Viva Maria!
Viva Maria!
They passed with a heavy trampling, exhaling a sour, herdlike odor, so jammed one to the other that nothing emerged from their mass except the long sticks fashioned like a cross. The men marched in front, and the women, more numerous, behind, with the glittering of golden ornaments underneath their white bandelets.
Viva Maria!
Viva her Creator!
Near by, at every repetition, their chant had the vehemence of a cry; then it diminished in vigor, betraying fatigue, surmounted by a continual and unanimous effort, the initiative of which, in the two half-choirs, almost always started in a single and more powerful voice. And this voice dominated not only the others when it intoned the measure; but often, in the midst of the musical wave, it was maintained high and recognizable during the entire duration of the strophe or refrain, denoting a more imperious faith, a singular and dominating soul among that indistinct crowd.
George remarked it, and, very attentive, followed it as it waned in the distance, as long as his ear could recognize it. And that gave rise in him to an extraordinary sentiment of the mystic power which lay at the roots of the great indigenous race from which he himself had sprung.
The procession disappeared in the curve of the coast; then reappeared on the summit of the promontory, in the light; then disappeared again. And the chant, through the distant night, became veiled, softened; became so light that the slow and uniform modulation of the calm sea almost drowned it.
Seated on the parapet, her shoulders leaning against the trunk of an acacia, Hippolyte remained silent, motionless, not daring to disturb the religious meditations in which her lover seemed plunged.
What could the beams of the brightest sunlight reveal to George, that this simple chant in the night had not already revealed to him? All the scattered images, recent and ancient, those still vibrating with the keen sensation which had given birth to them and those buried in the deepest recesses of his memory, all these were bound together internally, and composed for him an ideal spectacle which carried him over the most vast and most august reality. His land and his race appeared to him transfigured, uplifted from time, with a legendary and formidable aspect, weighty with mysterious, eternal, and nameless things. A mountain, like unto an enormous primeval stump, reared up in the centre in the form of a breast, perpetually covered with snows; and the sloping sides, the promontories devoted to the olive-trees, were bathed there by an inconstant and sad sea, on which the sails bore the colors of mourning and flame. Roads wide as rivers, green with grass, and sown with bare rocks, with gigantic vestiges scattered here and there, descended from the heights to conduct to the plains the migrations of the herds. The rites of dead and forgotten religions survived; incomprehensible symbols of powers fallen since centuries subsisted there intact; the usages of primitive peoples, gone forever, persisted there, transmitted without change from generation to generation; the rich fashions, strange and useless, were retained there as witnesses of the nobility and the beauty of an anterior life. Long strings of horses laden with wheat-corn passed there; and the devotees rode on the loads, their heads crowned with ears of corn, with belts of paste, and deposited at the foot of a statue the cereal offerings. The young girls, with baskets of wheat on their heads, led along the roads a she-ass bearing a still larger basket on its crupper, and, with their offering, they went towards the altar, singing. The men and boys, crowned with roses and with dewy berries, climbed in their pilgrimage on a rock on which was impressed a footprint of Sampson. A white bullock, fattened for a year on a rich pasturage, covered by a vermilion gualdrape and ridden by a child, advanced with pomp among the standards and candles; it knelt on the threshold of the temple, in the midst of the applause of the people; then, arrived at the centre of the nave, it voided its excrements, and the devotees drew from this steaming matter presages as to their agriculture. On feast days the fluvial populations bound their heads with bryony and, at night, they crossed the water with songs and music, bearing in their hands branches full of leaves. At daybreak, in the fields, the virgins washed their hands, feet, and faces in the fresh dew, to accomplish a vow. On the mountains, on the plains, the first sun of the spring was saluted by ancient hymns, by the clash of crashing metals, by cries and dances. Throughout the entire district the men, women, and children sought the first serpents emerged from their lethargy, seized them alive, and wound them around their necks and arms, so as to present themselves thus ornamented before their Saint, who would render them proof against venomous bites. On the inclines of the sun-bathed hills the young toilers, with their yoked oxen, in presence of their old men, rivalled one another as to who should trace the straightest furrow from the hill-top to the plain; and the judges awarded the prize to the conqueror, while the father, in tears, opened his arms to his well-deserving son. And so, in all the ceremonies, in all the pomps, in all the labors, in all the games, in the births, in the loves, in the marriages, funerals, everywhere was present and visible a georgic symbol, everywhere was represented and venerated the great producer Earth, from whose womb gushed forth the sources of all that was good and joyful. The women of the family gathered at the house of the newly married, bearing on their heads a basket of wheat-corn, on the wheat a loaf of bread, and on the loaf a flower; they entered one by one, and sprinkled a handful of that augural grain on the head of the happy wife. At the foot of a dying man's bed, when the death-agony was prolonged, two kinsmen deposited a ploughshare, which had the virtue of interrupting the horrors and of hastening death. The tool and the fruit thus assumed superior significance and power. A profound sentiment and continual desire for mystery gave to all these environing things an active soul, benign or malignant, of good or evil augury, that participated in every vicissitude of fortune, by a manifest or occult action. A vesicating leaf pressed on the bared arm revealed love or indifference; the hearth-chain; thrown in the road exorcised the menacing hurricane; a mortar placed on the edge of the window recalled the lost pigeons; the swallowed heart of a sparrow communicated wisdom. Mystery intervened in every event, envelopes and bound every existence; and the supernatural life dominated, concealed, and absorbed the ordinary life by creating innumerable and indestructible phantoms, which peopled the fields, inhabited the houses, encumbered the heavens, troubled the eyes.
Mystery and rhythm, those two essential elements of every cult were scattered everywhere. Men and women continually expressed their soul in song, accompanied by song all their labors under roof and heaven, celebrated by song both life and death. Around the cradles and around the biers, music was shed, slow and persistent, very ancient, as ancient, perhaps, as the race whose profound sorrows they manifested. Sad, grave, fixed in immutable rhythm, they seemed the fragments of hymns that had belonged to the immemorial liturgies which had survived the destruction of some great primordial myth. They were few in number, but so dominating that the new songs could not displace them or diminish their hold. They were transmitted from generation to generation like an inner heritage, inherent in the corporeal substance; and each one, on awaking in this life, heard them resound in himself like an innate language to which the voice gave a visible form. Just as well as the mountains, the valleys, and the rivers; just as well as the customs, the vices, the virtues and beliefs, they termed a part of the structure of the country and of the race. They were as immortal as the glebe and as the blood.
Such was the country, such was the race, visited by this New Messiah, of whom the old peasant had related the life and miracles. Who was this man? An ascetic, ingenuous and innocent as Semplice, the worshipper of the sun? A cunning and covetous charlatan, who was trying to play upon the credulity of his devotees for his own profit? Who, really, was this man who, from the border of a small river, could gather, by his name alone, multitudes from both near and far, induce mothers to desert their children, awaken in the souls of the most ignorant the visions and the voices of another world?