“Where he fell there he lay down and died.”
Sir John Lubbock tells a story—and this story teaches an obvious lesson—of certain red warrior ants, who capture black fellow pismires, and hold them as slaves; an outrage which must certainly shock all true pismitarian ants. The captors become in time so dependent upon their negro servants that, when deprived of their attendants, they are unable to feed or clean themselves, and lie helplessly upon their backs, feebly waving their paws in the air!...
Peripatetica, having but recently suffered the loss of a maiden slave of a dozen years’ standing, had suffered a like moral disintegration, and she violently lost her taste for travel whenever it became necessary to move from one place to another, attempting to deal with her packing by a mere series of helpless paw-wavings, most picturesque to observe, but which for all practical purposes were highly inefficient. So when she and Jane dropped down and down the zigzags to Giardini—each of those famous views self-consciously presenting itself in turn for the last time—the light figure which hurled itself boldly down the steeps by a short cut, springing along the daring descent with the sure-footed confidence of a goat, proved to be not a wing-heeled Mercury conveying an affectionate message from the gods, but merely a boy from the villa fetching Peripatetica’s left-behind nail brush, hot-water bottle, and umbrella....
From Giardini a spacious plain curves all the way to Syracuse. This broken level is built upon a foundation of inky lava cast out from Hephæstos’ forge in Ætna, in whose wrinkled crevices of black and broken stone has been caught and held all the stored richness of the denuded mountains so long ago stripped of trees; and in this plain grain and flowers and trees innumerable find food and footing. Peripatetica, bred in deep-soiled, fertile fields with wide horizons, drew, as they passed into the open vistas, deep breaths of refreshment and joy. The fierce, soaring aridity of Taormina had oppressed her with a restless sense of imprisonment. Her elbows were as passionate lovers of liberty as the Spartans, and she demanded proper space in which to move them. What she called a view was a view, not merely more mountains climbing, blind and obstinate, between the eye and the landscape. Being, too, of a race always worshippers of Demeter—a race which had spent generations in her service, which considered the cultivation of the soil the only possible occupation of a gentleman, and all other businesses the mere wretched astonishing fate of the unfortunate—she rejoiced loudly and fatiguingly over the blessedness of a return to a sweet land of farms.
“I don’t call that Taormina window-box-gardening on tiny stone ledges a thousand feet up in the air farming,” she scoffed.
“If your tongue was a spade what crops you would raise!” sniffed Jane.
“Well, I raise big harvests of diversion in my own spirit,” retorted the unsuppressed chatterer. “Besides, it’s now my turn to talk. You have done a lot of elaborate speechifying about Taormina. I made you a present of the whole jaggèd, attitudinizing old place, and for the moment I mean to flow unchecked! You needn’t listen if you don’t like. I enjoy hearing myself speak, whether anyone pays the smallest attention or not.”
Which was why, while Jane settled down comfortably to a copy of Theocritus, Peripatetica continued to entertain her own soul with spoken and unspoken comments as to a certain restful letting down of tension which resulted from sliding away from the dazzling, lofty Olympianism of Taormina into a region Cyclopean, perhaps, but with a dawning suggestion of coming humanity. For here, in this plain, succeeding those bright presences that were the elementary forces of nature—forces of the earth and sea and sun, of fire and dew, of thunder, wind, and rain, of the shining day, and the night with its changing moon—first came the primitive earth-spirits, rude and rugged, or delicate and vapourous. Creatures not gods—no longer immutable and immortal, but stronger, older, greater than man, who was yet to come. Creatures partaking somewhat of the nature of both gods and men, but subject to transformation into stream and fountain, into tree and flower; very near to the earth, yet swayed by human passions, by human sorrows and joys.
This plain was the home of nymph and oread, of dryad and faun. Here had the Cyclops and the Titans wrought—first of the great race of Armourers and Smiths—under the tutelage of Vulcan, shaping the beams of the heavens, and the ribs of the earth; arming the gods and forging the lightning.
Ulysses, the earliest of impassioned tourists, had had dealings on this very spot with the last of the Cyclops. A degenerate scion of the great old race, as the last of a great race is apt to be, Polyphemus had sunk to the mere keeping of sheep, and according to Ulysses’ own story he got the better of Polyphemus, and related, upon returning home, the triumph of his superior cunning, with the same naïve relish with which the modern Cookie retails his supposed outwitting of the native curio dealer. Very near to the train, as it ran by the sea’s edge, lay the huge fragments of lava which the blinded Cyclop had cast in futile rage after the escaping Greeks. He was a great stone-thrower, was Polyphemus, for further along the coast lay the boulders he had flung at Acis, the beautiful young shepherd. Polyphemus having still an eye in those days, his aim was truer, and the shepherd was killed, but who may baffle true love? The dead boy melted away beneath the stones and was transformed to the bright and racing river Acis (which they crossed just then), and the river, flowing round the stones, runs still across the plain to fling itself into the arms of the sea-nymph Galatea. So the two still meet as of old, and play laughingly together in and out among the huge rocks, which certainly might have been flung there by Ætna in one of her volcanic furies, but which, if one may believe the Greek story, were really the gigantic weapons of a cruel jealousy.