Earthquakes had shaken down more than half the tall, slim columns. Sirocco has bitten deep into those still standing, and into the fallen fragments which strew the landward slope; fragments lying among gnarled olives, seemingly as wind-eaten and ancient as themselves. Among these fluted fragments grew wild pansies and crimson lupins, from which little Fortunato gathered nosegays, as he shrilled, in his boyish falsetto, songs of love and sorrow—or sat and kicked his heels upon the margin of an old bottle-shaped cistern. Tourists whirled up dustily for a cursory inspection—Baedeker in hand—and whirled as quickly away, bent on getting through the sights and passing on; but still Peripatetica and Jane lingered and dreamed among the ruins until Fortunato, visibly bored, suggested a short cut back to the hotel. It led them by fields of lupin, spread like crimson velvet mantles on the hillside, where the contadini cut the glowing crop, heaping it upon asses until they seemed but a moving mass of blossom trotting home on brown legs. Goats, Fortunato volunteered, detested—for some curious goatish reason he could not explain—this picturesque food, but donkeys! ah, to donkeys it was—in a burst of superlative explanation—“the donkey macaroni.”
This short cut led, too—apparently to Fortunato’s surprise and dismay—directly through a walled farmyard surrounding a frowning, half-ruined casa, nail-studded of door and barred of window, and with an air of ancient and secretive menace. It was the sort of place travellers in such books as “The Mysteries of Udolpho” used to come upon at nightfall, far from any other habitation, with a thunderstorm about to break among the mountains, and the leader of their four-horsed travelling carriage hopelessly lame, so that the delicate and shrinking heroine must, willy nilly, beg for a night’s accommodation and the surly inhabitant’s sinister hospitality. Curiously enough the dwellers in this casa were, it seemed, of the exact Udolpho variety. Ringing the correctly rusty bell, and battering upon the massive gate with their parasol handles aroused a storm of deep-mouthed baying of dogs within, and a fierce brown face finally appeared at a small wooden shutter to demand the cause of the intrusion. Fortunato’s heart and legs plainly turned to water at the sight of this person, but realizing that he had got Jane and Peripatetica into a hole and must get them out, he wheedled in such honeyed and persuasive Sicilian, that at last, and reluctantly, the heavy portal
“Ground its teeth to let them pass,”
the furious dogs having first been chained. Very arid and ruined and poor this jealously guarded dwelling seemed. Nothing was visible the protection of which required those four big wolf-like dogs that shrieked and bounded and tore at their chains as the intruders passed; nor that the lean fierce man and his leaner and fiercer wife and children should accompany them like a jailer’s guard to the exit. Fortunately this nether door was unbarred before the lean man demanded money for having permitted them to cross his land, and having a sense of Fortunato’s imploring eyes upon them they made the gift a lire instead of a copper, and pushing through the door fled as for their lives.
“So there really was an Italy like the Italy of the romantic Georgian novel!” said Jane wonderingly, as soon as she could catch breath.
“It’s only another proof,” gasped Peripatetica, “that travellers really do tell the truth. It’s the ignorant stay-at-homes who can’t believe anything they haven’t seen themselves. Fortunato,” she demanded sternly, “who are those people, and why do they behave so absurdly? What are they concealing?”
But no explanation was to be had from that erstwhile fluent and expansive homme du monde. He was frightened, he was vague, and simply darkened counsel.
“I strongly suspect there is some Mafia business behind all this—you naughty boy!” said Jane reprovingly, but Fortunato only pulled his cap over his eyes and slunk away without claiming his day’s wage.
Because of this episode Fortunato found his offered services frigidly dispensed with the next day when he presented himself, Jane and Peripatetica setting out alone to explore the town of Girgenti. They were quite sure they could themselves discover a short cut to the small city which would be much more amusing than the dusty highway. It seemed but a stone’s throw distant, and surely by striking down this footpath, and rounding that rise....
An hour later, panting, dripping, and disgusted, they climbed into the rear of the town, having stumbled through the boulders of dry water-courses, struggled over the huge old rugged pavements of ancient Akragas—washed out of their concealment by winter torrents—skirted outlying villas, and laboured up steps. The short cut had proved the longest way round they could possibly have taken to the inadequate, shabby little museum they had set out to see in this modern successor of the great Greek city. Girgenti, though one of the most thriving of Sicilian towns, thanks to its sulphur mines, only manages to fill one small corner of the hill acropolis of that ancient city, which once covered all the miles stretching between this and the temple-crowned ridge of the southern boundary of cliffs. Akragas found space for nearly a million of inhabitants where Girgenti nourishes but twenty thousand or so.