They had been to Cefalu, looking for Count Roger in the great Cathedral built by his son, but found that he had vanished long ago, and his sarcophagus was in Naples. They had found instead traces of Sikel, Greek, and Roman; had lingered long before the splendid church, so noble even in decay, and now they were back again in Palermo, still on the track of their Normans. What Jane read from her book was also inscribed over the portal of Palermo’s Cathedral before which they stood, but being carved in Cufic script, and Jane’s Cufic being—to put it politely—not fluent enough to be idiomatic, she preferred to use the guide-book’s translation rather than deal with the original.
The Cathedral at Palermo—“The Last Resting Place of Queen
Constance”
They had been skirting about the Duomo for days, for it dominated all Palermo with its bigness. Seated in a wide Piazza that was dotted about with mussy-looking marble saints and bishops, and a great statue of Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron, the Cathedral was flanked by the huge Archepiscopal Palace, by enormous convents and public buildings, so that one couldn’t hope to ignore or escape it. Yet they had deferred the Duomo from day to day because they knew their pet abomination, the Eighteenth Century, had been there before them, and that they would find it but an extremely mitigated joy in consequence.
They knew that the swamp full of pxapyrus plants of Haukal’s time had given way to the “Friday Mosque” which the two Rogers and William the Bad had left undisturbed, but which had been pulled down by William the Good—being somewhat ruinous, and also seeing that William was “the Good” in the eyes of his ecclesiastic historians because he reversed the old Norman liberality to his Moslem subjects. Then Walter of the Mill, an Englishman, built the Cathedral, making it glorious within and without, and time and additions only made it more lovely until the modern tinkering began. A foolish, unsuitable dome was thrust among its delicate towers, and the whole interior ravaged and vulgarised.
Still, if one were hunting Normans, the Cathedral must be seen, and most of all they wished to find the last resting-place of Constance, around whose memory hung a drama and a mystery, and drama and mystery were as the very breath of their nostrils to Jane and Peripatetica.
The interior was impressive for size despite all the scrolled and writhed and gilded mud pies with which Ferdinand Fuga, the Neapolitan, had plastered it by way of decoration, and here and there still lingered things worth seeing. Such as the delicious bas reliefs of Gagini, Sicily’s greatest native sculptor; his statues of the Apostles and the fine old choir stalls, only making clearer by their ancient beauty how much that was beautiful had been swept away. Also there was the splendid silver sarcophagus of Santa Rosalia, weighing more than a thousand pounds, and other such matters, but the real attraction of the Cathedral was the great porphyry tombs of the Kings—huge coffers of ensanguined stone, as massive and tremendous as the mummy cases of the Pharaohs. Here lay Roger the King in the sternest and plainest of them, under a fretted Gothic canopy. In one more ornate, his daughter Constance, and near at hand her husband Henry VI. of Germany, and their son, the Emperor Frederick the Second.
Jane and Peripatetica longed that Constance, like Hamlet’s Father might
“ope those ponderous and marble jaws”
and come forth to tell them the real story of her strange life. For she too had been one of those hapless feminine pawns used so recklessly in the game of kingdoms played by the men about her; yet a whisper still lingered that this pawn had not been always passive, but had reached out her white hand and lifted the king from the board, and thus altered the whole course of the game!