sicilian temples; it was the only suitable material available to the architect, and of course all these columns were originally faced with a kind of marble dust composition to give the illusion of real marble. In consequence now when they are seen from close to the impression is rather of teeth which have lost their glittering dentine.

They are fawnish in tone, and matt of surface; while embedded in the stone lie thousands of infinitesimally small shells, tiny worm casts left by animalcules in the quarries from which the stone was taken. This is not apparent at night during the floodlighting unless one looks really closely. But by day they strike a somewhat secondhand note which forces one to recall that originally all these temples were glossy — fluted as to their columns while their friezes and cornices were painted in crude primary colors. It is something too easy to forget — the riot of crude and clumsy color in which the temple was embedded. Statues painted.… It is my private opinion that the Greeks had, for this reason, little of what we would call plastic sense in our present-day terms. I speak of our lust for volume and our respect for the parent matter out of which our sculptures are shaped. Obviously for them wholly different criteria obtained; it is intriguing to try and imagine whether we would not have been shocked rather than moved by these sites if they had been today in their ancient state of repair, bright with color washes. It might have seemed to our contemporary eyes as garish but as refreshingly childish as the painted sideboards of the little Sicilian carts which from time to time we passed in the streets of the towns. I thought back to the Pausanian description of the Holy of Holies on the Acropolis; perhaps one should make the mental effort to compare our impressions of, say, Lourdes (horrible!) or St. Peter’s or the Cathedral of Tinos….

So we slowly passed down at a walking pace in that pleasant sunshine following the sweet enfilade of the temples as they curved down towards the one to the Dioscuri — like a descending chromatic scale. One by one these huge mythological beasts came up to us, as if they were grazing, and allowed us to pat them. The image had got muddled up in my mind with another thought about temples as magical defensive banks; and by the same token with the thought that all religious architecture carries the same sort of feeling. In America the most deeply religious architecture (in the anthropological sense) is the banks, and some are watched over by precisely the same mythical animals as watched over the temples here, animals staring down from a frieze — lions or boars, bulls or bears. Just as in the Midi, added Deeds jokingly, the deeply religious architecture of the wine cooperatives betrays the inmost religious preoccupations of the inhabitants. He thinks this a boutade but has in fact made an observation of great perspicacity and truth. They are indeed very much alike, and quite religious in their style, like stout laic churches.

The Bishop now elected to fall into a shaft, gracefully and without damage, and for a moment a terrible beauty was born. One touch of music hall makes the whole world kin. All we heard at first was a kind of buzzing and booming. It was his voice from the depths giving his rescuers instructions as to how to help him clamber back into the daylight. Beddoes at once suggested that Hades had mistaken him for Persephone and had made an unsuccessful snatch at his coattails, almost dragging him into the Underworld. He would have been disappointed one supposes. At any rate a pretty scene was enacted not unworthy of its ancient Greek echoes, for his savior turned out to be none other than Miss Lobb who (like Venus on a similar occasion) undid her plaited goat-skin belt and extended the end of it to the upraised hands of the holy man. The idea was simple and efficacious. We all formed up, myself with my arms round Miss Lobb and the rest linked on as in a childish game and with a tug or two we raised the Bishop into the daylight, where he seemed none the worse for this brief adventure. The one who was really pale with anxiety was of course Roberto who at once realized that his charge could have broken an ankle. The shaft was not profound, however; the sides had subsided, that was all; and as for the Bishop he was only wounded in his amour propre.

The theory of Hades snatching at him was all the more plausible as down here there had once been a shrine to the chthonic deities — another bewilderment of contradictory ascriptions — and it was just the place where a Protestant Bishop might expect to run afoul of a pagan God. Anyway, this accident put us all in a very good humor and we felt a little touch of pride in the classical aspect of the whole affair. Though we were mere tourists we had a touch of the right instinct. As for poor Persephone, that is another story. But I could feel no trace of her sad spirit calling from its earthen tomb — the sunlight made such fictions too improbably cruel to contemplate. The chthonic deities had little reality for us on that sunny morning. It was hard to admit that one so beautiful had, as one of her attributes, the title of “bringer of destruction.”

