Old as the Cathedral is, the beach at Cefalù is strewn with curious craft that seem even more ancient: queer old feluccas, cask-like smacks with barrel bows and truncated sterns swept by huge tillers, bottle-nosed xebecs with staring painted eyes for hawse-holes and central sideboards in lieu of keels. And nowhere else in the island are the different types of the forefathers more numerous and distinct: here a distinctly Semitic type, with the swart face, black beard and piercing eyes of the Phœnicians; here a pure Greek face worthy of the sculptor; there a burnt-up son of the desert, and yonder a Roman beside a Gaul. Busy and prosperous they seem, for all their dirt and indifference to squalor and evil smells; and moreover, contented. Their fishing smacks bring in tons of herring which by euphemy go out of Cefalù in cans of oil as the best sardines. The chief industries of the town, after the selling of clothes and notions, seemed to be the manufacture and sale of cheap perfumes and footgear, so far as I could see.
From Cefalù westward the railway runs beside acres upon acres of artichokes and whole fields of crimson sumac, while the “donkey ears” of the prickly pear form spiky hedges and great pin cushions everywhere. For these are the Campi Felici, the Happy Fields of Fertility, whose fruitful farms give back rich returns for the labor spent upon them, and which murmur always with the creaking music of huge wooden wheels over which run the endless strings of irrigating buckets introduced ages ago by the Arabs. Another of their importations is manna. On the slopes of Angels’ Peak—otherwise Gibilmanna, or Manna Mountain—these trees still grow, as they did in Africa and Araby, and the people gather considerable quantities of their exudations of gum.
Ten miles down the line we come to the site of Himera. Here two of the greatest events in Greek history transpired, battles both, one a glorious victory, the other a frightful defeat and disaster. The good tyrant Theron of Akragas secured his vast number of able-bodied slaves here after the first battle, when in 480 B. C., with his son-in-law, the tyrant Gelon of Syracuse, he defeated the Carthaginians. It is said that Hamilcar himself took no part in the battle, but that all day he stood alone on a hilltop overlooking the fight, watching the Greeks driving back his picked troops. All day he prayed and sacrificed in vain, and at evening, his own army little more than a disorganized rabble streaming pellmell across the field, he threw himself into the altar fire as a supreme sacrifice to the bloody gods of Carthage. When Hamilcar’s grandson, Hannibal Gisgon, was sent over in another campaign against the Sicilian Greeks—this warfare was practically continuous—he wasted no time—though he destroyed Selinus by the way—but hurried to Himera, urged on by the spirit of filial vengeance. Baal and Ashtaroth were more gracious to him than they had been to his grandfather, and he wiped Himera from the map, literally leaving not one stone upon another in the fated city. At the end of the day he made his sacrifice to the gods—three thousand of the men of Himera, all who were left alive after the battle, on the very spot where the Shophet Hamilcar seventy-one years before had offered up himself.
What is the relation between street cries and criers? Do certain words or names necessarily draw to themselves vendors whose characters can be influenced by the sounds they utter in selling their wares; or do natures of a given sort instinctively select only those things whose names have a corresponding spirit to their own? Some Max Mueller can perhaps answer the question; but anyone can observe the facts. They apply especially to newsboys in the Latin countries. Passing Termini again—the hot springs of Himera—the papers were just out, and the voice of the little fellow at the window of the compartment with copies of The Hour was a long, musical drawl—“L’ Oh-oh-oh-oh—raaaa! L’ Oh-oh-oh-oh—raaa...!” Very different from this cry was that of the lad selling Life. He cried in a sharp staccato recitative, repeating very rapidly: “La Vita-Vita-Vita-Vit’-Vit’-Vit’!” Most lackadaisical of all was the older boy who had Sicilia. From scarcely opened lips and with dreamy eyes, he slowly intoned each syllable of the name, extending and amplifying and sweetening it, as a tender morsel of which he could not get enough, softening his c’s and making his l’s most liquid and mellifluous—“Seee-sheeeeee-lll-ly-aaaaah!”
About the time that the Phœnicians founded Panormos, their greatest city, in the bosom of the rich plain at the water’s edge, they also founded another city upon the crest of a lofty rock at the other side of the bay, and called it Solous, probably from the Hebrew or Phœnician word sela, meaning rock. It was a border fortress, a watch tower from which the Semitic traders could keep an eye on the ever encroaching Greeks. But when the heyday of Phœnician power was fading, the Soluntines invited the conquering Romans in, so the meager ruins to be seen are not the wreck of Phœnician Solous, but of the Roman Soluntum in which its identity was swallowed up. No greater contrast can be imagined than that which exists between these two cities—Palermo living, Solunto dead beyond any power to infuse life into its stony veins.
There are three ways to reach Solunto—that is its modern Italian name—by express train to the station for Bagheria; by accommodation to Santa Flavia, which is within five minutes’ walk of the Antichità di Solunto; or by carriage from Palermo, a ten- or twelve-mile drive each way. Luncheon should be taken. If you enjoy a lively time, by all means go by express to Bagheria on a festa or feast-day. As you step from the station platform you are immediately the center of a howling mob of peasants and hackmen, all behaving like enraged lunatics and grabbing at you from every side. When this happened to me, I called into play all the football tactics I had ever learned, charged through the thickest of the mass, and pelted down the road in exceedingly undignified fashion, the whole pack yelling derisively at my heels.
As I trudged ahead, I heard the squeak of ungreased wheels, and was hailed by the driver of a skeleton stage capable of holding four uncomfortably—five were already in it.
“Hai—get in and ride!” he called cheerily. “Where are you going?”
“To Bagheria. I like walking!”