The Secretary General.
(Signature) G. Crisafulli.
Visé The Mayor.
(Signature) A. Martino.
On their way to the ferry-boat the newly made citizens of Messina passed through the Piazza del Duomo and by the ruin of an old Norman cathedral, whose foundations were laid in the year 1098, by order of Roger II. The noble central doorway is still standing; over it is a marble bas-relief of the Madonna. The child has dropped from her arms. Then comes a great rent, for the upper part of the façade has fallen. The mighty columns of the nave (they once upheld the roof of the temple of Poseidon at Faro Point) are snapped like pipestems. Two only remain upright and uninjured. The high altar, a marvel of jasper, chalcedony, and lapis-lazuli, has fallen, broken into a thousand pieces. The splendid gold mosaics of the apse, so hard to see in the old days, are now easily visible. In the central arch over the ruined altar the figure of the Christ is almost intact. From the rich gloom of the mosaics His grave face looks out on the ruins of Messina, upon His world. For the world has never been so truly Christian as it is today; not even when Richard of the Lion Heart wintered in Messina on his way to Palestine to fight for the Holy Sepulchre, that same winter he took to wife the lovely Berengaria. A new name is added to the long list of those who have made their camp beside Charybdis, opposite Scylla, on the most beautiful, the most deadly coast in all the world—the Americans, who came not to conquer or to ravage, but to help and to save. The little boy who greeted Captain Belknap on Easter morning with the words, “Be thou blessed!” expressed the general sentiment of the Sicilians towards the Americans.
In our bustling young country we are so busy looking forward and looking backward that we sometimes lose sight of the only thing that is really ours to make or to mar—today. In Sicily there is more time, and, in the years to come, the old men and old women of Messina will tell the tale, hand down the story of those latter-day Crusaders, Captain Belknap and his men, and what they did in their camp beside the Torrente Zaera.
There was a certain exaltation in all the people who worked for Sicily and Calabria that seemed to lift them above the smallnesses of every day existence. They saw each other transfigured, they lived the heroic life. Each was eager to do the other’s work,—all were quick to sacrifice themselves to the others, as well as to the cause. It was a time when men and women seemed purged of meanness and jealousy. Each saw the god in the other. There was hardly a discordant note. It was like the time of our Civil War, when a breath of heroism passed through the country. No matter what might follow of discord and jealousy, the men and women who passed through that fire of sympathy will never again be quite the same. All their lives they will yearn for the glorified vision of those days; their eyes will never quite lose the keener insight of the mysteries they then attained.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Francesco Crispi, the great Sicilian patriot and statesman.
[2] When the work was all done, the Americans hung the bell in the belfry of the church of Santa Croce. Our church is now the pro-cathedral of Messina!
