Up to the top of this Ætna—ten thousand feet up—on the last journey from Catania climbed Empedocles, that strange figure who passes with ringing brazen sandals through the history of Sicily. Empedocles, clothed in purple, crowned with a wreath of golden leaves, followed by thousands to whom he taught some strange, half Pythagorean worship, the form and meaning of which have vanished with time, save for some hints of a sort of mental healing practised upon his followers. Empedocles, composing vast poems of thousands of lines, and vaunting himself as a Super-man, saying:
“An immortal god, and no longer a mortal man, I wander among you; honoured by all, adorned with priestly diadems and blooming wreaths. Into whatever illustrious towns I enter men and women pay me reverence, and I am accompanied by thousands who thirst for their advantage; some being desirous to know the future, and others, tormented by long and terrible disease, waiting to hear the spells that soothe suffering.”
Whether his following fell away; whether he became the victim of some wild melancholy, some corroding welt-schmerz—unable to cure the ills of his own soul with his own doctrines—no one knows, but the dramatic manner of his exit printed his name indelibly upon the memory of the world from which he fled.
Deserting late at night a feast in Catania, he mounted a mule, climbed the rough steeps, threaded the dusky oak woods, dismissed his last follower, and—after lingering a moment to listen to the boy-harper Callicles singing in the dawn at the edge of the forest—he passed on upward through the snows, and was seen no more by human eye. Only the brazen sandal was found beside the crater, into whose unutterable furnace—urged by some divine despair—he had flung himself: all that had been that aspiring, passionate life vanishing in an instant in a hiss of steam, a puff of gas, upon the most stupendous funeral pyre ever chosen by man.
There was endless history waiting to be looked into at Catania; frightful passagings and scufflings, massacres and exilings, murders, conspiracies and poisonings, and every other uncomfortable exhibition of “man’s inhumanity to man”—accompanied, of course, by heroisms, patriotic self-sacrifice, and a thousand humble, unremembered kindnesses and virtues, such as forever form warp and woof of the web of life and time. But railway schedules, even in Sicily, are almost heartlessly indifferent to tradition, and when the last tartlet was consumed the two seekers for Persephone were dragged Syracuse-ward, along with the crumby Tedeschi, divided during the long afternoon between increasing drowsiness and reproachful Baedekers. At last came sea marshes, where salt-pans evaporated in the sun, and toward sunset the train dumped them all promiscuously into station omnibuses at the capital of history; too grubby and fatigued to care whether the first class in historical research was called or not.
The Tedeschi, after their frugal fashion, went in search of cheap pensions in the city, and only Jane and Peripatetica entered the wheeled tender of the Villa Politi, along with a young Italian pair, obviously engaged upon a honeymoon. A pair who never ceased to look unutterable things at each other out of fine eyes bistred with railway grime, nor ceased to murmur soft nothings from lips surrounded with the shadows of railway soot, undaunted by the frank interest of the hotel portier hanging on to the step, nor by the joltings of the dusty white road that led, through the noisy building of many ugly new villas, up to bare, wind-swept heights.
Strong in the possession of a note from the proprietor promising accommodation, with which, this time, the wayfarers had had the prudence to arm themselves, Jane and Peripatetica swept languidly up the steps, ordering that their luggage be placed in their rooms and tea served immediately upon the terrace.
But there were no rooms. No rooms of any kind, single or double!
The note was produced. There it was, down in black and white!