A tattered, rosy-cheeked child runs up the uncertain footway—the stair-streets—with feet as light and sure as a goat’s. An old, old man, with head and jaws bound in a dirty red kerchief, and with the keen hawk-like profile of some far-off Saracen ancestry, crouches in a doorway with an outstretched hand. He makes no appeal, but his apparent confidence that his age and helplessness will touch them, does touch them, and they search their pockets hastily for coppers, with a faint anguished sense of the thin shadow of a dial-finger which for them too creeps round and round, as for this old derelict man, for this old skeleton city....
A donkey heaped with brushwood patters up the steep narrow way; so narrow that they must flatten themselves against the wall to admit of his stolidly sorrowful passage. They may come and go, as all the others have come and gone, but our brother, the ass, is always there, recking not of Greek or Roman, of American or Tedeschi; for all of them he bears burdens with the same sorrowful stolidity, and from none does he receive any gratitude....
These are the only inhabitants of Ravello they see until they reach the Piazza and the Cathedral of Saint Pantaleone. They know beforehand that the Cathedral too has been spoiled and desecrated, but there still remain the fine bronze doors by the same Barisanus who made the famous ones in the church at Monreale in Sicily, and here they find the most beautiful of the pulpits, and the very biggest Jonah and the very biggest whale in all Ravello.
Before that accursed Bishop Tafuri turned it into a white-washed cavern the old chroniclers exhausted their adjectives in describing the glories of Saint Pantaleone’s Cathedral. The richness of its sixteen enormous columns of verd antique; its raised choir with fifty-two stalls of walnut-wood, carved with incredible richness; its high altar of alabaster under a marble baldachino glowing with mosaics and supported upon huge red Egyptian Syenite columns—its purple and gold Episcopal throne; its frescoed walls, its silver lamps and rich tombs, its pictures and shrines and hangings—all pitched into the scrap heap by that abominable prelate, save only this fine pulpit, and the Ambo. The Ambo gives itself wholly to the chronicles of the prophet Jonah. On one stairside he leaps nimbly and eagerly down the wide throat which looks so reluctant to receive him, as if suspecting already the discomfort to be caused by the uneasy guest. But Jonah’s aspect is all of a careless gaiety; he is not taking this lodging for more than a day or two, and is aware that after his brief occultation his reappearance will be dramatic and a portent. On the opposite stair it happens as he had prophetically foreseen, the mosaic monster disgorging him with an air of mingled violence and exhausted relief.
No one can tell us why Jonah is so favourite a topic in Ravello. “Chi lo sara” everyone says, with that air of weary patience Italy so persistently assumes before the eccentric curiosity of Forestieri.
Rosina Vokes once travelled about with a funny little playlet called “The Pantomime Rehearsal,” which concerned itself with the sufferings of the author and stage manager of an English house-party’s efforts at amateur theatricals. The enthusiastic conductor used to say dramatically:
“Now, Lord Arthur, you enter as the Chief of the fairies!”
To which the blond guardsman replies with puzzled heaviness: “Yes; but why fairies?”
Producing in the wretched author a sort of paralysis of bafflement. The same look comes so often into these big Italian eyes. The thing just is. Why clamour for reasons? It is as if these curious wandering folk, always staring and chattering and rushing about, and paying good money that would buy bread and wine, merely to look at old stones, should ask why the sun, or why the moon, or why anything at all?...
So they abandon Jonah and take on the pulpit instead, the most famous of all the mosaic pulpits in a region celebrated for mosaic pulpits. It is done after the same pattern as that of St. John of the Bull, but the pattern raised to the nth power. More and bigger lions; more and taller columns; richer scrolls of mosaics; the bits of stone more deeply coloured; the marble warmed by time to a sweeter and creamier blond. The whole being crowned, moreover, by an adorable bust of Sigelgaita Rufolo, wife of the founder of the Cathedral and giver of the pulpit. A pompous Latin inscription under the bust records the virtues of this magnificent patron of religion. The inscription including the names of all the long string of stalwart sons Sigelgaita brought forth, and it calls in dignified Latinity the attention of the heavenly powers to the eminent deserts of this generous Rufolo, this mediæval Carnegie.