But what was a real knockout on this extensive and rather chaotic site was the enormous figure of the recumbent telamon — that gigantic figure whose severed fragments have been approximately assembled on the ground to give an indication of his enormous height and posture. This temple of Zeus is the most extraordinary in conception and has a strangeness which makes one wonder if it was not really constructed by some strange Asiatic race and left here. It feels somehow unlike anything else one may think of in the Greek world of temples, and particularly here in Sicily. I found the thing as barbaric and perplexing (despite its finish) as an Easter Island statue, or a corner of Baalbek. Who the devil executed this extraordinary Bank — which could have been the City National Bank in Swan Lake City, Idaho, or that of Bonga Bonga in Brazil? My elated puzzlement communicated itself to Deeds who raided his battered holdall and finally found a copy of Margaret Guido’s admirable book on the archaeological sites of the island. He used no other, it seemed. From it he read me a bit, sitting on a fragment of pediment to do so. The great temple had, like so much else, been toppled by an earthquake; but the fragments had fallen more or less in order and some notion of its construction could be deciphered. With this lucky factor, and with the description of Diodorus Siculus who had seen it standing, it was possible to work out its shape. But the real mystery begins at this point for the wretched thing is unlike anything else in the island — it is overgrown and vainglorious and, if one must be absolutely truthful, overbearing, and grim. It makes you uneasy when you look at the architectural reconstruction.

The whole thing, to begin with, stands on a huge platform about 350 feet long, reposing on foundations nearly 20 feet deep. Around this chunk had been strung a series of Doric half columns of staggering size. Their diameter is 13 feet. The top of this wall was surmounted by a sort of frieze of enormous stone men — the telamones. They supported the architrave with the help of an invisible steel beam linking column to column. Each of these giant men was over 25 feet tall, male figures, alternately bearded and beardless. Feet together and arms raised to support the architrave they must have been really awe-inspiring. Some of this feeling actually leaks into the dry-as-dust description of Diodorus who notes with wonder that the simple flutings of the columns were broad enough to contain a man standing upright in them. “The porticos,” he writes, “were of tremendous size and height and on the eastern pediment they portrayed the battle between the Gods and the Giants in sculptures which excelled in size and beauty, while in the west they portrayed the Capture of Troy in which each one of the heroes may be seen depicted in a manner appropriate to his role.”

Nothing but ruins and conjectures remain of all this. Mutilated fragments of statues and coins and walls marked by fires. But here to my astonishment the Japanese couple suddenly began to behave strangely, overwhelmed I suppose by the giant stone figure on the ground. They screamed with laughter and pointed at it. They started to talk one hundred to the dozen and to nod and giggle. They climbed on it and photographed each other sitting on it. They clucked and beamed. They behaved like children with a new toy. And climbing about its defenseless body they reminded me of illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels. It was an intriguing reaction and I would have given a good deal to ask them what had provoked such an expression of feeling, but the limitations of language made it impossible. We walked thoughtfully around the recumbent warrior, wondering at the coarseness of the workmanship yet aware that in terms of imaginative pictorial originality the temple marked an important point in the architectural history of Sicily. There was only one other construction which in style resembled it — and that we had not seen as yet; but I made a mental note to watch out for the Temple labeled F at Selinunte, and was struck by the suggestion that perhaps this heavy treatment of the building may have come here via Egypt — where of course they worked in heavy and recalcitrant stones for their religious buildings.

But what earthquakes and weather began was more often than not finished off by the marauders — not necessarily foreign invaders, but simply lazy local builders who picked these choice bones of history and culture simply because they lay to hand and saved transport costs. Every architect will tell you what a godsend it is to find your building materials on the site, instead of being forced to transport them.

The party had spread out to visit the further corners of the site but Deeds, who knew from old not to waste time, headed me away across the meadows towards a pleasant little bar where we celebrated the Bishop’s narrow escape from Hades with a glass of beer and a roundel of salami. “It was a very singular sound he made,” said Deeds. “Like a bumble bee in a bottle. I heard it from quite a distance. It sounded like the bees in Agamemnon’s tomb.” It was another reference which carried a small built-in pang — for a whole generation had heard and remembered those bees at Mycenae; but an unlucky spraying with insecticide had silenced them and the great tomb has sunk back into its original sinister anonymity.

But the mystery of the Japanese behavior was absolute; we could not evolve a theory to account for this little wave of hysteria. Unless, as Beddoes suggested, they were suddenly filled with the conviction that this gorgon-like figure was a sort of carnival joke, placed there to evoke innocent merriment.

Miss Lobb walked about with a pleasant air of having done her duty. The two old apple people sat down in a clump of bushes and began to eat fruit which the old man peeled with a small pocketknife. They were radiant, obviously without fear of the Underworld. The Bishop had recovered his composure and was once more pacing out the temples and behaving as if he were suspicious about being overcharged for them. If they were not of the stipulated size he would report them to the agency. Roberto, still shaken, drank Coca Cola. Mario blew his sudden horn at last and we awoke to action once more.