It was with difficulty that those natural leaders among the people effected the final separations, but at last, in the starlight, the two groups drew apart on the highway, the cavalcade with its foot retinue ascending along the face of the hill, the great, black mass of the crowd grouped about the end of the bridge shouting farewells. Some one struck up a farewell song, several voices joined in, among them the Vazzana boy’s clear soprano; but one by one they broke, and soon the song failed and ceased; and as the procession turned the corner that hid the town from view the long file of those left behind could be dimly seen moving back to the darkened homes.
It were ill indeed not to speak of “Bella.” The day before, when donkeys were being hired for the ride to the station, I had been struck by the gentle and affectionate way in which she stood beside her owner’s young wife, and had marked her for my own. Experience with the army mule of Missouri extraction and his despised cousin, the Mexican burro, should have made me less trustful.
For a half hour we cantered along in the dark, the babel of talk all about us. At the rougher places I held my camera carefully balanced on Bella’s neck in front of me, in order that it be not banged against projecting rocks or by other laden beasts pressing close alongside at times. When one wishes to urge a Sicilian donkey forward, one kicks him in the ribs and shouts high and nasally:
“Ah-a-a-ah!”
We came to a sharp bend in the road, where it turned over a high bridge crossing a deep ravine. Bella heard the braying of the lead donkey already across the bridge and on the other side of the ravine, and suddenly, without consulting me, turned aside and plunged, like a goat, from rock to rock down into the blackness of the ravine. I had been in the tail of the train, and no one missed me, I knew. She would not be checked on her downward course; in fact I was too busy clinging to the precious camera and holding on, to attempt to argue with her. The limbs of olive-trees and the raking thorns of the mura swept us from stem to stern. If she knew where she was going I felt very glad, for I certainly did not. High and faint above me I could hear the voices of the party. I was wondering what my chances were for getting out without a broken neck, when suddenly my fair beast struck level ground, and in an instant more a steep ascent. All sounds to show that the party was still in the vicinity had died away. The donkey went up that precipitous slope with an action that seemed nearly “hand over hand,” and, holding the strap of the camera in my teeth, I merely clung desperately about her neck. A stone loosened by her hoofs went crashing, down, down, down, and a cold sweat broke out on my brow.
But in a short time, without one misstep or one minute’s uncertainty, she made the climb, came out into a level open space, and stood stock still, looking to the left, and working her ears. I bent down and touched the ground with my fingers, encountering the warm, thick dust of the highway, and in a moment more heard the voices of our party as they turned a bend. Bella had taken a short cut across the ravine. Not having missed us they did not wonder how we had got so far ahead, and I said nothing about the matter.
Soon we wound through the slumbering town of Pagia. A head was now and then thrust out to murmur a sleepy “Bona notte,” and when some one of us answered, “We go to America,” there was always a hearty, “Bon viaggio e bona fortuna.”
Just beyond the village we heard something, encountered often before, but never under such eerie surroundings. Somewhere in the paths higher up, a shrill young voice raised a wild, plaintive song, and at the end of the first line held the note long drawn out and rounded, though nasal, while many other voices, men, women and children, struck in on a major chord and held it as long as they had breath. This was repeated over and over. It was a band of peasants already on their way to their distant work, singing in the plagal modes, in the darkness and loneliness of the hills.
CHAPTER X
FROM SICILY TO NAPLES
It was not long before we wound down to the little station, and day began to break in the east, turning the cloud of vapor over Stromboli into the semblance of a huge pink rose growing up out of the island volcano. Many of the people from the country about were gathered to see their own friends off, for there was quite a party by this time. Soon the train crept around the coast from Milazzo and brought up with a jerk and a blast of the conductor’s horn. Here farewells were brief. I heard one of the Socosa boys’ father cursing the train because it was the agent of the separation from his son, and then out of the hurly-burly came a slamming of compartment doors, cries of “Pronte! Pronte!” another blast of the horn, and we were hurried away to Messina.