The faun pursuing, the nymph pursued,
the pool of Cyane revealed no sign of her presence.
Disappointed in our quest, we turned back and glided down the Anapus again to visit her sister-nymph, the more famed but less fortunate Arethusa, whose unhappy fate it is to mingle her wave with the brackish sea-tide in the very harbour of Syracuse, where, under the wall of the quay, the poor creature languishes in a prison of masonry, her papyrus wreath sending up an anæmic growth from the slimy bottom filled with green.
We were glad to turn from this desecrated fount to the long russet-coloured town curving above its harbour. Syracuse, girt with slopes of flowering orchard-land, lies nobly against the fortified ridge of Epipolæ. But the city itself—richer in history than any other on that crowded soil, and characteristically symbolized by its Greek temple welded into the masonry of a mediæval church—even the thronging associations of the city could not, on a day so prodigal of sunlight, hold us long within its walls. These walls, the boundaries of the Greek Ortygia, have once more become the limits of the shrunken modern town, and crossing the moat beyond them, we found ourselves at once in full country. There was a peculiar charm in the sudden transition from the old brown streets saturated with history to this clear smiling land where only the spring seemed to have written its tale—its ever-recurring, ever-fresh record of blossom and blade miraculously renewed. The country about Syracuse is peculiarly fitted to be the exponent of this gospel of renewal. The land stretches away in mild slopes laden with acre on acre of blossoming fruit-trees, and of old olive orchards under which the lilac anemones have room to spread in never-ending sheets of colour. The open pastures are plumed with silvery asphodel, and every farm-house has its glossy orange-grove fenced from the road by a rampart of prickly pear.
The highway itself, as we drove out toward Epipolæ, was thronged with country-folk who might have been the descendants of Theocritan nymphs and mortal shepherds, brown folk with sidelong agate eyes, trudging dustily after their goats and asses, or jogging townward in their little blue or red carts painted with legends of the saints and stories from Ariosto. After a mile or two the road curved slowly upward and we began to command a widening prospect. At our feet lay Syracuse, girt by the Plemmyrian marsh, and by the fields and orchards which were once the crowded Greek suburbs of Neapolis, Tyche and Achradina; and beyond the ridge of Epipolæ and the nearer hills, Etna rose white and dominant against the pale Calabrian coast-line.
The fortress of Euryalus, on the crest of Epipolæ, might be called the Greek Carcassonne, since it is the best-preserved example of ancient military architecture in Europe. Archways, galleries, massive flights of stairs and long subterranean passages may still be traced by the archæologically minded in the mass of fallen stones marking the site of the ruin; and even the idler unversed in military construction will feel the sudden nearness of the past when he comes upon the rock-hewn sockets to which the cavalry attached their horses.
Euryalus, however, more fortunate than Carcassonne, has escaped the renovating hand of a Viollet-le-Duc, and its broken ramparts lie in mellow ruin along the backbone of the ridge, feathered with those delicate growths which, in the Mediterranean countries, veil the fallen works of man without concealing them. That day, indeed, the prodigal blossoming of the Sicilian March had covered the ground with a suffusion of colour which made even the mighty ruins of the fortress seem a mere background for the triumphant pageant of the spring. From the tall silhouette of the asphodel, classic in outline as in name, to the tendrils of scarlet and yellow vetch capriciously fretting the ancient stones with threads of richest colour, every inch of ground and every cleft of masonry was overrun with some delicate wild tracery of leaf and blossom.
But to those who first see Syracuse in the month of March—the heart of the Sicilian spring—it must appear pre-eminently as one vast unbounded garden. The appeal of architecture and history pales before this vast glory of the loosened soil. The walls and towers will remain—but this transient beauty must be caught upon the wing. And so from the flowered slopes of Euryalus we passed to the richer profusion of the gardens that adjoin the town. Fringing the road by which we descended, a hundred spring flowers—anemones, lupins, sweet alyssum, herb-Robert, snapdragon and the fragrant wild mignonette—linked the uncultivated country-side to the rich horticulture of the suburbs; and in the suburbs the vegetation reached so tropical an excess that the spring pilgrim’s memory of Syracuse must be a blur of golden-brown ruins immersed in a sea of flowers.
There are gardens everywhere, gardens of all kinds and classes, from the peasant’s hut hedged with pink geraniums to the villa with its terraced sub-tropical growths; but most wonderful, most unexpected of all, are the famous gardens of the quarries. Time has perhaps never done a more poetic thing than in turning these bare unshaded pits of death, where the Greek captives of Salamis died under the lash of the Sicilian slave-driver and the arrows of the Sicilian sun, into deep cool wells of shade and verdure. Here, where the chivalry of Athens perished of heat and thirst, a damp mantle of foliage pours over the red cliff-sides, fills the depths with the green freshness of twilight, and effaces, like a pitiful hand on a burning brow, the record of that fiery martyrdom. And the quarries are as good to grow flowers in as to torture men. The equable warmth of these sheltered ravines is as propitious to vegetation as it was destructive to human life; and wherever soil has accumulated, on the ledges and in the hollows, the “blood of the martyrs” sends up an exuberant growth.
On the edge of one of these hell-pits a monastery has been built; above another stands a villa; and monastic and secular hands have transformed the sides of the quarries into gardens of fantastic beauty. Paths and rocky stairways fringed with fern wind down steeply from the upper world, now tunnelled through dense growths of cypress and olive, now skirting cliff-walks dripping with cataracts of ivy, or tufted with the glaucous spikes and scarlet rockets of gigantic cactuses. In the depths, where time has amassed a soil incredibly rich, the vegetation becomes prodigious, febrile, like that of the delirious garden in “La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.” Here the paths wind under groves of orange and lemon trees, over a dense carpeting of violets, stocks, narcissus and honey-scented hyacinths. Trellises of red roses lift their network against the light, and damp clefts of the rock are black with dripping maidenhair. Here are tall hedges of blue rosemary and red-gold abutilon, there shrubby masses of anthemisia, heliotrope and lavender. Overhead, black cypress-shafts spring from the bright sea of foliage, and at the pit’s brink, where the Syracusan citizens, under their white umbrellas, used to lean over and taunt the captives dying in the sun, a great hedge of prickly pear writhes mockingly against the sky.