“Paladini! noi siamo stanchi.”
Their fatigue was caused by their exertions at the siege of Barcelona and their Emperor went on to promise them some repose before proceeding against Madrid.
This epilogue struck me as out of place; nothing ought to have followed the death of Bradamante, which was as affecting a scene as I have ever witnessed. The only hitch
occurred when Marfisa dismounted; her left foot came to the ground capitally, but her right would not come over her saddle for some time; she got it free at last, however, and stood upright on both feet. I thought again of Master Peter’s puppet-show and of how the petticoat of the peerless Lady Melisendra caught in one of the iron rails as she was letting herself down from the balcony, so that she hung dangling in midair, and Don Gayferos had to bring her to the ground by main force.
The rest of the scene in the grotto could not have gone better and the audience were enthralled by it. Yet what was it after all? Nothing but a couple of loosely jointed wooden dolls, fantastically dressed up in tin armour, being pulled about on a toy stage. Yet there was something more; there was the voice of the reader—the voice of “Lui che parla.” In the earlier part of the evening he had been giving us fine declamation, which was all that had been required. The meeting between the two princesses brought him his opportunity and he attacked the scene and carried it through in a spirit of simple conviction, his voice throbbing with emotion as he made for himself a triumph.
Art abounds in miracles, and not the least is this, that a man can take a few watery commonplaces and by the magic of his voice transmute them into the golden wine of romance. The audience drank in the glowing drops that poured from his lips, and were stilled to a silence that broke in a great sob as the curtain fell. What did they know of loosely jointed wooden dolls or of toy stages? They were no longer in the theatre. They had wandered the woods with Marfisa, they had sought Bradamante in the leafy glades, they had found her dying in the grotto, they had received her last breath and the world would never be the same to them again. A voice that can do this is rare and, like the power of a giant, rarely found in the possession of one who knows how to use it worthily.
MOUNT ERYX
CHAPTER VIII—MONTE SAN GIULIANO
Three or four miles inland from Trapani, at the north-west corner of Sicily, rises a precipitous solitary mountain, nearly 2500 feet high, with a town on the top. A motor bus makes a circuit of the mountain, taking one up to the town in about an hour. It proceeds inland, past the church of the Annunziata, the famous shrine of the Madonna di Trapani, and the ascent soon begins. As one looks back towards the sea, Trapani gradually assumes the form that gave it its Greek name of Drepanum, for it juts out towards the island of Levanzo like a sickle “with the sea roaring all round it.” Marsala is usually visible beyond the innumerable salt pans and windmills. One of these windmills is especially pleasing; it consists of five or six dummy ships with real sails on a
pond; these ships form, as it were, the rim of a wheel lying on its side, the spokes being poles which attach the ships to the axle, an island in the middle of the pond. The wind blows and the ships race after one another round and round the pond, causing the poles to work the mechanism which is inside the island.