“Poor little wretch! That was why he looked so troubled,” exclaimed Jane. “He knew the long and difficult search he was being sent upon, and perhaps thought it was a mere Barbarian ruse to shake him off, so that we could get away without paying him.”
As she spoke the sound of thudding hoofs echoed from the walls of the Cathedral, and the white anxious face of their guide appeared on flying legs. The reassurance that changed his expression into a beaming smile at sight of the two still there, made it clear that Jane’s supposition had been correct. He had evidently feared to find both his clients and the silver rewards of his labours vanished. The relief with which he gasped out his explanation of having had to go all the way down into the valley to the railway station to get a carriage which was now on its way while he had dashed ahead on foot up a short cut, was so pathetic they gave him double pay to console him for his worry.
And then with a noise between the rumble of a thunderstorm and the clatter of a tinman’s wagon came their “carrozza.” Its cushions were in rags, the harness almost all rope, one door was off a hinge and swung merrily useless—but two lean steeds drew this noble barouche and two men in rags sat solemnly on its ricketty box with such an air of importance its passengers felt as if they were being conducted homeward in a chariot of state.
Fortunato, restored to favour, was leading them up the Rupe Athena, that rose steeply immediately behind their hotel; he was leading them not straight up, but by a series of long “biases”—as Jane expressed it. The end of the first bias reached the little lonely church of San Biago, dreary and uninteresting enough in its solitary perch, save for the fact that it stood upon the site of a temple to Demeter and Persephone:
“Our Lady of the Sheaves,
And the Lily of Hades, the Sweet
Of Enna”
placed here no doubt because this high spur was the only point in Girgenti from which one could catch a glimpse of the lofty steeps of Enna-Castrogiovanni.
Turning at a sharp angle again they went slanting up across the bare hillside, the wild thyme sending up a keen sweet incense beneath their climbing feet, until they came to the verge of the great yellow broken cliff that shot up more than a thousand feet from the valley below. Some crumpling of the earth’s crust, ages ago, had forced up this sheer mass of sandstone, hung now with cactus, thyme, and vines, which served as one of the natural defences of Akragas, behind whose unscalable heights the unwarlike city had been enabled peacefully to pursue its gathering of wealth and luxury.