when laden with snow. There are picnics and excursions to other places on the slopes of the mountain where friends are passing the summer who presently return the visits by coming up to breakfast with us. There is a touring company performing in the theatre, there is music, there are drives and all manner of quiet amusements.
On the mainland of Italy, tobacconists’ shops display the Royal Arms with a notice that they are licensed to sell tobacco and salt. Here a license is necessary only for tobacco, salt being free in Sicily. This combines with the absence of rain to make the manufacture of salt profitable; but should a thunderstorm dilute the pans, the fresh water must be evaporated out again and time and money are lost. Storms come so rarely in the summer, however, that the caprices of the weather interfere but little either with the salt works or the excursions.
If there is no excursion or no special occupation, we go to the caffé or the club, or call on the chemist who is sure to be surrounded by friends, or sit in the balio smoking and talking nonsense by the hour. And there is always the inexhaustible wonder of the great view. The spacious dome of
the sky, which curves above and around, unites at the horizon with the inverted dome of the earth and sea, which curves around and below, the two together forming an enormous hollow globe in the midst of which the top of the mountain seems to be suspended like the floating island of Laputa. Conte Pepoli can sit in his castle and watch the half-tame ravens, with little silver bells on their necks, as they flit around the window and perch on the crazy wooden balcony where an old priest is asleep in a chair, over the edge of a precipice of many hundred feet, backed by leagues upon leagues of Sicily.
CHAPTER IX—THE MADONNA AND THE PERSONAGGI
In August, 1901, I was on the mountain and saw a procession representing Noah’s Ark and the Universal Deluge—one of those strange and picturesque cavalcades that were formerly more common than they are now.
Usually, in other parts of Italy, the same story is repeated at the same season: in one place, always the Passion at Easter; in another, always the Nativity at Christmas, and so forth. On the mountain they have the procession at irregular intervals, after perhaps three or four years, and the story, though now, as a rule, scriptural, is never the same again. When it does occur, it is as an extra embellishment of the annual harvest thanksgiving; it takes place by night and always introduces the Madonna di Custonaci. And now it is time to say
a few words about this famous Madonna, whose influence is felt throughout the whole comune at all times, but nowhere more than on the Mountain, and at no time more than during the harvest thanksgiving.
Mount Eryx, as every one knows, was in classical times famous for the worship of Venus: here stood perhaps the most celebrated of all her temples—the one with which her name is most familiarly associated—and here, long before Horace wrote of “Erycina ridens,” she was worshipped as Aphrodite by the Greeks, and as Astarte or Ashtaroth by the Phœnicians. Hardly any vestige of a temple can now be made out, but the remains of the Pelasgic walls that protected the city in prehistoric ages are still to be seen near the Trapani gate. The late Samuel Butler (author of Erewhon) wrote The Authoress of the Odyssey (Longmans, 1897) in support of his view that the Odyssey was written by a woman who lived at Trapani and upon the mountain, and who in the poem described her own country. In Chapter XII. he quotes Thucydides (vi. 2), to show that the Sicans had inhabited this corner of the island from a very remote period, having come probably from Spain.
After the fall of Troy, some of the Trojans, who had escaped the Greeks, migrated to Sicily, settled in the neighbourhood of the Sicans and were all together called Elymi, their cities being Eryx and Segesta. The city walls were originally built by the Sicans, and restored by the Phœnicians when they came to the mountain; on many of the stones the quarrymen’s marks in Phœnician characters are still visible.