Clear as crystal and blue as the heavens is the circular pool from which the brook springs. Through its cold, pellucid azure splendid gray mullet and other fish—guardians of the sacred spring, perchance—dart or idle about among mimosa-like aquatic plants plainly visible twenty or thirty feet below. It is poetic water, full of shifting lights and nuances of color—now a silvery, glancing mirror, now soft gray and translucent, now pure azure and thin as rain-washed air; but always beautiful, always dimpling to the sun. And what more poetic than its story?
When Pluto—again to give the Greek legend in the Latinized form preferred by the present day Sicilians—carried off Proserpina from the shores of Lake Pergusa, one of her attendant nymphs, Cyane, followed weeping after the black chariot until, in this mead of Syracuse, the King of Darkness turned, passed his scepter before her face, and the poor nymph dissolved into a pool of tears, the Pool of Cyane. But so potent was her grief that her tears, through all the centuries since, have continued to flow; and they still bubble up, a living spring beneath the limpid waters of the little blue mere, “To witness if I lie.”
Going back down-stream, the boatmen give an astonishing exhibition of how to “protect” Government property. So jealously does the Italian Government guard its precious papyrus plants that each boat must stop at a station where customs guards keep watch to see that no visitor carries away more than one single stalk. The boatmen know this perfectly, yet when a fine clump of the reeds provokes the passengers to ecstasy they amiably stop and cut as many as they have passengers—and some for good measure—without a word about the regulations. When nearing the guard-float, however, they throw all the extra stalks overboard, explaining the rules to the bewilderment of the incensed or amused travelers. The absurdity of “protecting” the papyrus from destruction by throwing it away strikes an American sense of humor very hard. Perhaps a little stiff fining of the boatmen for cutting too many pieces would have a more salutary effect! But the “height of the ridiculous” is reached by the guards themselves. Looking us gravely over, they inquired if La Signora and I were sposati. I admitted it, and they shook their heads.
“Throw away your stalk,” they said together to me. “A married couple is only one!”
X
SYRACUSE, THE PENTAPOLIS
NEVER make the blunder of trying to study the Greater City when any of the big “tourist yachts” are in port. You will know soon enough when they are—cloop! cloop! cloop! go the hoofs under your windows long before you have thought of breakfast. An endless string of carriages plods out of the island full of gesticulating, noisy, Baedekering enthusiasts who make up in cheery adjectives what they lack in knowledge. When they are back at evening, white with dust and happily weary, and the launches have taken them all on board the white floating palaces, Syracuse sighs and sleeps again. Once more it is safe to venture out. Once more cabs can be had at decent rates. And once more the timid ghosts of Greek and Roman days come to the gentle call.
Ortygia, the island, was once connected with the mainland by a mole of cut stone, and afterward separated and attached and separated again as the whims and dangers of the different periods dictated. Now it is both connected and detached. Between island and shore is the citadel, separated from both by little canals crossed by stout bridges, and capable of defense in time of necessity. All the dust of a whole rainless season seems to concentrate upon the dusty road leading from the island across the bridges, by the citadel, past the rows of shipping that fill the docks on either side of the mole, and so on through the deserted square which was once the Agora of Syracuse.
Every Greek city had its agora, or marketplace, as every Roman city had its forum. Besides being the market, where food and commodities of every other sort were sold the agora was the assembling place of the city, the central exchange for news and views. You must use your imagination to-day to reconstruct the agora, to people it again with the dark faces and flowing robes of the Greeks of old, to hear the clank of weapons and armor as a Tyrant’s bodyguard passes through the unsmiling crowd: for the agora, now, is only a bare, open square, through the middle of which a naked red column thrusts upward. A kindlier fate has overtaken the Roman Palæstra near by—a gymnasium and auditorium where the youth of Latinized Syracuse used to polish their muscles and wits alike. One exquisite bit of it remains—the little semi-circular lecture hall, in which clear water covers the pit, and mirrors back the delicate maidenhair peeping from the cracks and joints between the marble seats in its gleaming horseshoe. What schoolboy debating societies met here, and who were the “exchange professors” who held forth in this choice hall where now waterbugs and tiny lizards alone give sign of life?
Not far from town the road runs into pleasant farming country, followed by orchards of almonds, lemons, and citrons. Farther up the slopes of Neapolis and Epipolai straggle great rocky groves of uncanny, fantastically shaped old olives, the most disreputable-looking tenants of the soil imaginable. They are whorled like an oak, knobbed like an apple tree, split full of holes, leaning at all angles; and, most curious of all, some appear to be nothing but half-shells of bark, only half of each half-shell having any visible contact with the roots. How they live and bear fruit at all in such astonishingly rocky fields is a mystery, yet they are proverbially prolific. They seem ghosts of dead Syracuse, phantoms of the citizens who once, in the pride of their strength and glory, trod the streets of the great pentapolis of Epipolai, Neapolis, Tyche, Achradina and Ortygia—Syracuse all.
Fewer than thirty-two thousand inhabitants exist now in the city, where more than half a million once looked down upon the great argosies afloat in their twin harbors. And the hills where Gelon and the Hierons, Agathocles and Timoleon flourished, where Theocritus and Archimedes were born and toiled, lie apart, dotted with scattered limestone ruins where hawk and bat, tourist and guide are the only living things to disturb this city of silence.