A slow, fine rain falls. Vapours roll among the vapoury hills.
It is just the day for the museum, and such a museum! Not one of those cold and formal mausoleums built by the modern world for the beauties of the dead past, but a fine old monastery of the Philippines with two cloistered cortile; with a long, closed gallery for the hanging of the pictures; with big refectories, ambulatories, and chapels for housing the sculpture, and with its little cells crammed with gold and silver work, with enamels, with embroideries, with jewels. A gracious casket for the treasures of old time.
The rain is dripping softly into the open cloister, where the wet garlands of wisteria and heavy-clustered gold of the banksias are distilling their mingled fragrance in the damp air. The rain makes sweet tinklings in the old fountains and in the sculptured wellheads gathered in the court; on the cloister walls are grouped bas-reliefs—tinted Madonnas by Gagini; Greek fragments, stone vases standing on the floor, twisted columns, broken but lovely torsos.
Indeed, it is not like a museum at all. No ticketed rigidity, no historical sequence—just treasures set about where the setting will best accord with and display their beauties. There is not even a catalogue to be had, which gives a delightful sense of freedom at first, but this has its drawbacks when Jane and Peripatetica come to the tomb of Aprilis in a side chamber, and wish to know something more of this sad little maid sculptured into the marble of the tomb’s sunken lid—wrapped in a straitly folded wimple, with slim crossed feet, and small head turned half aside; smiling innocently in the sleep which has lasted so long. Aprilis, whose April had never blossomed into May, and whose epitaph has for five hundred years called Sicily to witness the grief of those who lost her:
“Sicilia, Hic Jacet Aprilis. Miseranda Puella
Unicce Quælugens Occultipa Diem 18 Otobre
XIII 1495.”
Of course, the guide-books ignore her. Trust the guide-books to preserve a stony silence about anything of real human interest!...
Another court; a great basin where papyrus grows, where bananas wave silken banners amid the delicate plumes of tall bamboo, where are more purple wreaths of wistaria and snow-drifts of roses, and where the treasures are mostly Greek. Very notable among these a marble tripod draped with the supple folds of a python; the lax power of the great snake subtly contrasted with, and emphasized by, the rigid lines of the seat of the soothsayer. More notable still, in the Sala del Fauna, is an archaic statue of Athene from Selinunto—like some splendid sharded insect in her helmet and lion skin—rescued from that vast wreck of a city. They had travelled from Palermo a few days before to see that city, drawn by Crawford’s fine passages of description, and there they, too, had wondered at the astonishing remains of those astonishing Greeks.
... “There is nothing in Europe like the ruins of Selinunto. Side by side, not one stone upon another, as they fell at the earthquake shock, the remains of four temples lie in the dust within the city, and still more gigantic fragments of three others lie without the ruined walls. At first sight the confusion looks so terrific that the whole seems as if it might have fallen from the sky, from a destruction of the home of the gods—as if Zeus might have hurled a city at mankind, to fall upon Sicily in a wild wreck of senseless stone. Blocks that are Cyclopean lie like jackstraws one upon another; sections of columns twenty-eight feet round are tossed together upon the ground like leaves from a basket, and fragments of cornice fifteen feet long lie across them, or stand half upright, or lean against the enormous steps. No words can explain to the mind the involuntary shock which the senses feel at first sight of it all. One touches the stones in wonder, comparing one’s small human stature with their mass, and the intellect strains hopelessly to recall their original position; one climbs in and out among them, sometimes mounting, sometimes descending, as one might pick one’s way through an enormous quarry, scarcely understanding that the blocks one touches have all been hewn into shape by human hands, and that the hills from which men brought them are but an outline in the distance.”...