“That’s Luigi,” said Patsy, as we waited for the Syracuse train on the platform at Giardini, “that beautiful old fellow with the white beard! Bonanno told me about him. He was driven quite mad by the earthquake—benevolently mad, he’s perfectly good-natured. His mind is destroyed, as far as today is concerned. What’s left alive is the most interesting thing of his life—he was one of the ‘Mille;’ he sailed from here with Garibaldi for Calabria in 1860, nearly fifty years ago—he must have been a mere boy then, can’t be so very old now—looks hard as nails. The arrival of a train seems to be his link with the past. He meets them all, and marches up and down the platform, singing patriotic songs. He doesn’t beg; I tried to give him something the other day, and he would not take it.”

As the engine slowed down, the old fisherman drew himself up to his great height and saluted. A fine man, with something very Spanish in his bearing, he must have had a drop of Castilian blood in his veins. His skin was tanned as leather, his eyes blue as the sea, his hair and beard of virile silver. As the guard blew the whistle, Luigi threw up his right hand, waved it gallantly over his head, charged across the platform, with the old cry of the Hunters of the Alps:

“Italia e Vittorio Emanuele!”

In the railroad carriage the people laughed. Patsy looked back at the old fisherman with that odd brightening of the eye, that in a woman ends in tears.

Down at Naxos burned a brushwood fire. The thin column of smoke mounted high in the breathless air. Here stood the altar to Apollo, where the Greek mariners, before they sailed back to Hellas, lighted a sacrificial fire.

XII
SYRACUSE

The only sounds in the quarry came from over our heads; first there was a soft rushing of wings, as a flock of birds alighted in the tree-tops, then the confused twittering of their voices as they chattered busily together; a bevy of quail had halted to rest on its flight from Africa to Europe. We listened to their plans for the next stage of the journey; orders were given, questions asked, signs and counter-signs exchanged. Then came another soft whirring noise, the sky was darkened by the shadow of wings, the air filled with sounds of flight—the aerial army was gone. We were alone again in that place of agony, “the Gethsemane of a nation,” the quarry where nine thousand Athenian captives languished and perished in their prison grave. Alone? no! Shadows of the broken remnant of that great army, that came to Syracuse to conquer and to crush and was itself crushed out of existence, crowd about us. We feel their presence, as we felt the birds’, even though we cannot see them. Here in the Latomia dei Capuccini, a hundred feet below the surface of the earth, the bitterness of that defeat is tasted again. The place that heard the groans of those sorrowing and dying men still claims its tribute of tears, and will while the imperishable spirit of Hellas rules, while from generation to generation one Grecian lives to repeat the dreadful story of Thucydides.

No defeat was ever so unexpected. The Athenians, led away by the eloquence of their evil genius, Alcibiades—he was then thirty-five years old—the wittiest, bravest, handsomest, most worthless of men, had gone mad over their anticipated victory. They would become masters of Syracuse and the other Greek cities of Sicily; when Trinacria was conquered, Athens would take Italy, Carthage, the western islands of the Mediterranean. So Athens dreamt of the empire that, five centuries later, Rome built. In 415 B.C. the Athenians began the war with Syracuse that ended in such terrible destruction, and led to the downfall of Athens. The Athenians were at first successful; they built a double wall around Syracuse, they seemed on the point of reducing the city, when something happened. Some say the total eclipse of the moon frightened Nicias, the vacillating Athenian General; others that the Athenians were made prisoners between their own lines of defence by reinforcements from perfidious Sparta, at the moment when the Athenian ships under Demosthenes were cut off by sea. The overthrow was so complete that not a ship escaped, not one man went back to Greece to tell the tale. Nicias and Demosthenes happily committed suicide; those others were left to rot and die in that living tomb, where for ten weeks long the dead and the living lay together. Months after a traveling merchant told the story of the disaster to a barber in Piraeus, supposing all Greece knew it.

The glaring stone quarry, where the Athenian captives were exposed to the burning sun by day, the bitter cold at night, while the gaily dressed Syracusan ladies, scent bottle in hand, peeped over the parapets, watching their agony curiously, is now a place of extraordinary beauty. We climbed down a flight of a hundred stairs to reach this subterranean garden, a solemn and romantic spot. The primrose colored walls of the old quarry are hung with a splendid tapestry, knotted ivy, and long trailing creepers of madre selva, clematis, the mother of the wood. Here and there, from some cranny in the dazzling limestone, a fig tree thrusts its strong green leaves up to the sun, the flame of the pomegranate glows beside the gold of oranges and lemons, long lines of lilies stand waiting to bloom for Easter. In the midst of this sunken garden of delight stand the busts of two great men the Syracusans of today delight to honor, Archimedes of Syracuse and Mazzini of Genoa.

“Amerigo, behold! thy compatriots! Piano, piano, so; that was a good riverenza!”