Around a curve, the train dashes into a big fishing village, a sturdy hamlet of nets and boats, of men in bare legs and knitted caps with tassels, of houses packed together on the side of a steep hill, struggling upward like lame sheep; a town of tiles and whitewash huddled together under the protection of a dozen stalwart-steepled belfries—Termini Imerese, busiest of Sicily’s provincial towns, famous for its macaroni. Here were the celebrated hot springs of Himera, where, legend says, Hercules bathed after his great wrestling match with King Eryx. It is said that the water from these springs gives the macaroni its characteristic flavor. And here Agathocles, the Peter the Cruel of Greek Sicily, was born.
A few miles east of Termini the railroad leaves the shore, and turning southward enters the valley of the Torto, to begin climbing the rugged backbone of Sicily; the watershed between the ancient African and Tyrrhenian Seas. We might be in another country and clime, so different is the scenery as we puff on southward, the way bordered on either hand by the ruins of medieval castles and by little mountain towns still living in the Bronze Age. Near Lercara, forty-eight miles from Palermo, the sulphur mining district begins, where the mephitic gases from the smelting furnaces have poisoned and stunted vegetation and herbage, giving everything a ghastly mummified look, besides polluting the keen mountain air with an unmistakable brimstone flavor.
At Aragona-Caldare Girgenti first appears, seven miles away, surely “a city set upon a hill that cannot be hid.” Yet to-day it is no more like the ancient Greek Akragas, founded twenty-five centuries ago, than the dried sponge is like the live one. All that is left of this richest and most splendid of Sicilian metropoli is huddled within the confines of its former acropolis, high on the top of the hill. The greater city, which spread clear down to the temples that fringe the abrupt southern edge of the plateau, has vanished completely, and the bright homes of the gods, crumbled into mellow ruin, stand alone beside the shattered wall, in the midst of the everlasting beauty of hill and plain.
In its palmy days—which began after the battle of Himera and lasted until the Carthaginian siege—Akragas was so wealthy and so filled with splendor that the record is almost incredible. The Akragantines’ flasks and body-scrapers, for use in the baths, were of gold and silver, their beds of ivory, their feasts and celebrations magnificent. At the wedding of the daughter of Antisthenes, one of the two leading citizens, there were eight hundred chariots in the wedding procession, every single citizen was feasted, and the whole city seemed ablaze from the smoke and flame of the innumerable bonfires. Even more noted was the hospitality of Gellias. His slaves stood always at every gate of the city, to bid all who came thither welcome as his guests. Once, indeed, he even entertained—clothed, lodged and fed—five hundred cavalrymen and their horses. And, as Freeman says, these men, Antisthenes and Gellias alike, were neither tyrants nor lords nor oligarchs, but simple citizens of the democracy.
The main source of the city’s wealth was her trade with Carthage, especially in the grape and the olive, neither of which grew in Africa at that time. Evidently, though, the grapes were not all sent to Carthage, for Timæus tells us that a house in the city was nicknamed the “Trireme” because some young men of fashion got very drunk there one night, and imagining they were in a reeling, rolling ship at sea, began throwing the furniture overboard to lighten the laboring craft. When the generals of the Commonwealth came rushing in to quiet things down, the drunken boys mistook them for gods of the raging sea, and prayed them to calm the storm!
Empedocles, one of Akragas’s most famous sons, laments that his fellow townsmen “gave themselves to delights as if they would die to-morrow, while they built their houses as if they were going to live forever.” Little did these luxury-loving folk think that the very barbarians whose trade was so enriching them would at last grow envious and snatch back by force the wealth they had built up for their neighbors. Empedocles, by the way, is one of the most picturesque characters in the whole story of Sicily. A political leader and an engineer who did wonders for the sanitation of the city, he refused supreme control when he might have had it, and proclaimed himself a sort of primitive socialist early in his career. But later in life he seems entirely to have forgotten his previous socialistic theories. Dressed in a purple robe with a golden girdle, brazen shoes, and a Delphic wreath for his thick hair, he wandered from city to city proclaiming himself, in the words of one of his own poems, the Katharmoi, “An immortal god, and no longer a mortal man.”
Nearly a sixth of Sicily’s sulphur is exported from Porto Empedocle, Girgenti’s ancient haven, six miles distant. From the station platform one sees all around reddish-yellow and gray hills covered with small dumps and pierced with scores of drives, dotted with little shanties and pricklied over with chimneys where the miners are delving and smelting. On the sidings near the depot scores of flat cars are heaped high with huge pressed cakes of the sickly greenish-yellow sulphur, while the roadway leading to the freight-house is fulvid with powdered brimstone, and the atmosphere faintly suggests things infernal. In the city museum the antiquarian may study the tile stamps of the Roman period—Girgenti was Agrigentum then—for impressing the sulphur cakes before they solidified.
Outside the station every train draws a barking crowd of facchini (porters) and hotel-runners, from whom you escape into an hotel omnibus. We chose a tiny, rickety, low-roofed vehicle, which had developed rheumatism and gout in every complaining spring and joint. Delighted to secure the only first class passengers who had come on that express, the driver whipped up his three emaciated nags and we started on the long, circuitous, heart-breaking climb up the steep hills to the citadel above.
The bus was scarcely moving when a face appeared at the rear door, not of the usual hotel porter who rides behind, but of a Murillo cherub, brown-eyed and dark, with a lurking smile so ingenuous and charming that one must have been stony-hearted indeed not to succumb to the spell of his innocent sorcery.
The hotel on the Via Atenea—the only street in Girgenti worthy the name of a thoroughfare—proved a seedy, disreputable looking establishment, giving upon the narrow way in a black hole into which we plunged, to find a pair of winding, cold stone stairs in the rear up which we stumbled to the second story office. But the drawbacks of this inn—and there are better ones in town—were fortunately most of them on the outside. Our room was really comfortable, and the luncheon considerably better than we dared expect, though the dessert, in a dirty glass cake-dish, consisted of oranges, nespoli, or Japanese medlars, large raw broad-beans, and something that looked like celery but proved to be finocchi, or fennel, one of the staple foods of the people, apparently a natural source of concentrated paregoric.