“The elections should have been put off,” said the small avvocato. “We in Sicily have enough at this moment without that business; but no, the politicians care more about keeping their men in than about their distracted country, desolated, ruined by the most consummate disaster the world has seen!”
Grudgingly Teodoro’s father agreed; he would have preferred to disagree. A man of intelligence, feeling, sentiment, not a man of power.
He had a low forehead, dark, angry eyes, a swart color that showed Saracen descent. All his good qualities—I am sure there were many—were nullified by his volcanic temper, that without rhyme or reason burst forth, devastating the hour as an eruption of Etna blasts the lovely vineyards and olive groves, and turns them into burnt lands that produce nothing.
In the silence that followed, Teodoro’s gay lilting voice was heard imparting advice to Patsy.
“For Palermitan dishes? Go to the Ristorante Trinacria, order pasta con sarde, baccalà à ghiotto, melone d’inverno, zibibbi, a fiasco of Vino di Zucco—Ah, behold us arrived at Termini—here is made the best pasta (macaroni) in Sicilia.”
At Trabia the little avvocato hopped briskly off the train and returned carefully carrying his bandana handkerchief filled with eggs.
“They cost a horror at Palermo; my wife always asks me this favor,” he explained, as he stowed away three dozen eggs in his lawyer’s bag.
After Trabia our fellow travelers fell asleep worn out by much conversation, and we were left to enjoy the marvelous scenery as we approached the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Shell in whose midst stands Palermo, the old Panormus—all-haven—of the Greeks. The road runs between the mountains on the right and the sea on the left,—a narrow strip of land ’twixt yellow sands and gray-green hills. Now and then we caught a glimpse of some valley of paradise, with locust and Judas trees among the groves of oranges and lemons with their “golden lamps in a green night.” We passed many Saracen water-wheels with irrigating trenches running through fertile fields. Between the exquisite airy blue hills that jut out into the sea and the emerald valleys, the way crossed many torrenti, dry stony water-courses descending from the mountains to the shore. These torrenti (the first we saw was the Torrente Zaera at Messina) are characteristic of Sicily. For a short time in early summer, when the snows on Etna and the Madonia mountains are melting, there is water in them, but for the greater part of the year they are empty ravines. J. saw them used in turn for roads—he even went through one in an automobile—for stone quarries, for gravel and sand pits, and for the washing and drying of clothes.
Sicily, the granary of the Romans, still bears three simultaneous crops in the neighborhood of Palermo. We saw olive groves planted with grape vines and wheat,—all three seeming to thrive. The suicidal destruction of the forests has had the same terrific effect upon Sicily that we saw in Spain, that we see today in the United States. After the arid, poorly cultivated regions we had passed through, it was comforting to rest our eyes on the lovely verdure, that, thanks to the Arabs, still surrounds Palermo. The innumerable wells, pumping machines, norias, the astonishing richness of the soil, reminded us at every step of Granada, the lost paradise of the Moor. Here, in the Conca d’Oro, as in Granada, the labor of those truly great agriculturalists, the Arabs, still beautifies and enriches the land they loved.
Looking down upon the Golden Shell from a height, the plain seems literally paved with the gold of oranges, lemons, mandarins and citrons. It is one immense continuous fruit grove of the orange tribe, intermixed with Japanese medlars, mulberries, almonds, figs and olives. The Conca d’Oro takes its name not only from its extraordinary fertility, but from its shape. Behind Palermo the airy mountains draw together, the plain narrows almost to a vanishing point; as it approaches the sea it widens out into what is variously called a shell or a cornucopia.