as the reason he had chosen Sicily as a home, that the violets bloom longer here than any place he had ever known.”
Overhead the sky was a flawless sapphire vault, broken only in one corner by a mountain that looked like transparent amethyst. The perfume of the orange and the lemon blossoms was intoxicating as sweet wine; the comfortable hum of bees made a low undersong to the music of the magic fountain in the corner of the cloister. It is not Italian, it is not Sicilian. What manner of fountain can it be? Listen! Its language is softer than any now spoken in Trinacria!
“Allah il Allah!” The fountain still murmurs the old cry of the muezzin.
From a large basin rises a high carved shaft of rich topaz colored marble, supporting a curiously wrought ball with sculptured figures, foliage, and the alternate heads of men and lions. From their mouths drips and drips, but never spurts, a slow soft shower of diamond drops. It is as different from the noisy splurging fountains of Naples, as the slow soft-spoken tongue of the Arabian sage is different from the strident scolding of those men on the train, the father of Teodoro and the little avvocato.
“A place of mystery and beauty beyond belief.”
So the record of Monreale ends as it began—“past belief!”
“It’s good enough just to be alive today,” Patsy declared one ecstatic morning; “I’m off for the market and the Marina!”
To reach the Piazza Caraccioli, the market-place, we threaded a maze of narrow dark alleys full of Rembrandtesque lights and shadows. In the very heart of this labyrinth stands an old macaroni mill.
“We may enter and see the works?”
“Benvenuto!” The voice was less welcoming than the word. “They don’t make macaroni where the Signorino comes from?”