For suddenly was revealed to the two the meaning of what they had been journeying to see—it was the dead body of a great civilization.
Here, nearly three thousand years since, had come Archias, the rich Heraclid of Corinth. He had gathered sullenly into little ships his wealth, his family, and his servants, and had fled far down the horizon, an execrated fugitive because of the slaying of beautiful Actæon. And, finding on the coast of the distant God’s-land a reproduction of the bays and straits of the Corinth which had cast him out, he founded there a city. A city that was to have a life like the life of some gifted, powerful man, growing from timid infancy to a lusty youth full of dreams and passions and vague towering ambitions; struggling with and conquering his fellows; grasping at power and glory, heaping up riches unbelievable, decking himself in purple and gold, living long and gloriously and tumultuously; and who was to know rise and fall, defeats and triumphs, and finally was to die on the battlefield, and be left there by the victor to rot. So that all the flesh would drop from the long frame, the muscles dry and fall apart, the eyes be sightless, and the brain dark; and the little busy insects of the earth would carry away the fragments bit by bit, and on the field where he lay would be found at last only the hollow skull once so full of proud purpose; only the slack white bones of the arm that had wielded the strong sword, the vast arch of the gaunt ribs that once had sheltered the brave heart of Syracuse. And among these dry bones little curious creatures would come to peep and peer and build their homes; spiders spinning webs over the empty eye sockets, mice weaving their nests among the wide-flung knuckles....
One little spider, about ten minutes old, lay in wait for these two tourist flies at the side door of the Cathedral with an offer to guide them, and though they sternly endeavoured to brush the insect aside, doubting his infantile capacity to direct their older intelligences, the Spider was not of the to-be-brushed-aside variety and knew better than they what they really needed. While they wandered through the vulgar uglinesses of Zosimus’ shrine, trying to recall Cicero’s glowing picture of the temple in its glory, he never took his claws off of them. While they talked of the great doors inlaid with gold and ivory, of the brazen spears, of the cella walls frescoed with the portraits and the battles of the Sikel Kings, of the pedestals between each column bearing images of the gods in ivory, silver, and bronze, the Spider was patient and merely murmured “Greco” or “molto antico” by way of encouraging chorus. He let them babble unchecked of the tall image of armed Pallas standing behind the altar, with plumed helmet and robe of Tyrian purple, grasping her great spear in her right hand and resting the left hand upon the golden shield that bore a sculptured Medusa head. Upon her pedestal was carved the cock, the dragon, and the serpent, and the altar before her was heaped with fresh olive boughs about the smouldering spices sending up wavering clouds of scented smoke that coiled among the ceiling’s gilded plates. Without, upon the roof, stood another great shield of gilded bronze, a beacon for sailors who, setting out upon long voyages, carried a cup of burning ashes from her altar to sprinkle on the waves as the glittering landmark faded down the sky.
But when these reminiscences of the “molto antico” finally exhausted themselves, the Spider rose to his occasion. He was vague about Minerva, but Santa Lucia was his trump card. He was eminently capable of guiding any number of travellers to the chapel of that big swarthy idol adorned with wire-and-cotton wreaths, and hung about with votive silver hands and hearts, arms and legs, in grateful testimony of the limbs and organs cured by her mercy and power. He could pour out in burning Sicilian, illustrated by superb spidery gestures, a thrilling description of the yearly villegiatura of Syracuse’s patron saint. How twice in a twelvemonth she feels the need of change of air, and all the town attends her visit of a few days to the church beyond the bridge, she being escorted by priests and censors, and blaring bands, and wearing her finest jewels and toilet, as befits a lady on ceremonial travels. It is a festa for all Syracuse, Spider explains, with much good eating and “molto buono vino.”
Jane, always a molten mass of useful information, interjects sotto voce into the flood of his narrative that precisely the same ceremony was used for the image of Diana when she was the patron goddess of the Syracusans, and the very same molto buono vino so overcame the populace at one of Diana’s festas that Marcellus, the Roman, after a siege of three years, captured the long and fiercely defended city that very night.
The Spider took them later to see the handful of fragments alone remaining of Diana’s fane—broken columns sunk in a fosse between two houses—though once a temple as splendid as Minerva’s. A temple served by many priestesses, and surrounded by a great grove sloping down to the fountain of Arethusa. Among these trees the Oceanides herded the sacrificial deer, and troops of just such silken-coated, wavy-horned goats as feed to-day upon the Catanian plain. And to this grove came young girls, offering up, to please the great Huntress, their abandoned childish toys of baked clay. For oddly enough the wild, arrowy goddess who loved to shed the blood of beasts, adored children, and was a special patron of theirs, and would even listen favourably to the petitions of barren wives.
There seemed some strange vagueness, some shadowy inexplicableness in the worship of Diana. All the other gods typified some force of nature, some resultant struggle and passion of man caught in nature’s web, but of the moon they knew only that it influenced tides and the growing of plants. What is one to make then of this fierce ivory-skinned Maid who sweeps, crescent-crowned, through the moonlit glades of the deep primitive forests, with bayings of lean questing hounds and echoing call of silver horns, hard on the track of crashing boar, of leaping deer? There is something as glimmeringly elusive, as magically haunting in the personality and the worship of Diana as in the moon itself.
They offered the web of this conundrum to the Spider, but he wisely refused to allow himself to be entangled in it. This, however, is anticipating the real course of events.
Already, before leaving the Cathedral, another conundrum had been asked and not answered.
High on opposite sides of the walls of the nave Jane and Peripatetica had observed two ornate glass and gilt coffins. The one on the left contained the half-mummy, half-skeleton of a man. A young, beardless face it was, the still fair skin drawn tight over the features; the still blond hair clustering about it in curls of dusty gold. The fleshless visage was handsome, and though strange and ghostly, not repulsive. The skeleton body was clothed in velvet and gold, and the bony, gloved fingers clasped a splendid silver-scabbarded sword; an empty dagger case was hanging from an embroidered baldrick across the dead man’s breast. He lay on his side in an uneasy attitude, looking through the transparent pane of his last home toward the opposite crystal sarcophagus. This opposite coffin contained a half-mummied, half-skeleton woman—a woman also young and fair-haired; artfully coiffed, her tresses wrapped with pearls. Neither was her face repulsive; some strange process had preserved a dry whiteness in the skin stretched smooth and unwrinkled upon the bones and integuments, though all the flesh was gone. She too was clothed in gold and silk in a fashion centuries old. Through the lace of the sleeves showed the white polished bones of what must once have been warm rounded arms. She too was gloved; she too crouched upon her side uneasily, but she did not face her companion. Her head was thrown back as if in pain; and plunged through the pointed silk corselet—just where there must once have beat a young heart—was the gold-handled dagger from the empty dagger case hung to the embroidered baldrick.