represented on carts belonging to those spiritually-minded owners who prefer the Story of S. Alfio to the Story of the Paladins. It seemed to me that the painter had been suspiciously obsessed by the number Three; it was in the third century, there were three saints, they were each martyred three times over, though they cannot have known much about the boiling or the grilling, and there were three drunkards who went to sleep for three centuries. But I said nothing. I thought I would wait till I could see a cart.
By this time we had reached Nicolosi, that is we had nearly traversed the first of the three zones into which the Slopes of Etna are divided. This lowest one is the Regione Piemontese and Nicolosi is about 2250 feet above the sea—the place from which tourists often start to make the ascent of the volcano. Here we spent a declamatory half-hour discussing where we should eat the provisions we had brought from Catania and drink the wine we had bought at Mascalucia on the way. The discussion ended by our being received in a peasant’s hut, where we spread a table for ourselves and the woman stood a low paraffin lamp in the middle of the cloth. This is a bad plan, the light dazzles one for seeing those sitting opposite and their shadows are thrown big and black on the wall and ceiling so that one cannot see the room, but I should say it was like Orlando’s bedroom in the contadino’s cottage on Ricuzzu’s cart, the only room in the house, poorly furnished and used for all purposes. The woman of the hut had a baby in her arms and I said to Ninu:
“I wonder whether I may look at the baby?”
“Of course you may,” he replied, “why not?”
So I asked the woman, who smiled proudly and gave me the baby at once. She called it Turi (Salvatore) and said it was three weeks old. It was asleep and I nursed it till the table was ready, which was not long, for everything was cold. I handed Turi back to his mother and sat down, with Joe on one side of me and Ninu on the other.
Presently Ninu inquired why I had asked whether I might look at the baby. I replied that I had heard that Sicilian peasants are so superstitious they do not like strangers to look at their babies for fear of the evil eye; I admitted that I had never yet met with a peasant so superstitious as to refuse to show me her baby, but on the Slopes of Etna, during an eruption, I had thought it wise to be careful.
Ninu, in the Sicilian manner, was about to say that anyone could tell by my appearance that there was nothing to fear from me, when Joe interrupted him:
“She is an intelligent woman,” said Joe.
I said: “I suppose you mean that she throws her intelligence into the scale with her maternal pride, and together they overbalance any little superstition which the proximity of the volcano may have fostered.”
“That’s the way to put it,” he replied.