Seekers in Sicily: Being a Quest for Persephone by Jane and Peripatetica

by Elizabeth Bisland; Anne Hoyt

“My dear,” Jane explained contemptuously, “the Eighteenth Century wasn’t a period of time. It was merely a deplorable state of mind. And the mind seems to have been slightly tipsy, it was so fantastic and ridiculous, and yet so gravely self-satisfied.”

La Cuba, another Saracenic relic, was so obliterated into the mere military barrack to which it had been transformed that there was nothing for it but to pass on to the Normans, and to great Roger de Hauteville, a fit companion of the Paladins, so heavy a “Hammer of the Moors” was he—so knightly, so romantic, so beautiful.

Not until twelve years after that bold attempt at Messina to conquer a kingdom with only sixty companions was Roger able to enter Palermo, and he and his nephews chose for themselves “delectable gardens abounding with fruit and water, and the knights were royally lodged in an earthly paradise.”

No hideous massacre or sack followed the taking of Palermo, for though Roger had conquered the island for himself he was a true mirror of chivalry, and was never cruel. He was chivalrous not only to the defeated, but to those other helpless creatures, women, who in his day were mere pawns in the great military and political games played by the men; married whether they would or no, and unmarried without heed of any protest from them; thrust into convents against their wishes, and haled out of convents if they were needed. And swept ruthlessly from the board when they had served their purpose, or when they got in the way of those fierce pieces passaging back and forth across the chequered squares of the field of life. Roger loved the Norman maid Eremberga from his early boyhood, it appears, and as soon as his hazardous fortunes would permit she was had out from Normandy, and the history of the great soldier is full of his devotion, and of her fidelity and courage. As at the siege of Troina, when the two were reduced by hunger and cold to the greatest extremities, sharing one cloak between them, so that finally Roger, rendered desperate by his wife’s sufferings, burst through the ring of Saracens, leaving her to defend the fortress with unshaken valour until he returned with a force adequate to save her, and raise the siege.

There is an amusing story of Roger and his eldest brother, that ruthless old fox, Robert Guiscard. They were fighting one another at the time, and Roger’s soldiers captured Robert, who was disguised and spying. He with difficulty rescued Robert from the angry captors, took him to a private room, kissed him, helped him to escape, and promptly next day fell upon his forces with such fury that Robert was glad to make peace and fulfil the broken promises which had caused the dispute....

It was not Roger, the great Count—he had little time in his busy life for building—but his son Roger the King, who raised the great pile at Monreale which Jane and Peripatetica were on their way to see. Not by way of the winding rocky road which for centuries the pious pilgrims had climbed, but whisked up the heights by an electric tram which pretended it was a moving-picture machine, displaying from its windows an ever widening panorama of burning blue sea, of pink and purple mountains, of valleys down which flowed rivers of orange groves, of a domed and spired city in the plain, and a foreground freaked with an astonishing carpet of flowers.

“If you were to see that in a picture you wouldn’t believe it,” quoted Jane from the famous Book of Bromides, writhing her neck like an uneasy serpent in an endeavour to see it all at once.

“No, of course, you wouldn’t,” said Peripatetica resentfully. “And when we try to tell it to people at home they’ll simply say our style is ‘plushy.’ There’s nothing so resented as an attempt to carry back in words to a pale-coloured country the incredible splendours of the south. The critics always call it ‘orchid and cockatoo writing,’ and sulkily declare, whenever they do have a fairly nice colourful day, that they are sure the tropics have nothing finer, whereas, if they only knew, it is but an echo of an echo of the real thing, and—” but words failed even Peripatetica.

On the breezy height, dominating all the deep-toned landscape, stood the Abbey church of Monreale—truly a royal mount, crowned by one of the finest shrines in Europe. The famous bronze doors of the main entrance had been oxidised by time and weather with a patine of greens and blues that lent subtle values to the bold delicate modelling of the metal, framed in a toothed doorway of warm, cream-tinted stone, whose magic harmony of colour was a fitting preliminary to the lofty glories of the interior. An unbelievable interior! faced throughout its three hundred and thirty-three feet of length with millions upon millions of tiny stones, gold and red and blue—stones of every colour. For all the interior they found, up to the very roof, was of this dim, glowing, gold-mosaic set with pictures of the Christian faith—the creation of Adam and Eve, the temptation by the Serpent, the casting out from Eden, the wrestling of Jacob, the whole Bible history, culminating above the altar in a gigantic Christ. More than 700,000 square feet of pictures made of bits of stone; and around and about pulpit, ambo, and altar, across steps and pavement, and enclosing every window and door, lovely mosaic patterns and devices, no two alike....

Brown-faced old peasants pushed aside the leathern curtain at the entrance and knelt, crossing themselves, in the shadow of enormous pillars, as their forebears had knelt and crossed themselves there for a thousand years. A mass droned from a side altar. Groups of young priests-in-the-making sauntered gossipping in whispers, or coming and going on ecclesiastic errands. Knots of tourists stared and wandered about the great spaces, and from behind the high altar rose boys’ voices at choir practice, echoing thin and pure from the painted roof.