This fine generalization gathers acuity from the fact that a sharp turn soon after leaving the station piles up elevations that quickly rob them of their long-sought opportunity, but for the rest of the time that the paths of the four lie together the Poles insist upon attributing to the direct intervention of Jane and Peripatetica the wiping of this blot from their travelling ’scutcheon—an attitude which Jane and Peripatetica find both soothing and refreshing, and they affect a large familiarity and possessiveness with the Volcano, which the Poles bear with polite and grateful respect; the more so, no doubt, as the two seekers possess—as Americans—a novelty almost more startling and intense than Ætna. The gentlemen from Cracow have never met Americans until now, and make no attempt to disguise the exhilaration of so unwonted a spectacle—confessing that in their turn they too have been speculating upon the racial identity of “the foreign ladies,” whose nationality they were unable to guess. They are consumed with an inexhaustible curiosity to get the “natives’” point of view, and exchange secret glances of surprise and pleasure at the exhibition of human intelligence in a people so remote from Cracow. When the necessary change of train detaches them from their eager investigations Peripatetica is still futilely engaged in her persistent endeavour to combat in the European mind its strange delusion as to the real relations of the sexes in her own land.
... “No; the American man in no respect resembles the Sicilian donkey ... no; he does not ordinarily spend his life toiling humbly under the intolerable loads laid upon him by his imperious mate.... No; he is not a dull unintelligent drudge wholly unworthy of the radiant beings who permit him to surround them with an incredible luxury.... No; the American woman is not his intellectual superior. In everything of real practical importance he is immensely the superior.... No; he isn’t this.... No; he isn’t that.... He isn’t any one of the things the European thinks he is and—good bye!”
The mountains all this while have been peaking up; mounting, climbing, rolling more wildly, and at last two of them soar splendidly, sweep up close on to three thousand feet into the sky ... Castrogiovanni and Calascibetta, and the train drops Jane and Peripatetica at their feet.
Memory has cast out, or has pushed into the background, the long weary jolting up to the wild little wind-swept town; makes no record of the hotel or the fellow tourists; has jotted down a certain straight wild beauty in the inhabitants, who have eagle-like Saracen profiles, but grey Norman eyes. Has left well in the foreground a dark castle, and a cluster of half-ruined towers. All else of modern details she has rejected, except a great wash of blue, a vast vista of tumbling broken landscape, huge and stern, for she has been busy with a picture of the past; building up an imagination of vanished gods moving about their mighty affairs, playing out Olympian dramas in this lofty land. Here is the very centre of the God’s-land, the “umbilicus Siciliæ,” the Key of Sicily, Enna “the inexpugnable,” the strongest natural fortress in the world, which no one ever took except by treachery; which the Saracens besieged in vain for thirty-one years, and when they finally got it, through a treason, the Normans in their turn could not dislodge them until all Sicily had been theirs for a quarter of a century, and then only through another betrayal. In the great slave war Eunus, the serf, held it against the whole power of Rome for two years until he too was betrayed.
Broken and wild as is the land it is still cultivated; the olive still climbs up to where the clouds come down, but where are the magnificent forests, the wonder and joy of antiquity? Where the brooks and streams and lakes, whose dropping waters sang all through the records of the elder world? Where are those fields so blessed by Demeter that they offered to the hands of men illimitable floods of golden grain? Where are the vines that wreathed the mountains’ brows with green and purple grapes, as if it had been the brow of Dionysius the wine god? Where, too, are the meadows so thick with flowers that for the richness of the perfume the hounds could not hold the scent of the game? Meadows where the bees wantoned in such honeyed delight that the air vibrated with their murmuring as with the vibrating of multitudinous harp strings?...
Listen to the story, which, when it was told was only a prophecy and a warning, but a warning never heeded.
Erysicthon cuts down the grove sacred to Demeter. A grove so thick “that an arrow could hardly pass through; its pines and fruit trees and tall poplars within, and the water like pale gold running through the conduits.” One of the poplars receives the first stroke, and Demeter, hearing the ringing of the axe, appears, stern and awful, hooded and veiled, and carrying poppies in her hand. To the ravager of her groves she threatens a divine curse of an everlasting thirst, of an insatiable, unsatisfied hunger, and the workmen, awed, depart, leaving the axes sticking in the trees, but Erysicthon drives them to their task again with blows, and soon the grove is levelled, and the heat of the day enters where once all was sweet shade. Erysicthon laughs at the futile curse of the goddess; he has had his will and nothing has happened. The water still runs and he can slake his drought, but the water escapes as he stoops for it, sinking into the earth before his eyes, leaving upon his lips only choking dust. No one can safely ignore the warnings of the gods, and he wanders, whipped by intolerable longings, and dies dreadfully, raving of his own folly.
Neither Greeks, Romans, Saracens, nor Norman heed this parable, told ages and ages before the meaning of the loss of forests was understood. All over the land the clothing of oaks, chestnuts, and pines was stripped from the hills, and slowly but surely the curse of Demeter has turned it into a place of thirst. To-day less than five per cent of the whole island contains timber, and these high lands, these “fields which in the days of the Greeks returned one hundred times the amount of seed sowed, now yield but seven-fold, and only one-ninth of all the land is productive.” This is the story of the ravaging of Enna, once the true garden of Paradise, and now a rocky waste burned to the bone.
