The Authoress of the Odyssey / Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands

by Samuel Butler

"Is there water there now?"

"I should think so, but cannot be certain."

"Can you take us to it?"

"No; the key of the ground is at Trapani."

"They say there is a bull in the further recesses of the cavern?"

"They say so, but we have never seen him; all we know for certain is that there is a treasure."

Here the boy again brightened up, and said that this was certain.

When we had finished our questions the contadino took one of our party aside, and said, confidentially, "Be sure of me, for I have a strong stomach" (i.e., I can keep a secret). "When you come to remove the treasure, which I can see that you intend to do, you must take me with you and give me my share. If you come by night the dogs will bark, and I shall know that you are there. I will then come down and help you, but you must give me my share."

I wrote the above conversation down, in Italian, immediately on my return to Trapani, and my Sicilian friends signed it, at my request, as a correct report. It occurs to me to add that there is no other cave near Trapani to which any story of a hidden treasure attaches.

Last year (May, 1896) I visited the cave again, this time with my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones, who has gone over the whole of the ground described in this book, to make sure that I have not overstated my case. We were accompanied by Signor Sugameli of Trapani, to whom I owe the correction of my error in believing the more conspicuous of the two caves to be called the grotta del toro—for so, on my first visit to Trapani in 1892, my friends in the town had assured me, not knowing the existence of the one which really bears the name. Jones and Signor Sugameli scrambled into the interior of the cavern, but I, being elderly and somewhat lame, did not venture. They found the cave end, after about thirty feet, in a mass of solid rock; but few who have gone above ten or twelve feet will be likely to go any further, and I can well believe that the writer of the Odyssey, like the peasants of to-day, believed that no one could get to the end of it. My friends found water.