“By no means!” objected Peripatetica in lofty obstinacy, with a backward glance of contempt at the visibly astonished attendants. “The city no doubt pays them well to grow roses, and I mean to shame them for this indecent neglect of their duties. Besides, I am enjoying it immensely; I’ve been hungering and thirsting for a little gardening.”
That very day it was conveyed to their intelligence—or their lack of it—that they had not been enjoying the Giardino Inglese, a dull park which lay almost opposite, but had been calmly annexing the private grounds of Prince Travia. He, however, being a model of princely courtesy, was glad to have the foreign ladies amuse themselves there as much as they liked. Only once more did they see it; on the day of departure, when they blushingly left a tip in the hands of the handsome old silver-staffed portiere, who had truly looked like a nobleman’s servant, and behaved like one as he saluted them with unprotesting dignity each time they had passed in and out of that beauteous spot in which they had no right to be.
There were many other gardens in Palermo, but none so fair. The green world was so enchanting in this glowing spring that a day of villegiatura was necessary between every two days of sight-seeing, and having been banished from the Travia garden by their own innate sense of decency, they took lunch in their pockets and set out for the famous Villa Giulia which had aroused such enthusiasm in Goethe.
The Villa Giulia, as they might have foreseen, was just the sort of thing Goethe would have liked—and they had been violently disagreeing with Goethe all over Sicily. An untouched example of the most tiresome form of Eighteenth Century gardening—a cross between a wedding cake and a German Noah’s Ark. All rigid, glaring, gravelly little allées, with trees as denuded of natural luxuriance as a picked chicken; sugar-icing grottoes; baroque fountains; gaudy music kiosks; cages of frowzy birds and mangy monkeys; and posé busts in self-conscious bowers. Not here could these Eden-exiled Eves lunch, nor yet in the untidy, uninteresting Botanic Gardens next door—a wilderness of potted specimens and obtrusive labels—but wandering melancholily around a vast egregious gas tank, they came upon a long, neglected avenue of great trees; all that was left of some once lovely villa swept out of existence by the gas works. And here upon a stone bench in the glimmering shade they fed at the feet of a feeble little knock-kneed marble King. One of the Spanish monarchs of Sicily it was, thus commemorated in marble Roman armour and a curled marble wig, and his rickety, anæmic majesty moved them to smiling pity, so feeble and miserable he looked, forgotten and overshadowed by modern gas tanks, his boneless legs ready to give under him, and his peevish face smeared with creeping lichens. The green tunnel of the trees framed a blazing sapphire at the other end—a glimpse of the bay—and ragged pink roses, and neglected purple iris bloomed together along the path. Ere another year the blight of the gas works will have swept away the airy avenue, the wilding flowers, the poor spineless little King, and the two bid it all a wistfully smiling farewell, knowing they should never again eat an April day’s bread and cheese under those sweet auspices.
... Will travellers from the roaring cities of Central Africa come a couple of centuries hence and mark with regret the last bit of some now flourishing boscage being eaten away by Twenty-Second Century progress, and smile indulgently at one of our foolishly feeble statues, in granite frock coats, tottering to lichened oblivion? No doubt. Palermo has seen so many changes since the Phœnicians used to trade and build along this coast. For this was the Carthagenian “sphere of influence” from the first, and the Greeks were here but little, and have left no traces in Palermo, though in the long wars between Carthagenian and Greek it was captured by the latter from time to time, and held for a space. The Greeks called it Panormous—meaning all harbour, for in their day deep water curved well up into the town, where are now streets and palaces and hotels. Of course Rome held it for a while, as she held pretty nearly everything. Held it for close upon a thousand years—with the Goths for its masters at one interval—but there are few traces of Rome either, and then the Arabs took it and set their seal so deep, in less than two centuries, that after the lapse of nearly another thousand years their occupation is still visible at every turn. For under the Saracens it was a capital, and after their destruction of Syracuse, which ended Greek domination in the Island, it gained a pre-eminence among Sicilian cities never afterwards lost.
That garrulous old traveller from Bagdad, Ibn Haukal, writing in 943, says that Palermo then had a most formidable nine-gated wall, a population of close upon half a million, and many mosques. He also says that near where the Cathedral now stands was a great swamp full of papyrus plants, serving not only for paper but for the manufacture of rope.
Already Sicily was beginning to suffer from the scarcity of water, and the merchant from Bagdad, accustomed to the abundant pools and conduits of his own city, makes severe comments upon the lack of these in Palermo. It could only have been by contrast, however, that the Palermians could have seemed to Haukal dirty, because Jane and Peripatetica, going to see a part of the old Moorish quarter, in process of demolition, found multitudinous water-pipes in the houses, entering almost every chamber. Haukal says that the Greek philosopher Aristotle was buried in one of the mosques of Palermo, and he opines that the most serious defect of the citizens was their universal consumption of onions. Peripatetica—to whom that repulsive vegetable is a hissing and an astonishment—read aloud in clamant sympathy this outburst of Haukal’s:
“There is not a person among them, high or low, who does not eat them in his house daily, both in the morning and at evening. This is what has ruined their intelligence and affected their brains and degraded their senses and distracted their faculties and crushed their spirits and spoiled their complexions, and so altogether changed their temperaments that everything, or almost everything, appears to them quite different from what it is.”
“That gentleman from Bagdad is a man after my own heart,” she declared triumphantly. “I have always been sure that people who eat onions must be those to whom ‘almost everything appears quite different from what it is,’ for if they had the slightest idea of ‘what it is’ for other people to be near them after they have indulged that meretricious appetite they would certainly never do it!”
This Arab impress, though visible everywhere, is more a general atmosphere than definite remains; for with but few exceptions their creations are so overlaid and modified by subsequent Occidental work that it glows through this overlay rather than defines itself. It was while searching for Moorish fragments that Jane and Peripatetica came upon La Ziza. The guide-books unanimously asserted that Al Aziz—La Ziza—was the work of the Norman King, William I., but the guide-books, they had long since discerned, were as prone to jump to unwarranted conclusions, and, having jumped, to be as aggravatingly cocksure in sticking to their mistakes as was Peripatetica herself. So they took leave to doubt this assertion, and concluded that William probably seized the lovely country-house of some Moorish magnate, adding to it sufficiently to make of it a “lordly pleasure dome” for himself in the wide orange gardens, but the core of the place was wholly Moorish in character; well worth the annexing, well worth its name Al Aziz—The Beloved.