Diversions in Sicily

by Henry Festing Jones

No. 7 was The Rainbow, another lovely girl as an angel standing between a bank of clouds and a rainbow. On the breast of this figure was worked in jewels Noah’s dove with an olive-branch; this was particularly appropriate, as it happens also to be the badge of the town.

The procession was closed by a long car carrying first a band of musicians, then a chorus of youths attired as angels and crowned with roses, the whole backed by a sort of temple front framing a copy of the sacred picture. This car had to stand still from time to time while its occupants performed

music composed specially for the occasion, and the continual stopping dictated the movements of the other cars and was signalled to them by bells, so that there might always be about the same space between them.

The cars were drawn by men and the figures made no attempt to stand rigidly still—anything of the kind would have been out of the question, for they must have been on the move between five and six hours. The last car passed my balcony at 3.30, an hour and three-quarters after the first had come into sight, and one could tell the next day that they had been through nearly the whole town, for hardly a street was safe to walk in—they were all so slippery with the wax that had dropped from the candles. The constant moving of their limbs by the figures, though they never lost the general idea of the attitude, together with the tottering motion caused by the roughness of the paving, prevented any sense of the pose plastique or living picture.

Every one of the female figures, except The Voice of God, had her breast encrusted with jewels, usually in a floral design, and the borders of their dresses were heavy with

jewellery; the male figures also wore as much as could be suitably sewn on their costumes.

Omitting consideration of the final car, which was there to close the procession and bring on the music and the Madonna, and also of the Ark, which could hardly have been otherwise, there were six cars, three carrying groups and three practically single figures, for the boy and girl at the feet of The Voice of God, though they were the children of Donna Anna, my landlady, were not really necessary. Of the groups, the one representing The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men was certainly the finest. It told its story in the right way and was full of the right kind of imagination. The Sacrifice was next best, and owed much to the extreme dignity of the principal figure. I should have liked The Flood better if it had had more living figures and less papier maché, though I am not ashamed to admit that I have no idea how this could have been done. Shakespeare himself, who apologizes for trying to make a cockpit hold the vasty fields of France, might have been excused for not attempting to decant The Universal Deluge into a receptacle scarcely bigger than a

costermonger’s barrow. Of the three remaining cars, Sin was beyond comparison the finest both in conception and execution. Perhaps he would have looked the part more obviously if he had had more of a once-aboard-the-lugger expression on his kind and gentle face; on the other hand, the designer of this car may have intended that Sin is most successful in seducing the righteous when he appears with nothing repulsive in his aspect. The other two were merely just what they should have been—ordinary business cars, so to speak. Had these three single figures appeared on horseback with grooms to lead them, as in former times, the procession would have gained in variety and the importance of the groups on the cars would have been emphasized.

But this is a small matter. The procession as it was, with its car after car jolting along under an August full moon, the sparkling of the jewels, the flashing of the torches, the blazing of the gas, the beauty of the figures and the immense multitude of reverent worshippers made up a scene never to be forgotten. The impressiveness was deepened by the knowledge that this Mountain, where Astarte, Aphrodite and Venus have all reigned

in turn, is also a place where much that has helped to mould the poetry and history of the world has happened since the Sicans first girded it with its megalithic cincture. Added to this was the conviction that for many and many an age some such procession has been winding through these narrow, irregular streets, the form changing, but the intention remaining ever the same—Praise to the Giver of the Increase.