When the porter announced that our landau was waiting after luncheon, we questioned the ability of the three mangy, half-starved horses—the same team which had brought us from the railway station—to drive all the afternoon over the amazingly steep and hilly roads; but assured that these very animals had been doing the same work for “twenty years or more” we started off congratulating ourselves on escaping the guides, unnecessary nuisances.
As we stepped out at the little antique Gothic church of San Niccolà, the cherub suddenly appeared before us.
“Hello! Where did you come from?” I inquired.
The lad only shook his head, but the coachman, whose face was all one broad grin, waved his whip at the rear of the carriage. “A dietro—On behind!”
It was true. For miles that child had clung to the rear axle in the choking dust for the sake of a little silver. With an air of modest assurance he introduced himself—“Alfonso Caratozzo, signore. I am just twelve years old. For six years I have been the best guide in Girgenti, and all the grand foreign gentlemen are much pleased with me. I can show you everything.”
Alfonso’s large claim was fully justified by his conduct of our affairs, his poetic appreciation not only of the beauties of the scenery but of his own dignity and importance as counselor and pilot of the forestieri americani—and no one who wishes a guide can do better than to inquire for Alfonso the Wise!
Never was the mixed civilization and pagan ancestry of the Sicilians of to-day brought more vividly to our attention than in this little church of San Niccolà. The attractive girl custodian was a perfect young Saracen Sicilian, black-eyed and raven haired, with big gold and coral earrings. Beside her Alfonso, as purely Greek as she was Moorish, looked every inch a faun. The girl knew what stories she had to tell very well. Alfonso, however, evidently bored by the history of ancient Akragas from the day of its founding, whispered: “Pay no attention to her, signore. She tells this to everybody!”
Shades of Diodorus—what should she tell!
Near by stands a little Roman building dating from the second century B. C. Somehow it got the name of Oratory of Phalaris, though it certainly was not in existence in Phalaris’s time. How strange that such a building and such an idea should be associated with this most widely advertised of Greek tyrants! Of all the disputed stories told of him, that of the brazen bull is most widely known; and without his bull, Phalaris would be no more than an hundred obscure tyrants in other Greek cities. The legend declares that an artist named Perillos made a monstrous hollow brazen bull in whose shoulder was a door through which the victim could be thrust. When the fire underneath heated the diabolical invention, the cries of the sufferer, issuing through the nostrils, sounded like the roarings of the enraged animal. The tyrant, with a proper sense of humor, immediately tested the efficiency of the image upon its luckless inventor Perillos. In later times apologists denied these stories; but Pindar, writing within a century after the death of Phalaris, summed up Sicilian public opinion of that day very tersely in the lines:
“Phalaris, with blood defiled,
His brazen bull, his torturing flame,
Hand o’er alike to evil fame
In every clime!”