No doubt the usual things that happen to travellers happened to Jane and Peripatetica at Enna-Castrogiovanni, and on their way to it. Things annoying and amusing, tiresome or delightful, but they have no memory of these things, all lesser matters having been swallowed up in the final satisfaction of their quest.

Memory is an artist who works in mosaic, and all the fantastic jumble and contrast of the experiences of travel she heaps pell-mell together in her bag. Bits of sights but half seen, but half understood; vague memories of other things seen before and seemingly but slightly related to these new impressions, mere faint associations but partly realised, along with keen emotions and strong pleasures; all tumbled in together and rubbing corners with petty vexations, small inconveniences, practical details. Memory gathers them all without discrimination and carries them along with her, a most unsatisfactory-looking mess at first sight, out of which it would seem nothing much could be made. But give her time. While one’s attention is occupied with other matters she is busy—sorting, arranging, rejecting here, adding there. Recollections that bulked large at first she often files down to a mere point; much that appeared but dull rubbish with no colour she finds valuable when pushed into the background, because its neutral tones serve to bring out more clearly the outlines of the design. Dark bits are skilfully employed for the sake of the contrast, and to intensify the warm tones of richer fragments. The shadowy associations give body and modelling to impressions otherwise flat and ineffective. All at once the picture is seen; a complete delineation of an episode, taking form and warmth, and vivid life; and over the whole she spreads the magic bloom of distance, which transforms the crude materials, hides the joinings of the mosaic, and makes of it a treasure of the soul.

Something of this sort she did for Castrogiovanni. ’Tis but an impressionist picture. They only see, looking back to it, two great, divine shadows breathing such passion and pain, such essential, heart-stirring loveliness that the eye hardly observes the wreathed border about the picture, a border which serves merely as a frame for those two significant figures revived from the dreams of primitive man.

Here is an incident taken from the unimportant frame of the picture....

Jane and Peripatetica are in the train. It seems quaint to be finding one’s way to the “Plutonian Shore” in a little puffing, racketting Sicilian train. To be properly in the picture they should have been included in a band of pilgrim shepherds piping in the hills as they wander upward to the great shrine of Demeter, to give thanks for the increase of their flocks, to offer her white curds, and goat cheeses, and the snowy wool of washed fleeces. Pilgrims who are weeks upon the road; climbing higher and higher each day through the steady sunshine, and sleeping at night under the large stars, with the little olive-wood fire, that cooked the evening meal, winking and smouldering beside them in the dewy darkness. Resting here and there at the Greek farms, where new pilgrims are waiting to add themselves to the pious band.

Jane, who consults her Theocritus oftener in Sicily than her Baedeker—for she says she finds that Theocritus has on the whole a better literary style—is the one who suggests this idyllic alternative.

“Just listen to him!” she cries. “This would be travel really worth while recording. He is telling of just such a journey, and of the pause at one of the hill farms:

“‘So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned aside into the house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with delight in beds of sweet tamarisk and fresh cuttings from the vines, strewed on the ground. Many poplars and elm trees were waving over our heads, and not far off the running of the sacred water from the cave of the nymphs warbled to us; in the shimmering grass the sunburnt grasshoppers were busy with their talk, and from afar the owl cried softly out of the tangled thorns of the blackberry. The larks were singing and the hedge birds, and the turtle dove moaned; the bees flew round and round the fountains, murmuring softly. The scent of late summer and the fall of the year was everywhere; the pears fell from the trees at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at our sides, and the young plum trees bent to the earth with the weight of their fruit.

“‘The wax, four years old, was loosed from the heads of the wine jars. O! nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Parnassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the stony cave of Phulus? Was it nectar like this that made that mighty shepherd on Anapus’ shore, Polyphemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses’ ships, dance among his sheep-folds? A cup like this ye poured out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over the threshing floor. May it be mine once more to dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of corn; and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies and handfuls of corn in her two hands!’”

Instead of being accompanied on their arcadian journey by Eucritus and the fair Amyntichus, they have as companions in the little carriage of the Regie Ferrovia the two dark foreigners from Syracuse, upon whose nationality they have speculated at idle moments. They prove to be Poles. Two gentlemen from Cracow, escaped for a moment from its snows to make a little “giro” in the Sicilian sunshine.

Conversation develops around Ætna—of all places! Peripatetica catches sight of it, as the train rounds a curve, sees it suddenly looming against the sky, a glittering cone of silver swimming upon a base of misty hyacinth-blue. By a gesture she calls everyone’s attention to this new and charming pose of that ever spectacular mountain.

Jane glances up from her book and signifies a condescending approval, but the sight has a most startling and electrifying effect upon the Poles. They miss, in their enthusiasm, flinging themselves from the carriage window merely by a hair’s breadth, and crying, “Ætna! Ætna!” with passionate satisfaction, not only solemnly clasp hands with one another, but also grasp and shake the limply astonished hands of Jane and Peripatetica. Transpires that the foreigners have been three weeks in Sicily without once having caught a glimpse of the ever present, ever dominant mountain, since, with sulky coquetry, whenever they were within sight it promptly hid in veils of mist, and now they are bound for Cracow, via Palermo, facing uneasily the confession at home of having been to the play and missed seeing the star.

They hang from the window in eager endeavour to cram all lost opportunities into one, and rend the heavens with lamentations when the carriage comes to rest immediately opposite a tiny station whose solid minuteness is sufficient to blot from sight all that distant majesty.

“It is like life,” the taller foreigner wails, sinking back baffled from an attempt to pierce the obdurate masonry with a yearning eye. “One little ugly emotion close by can shut out from one’s sight all the loftiest beauties of existence!”

This fine generalization gathers acuity from the fact that a sharp turn soon after leaving the station piles up elevations that quickly rob them of their long-sought opportunity, but for the rest of the time that the paths of the four lie together the Poles insist upon attributing to the direct intervention of Jane and Peripatetica the wiping of this blot from their travelling ’scutcheon—an attitude which Jane and Peripatetica find both soothing and refreshing, and they affect a large familiarity and possessiveness with the Volcano, which the Poles bear with polite and grateful respect; the more so, no doubt, as the two seekers possess—as Americans—a novelty almost more startling and intense than Ætna. The gentlemen from Cracow have never met Americans until now, and make no attempt to disguise the exhilaration of so unwonted a spectacle—confessing that in their turn they too have been speculating upon the racial identity of “the foreign ladies,” whose nationality they were unable to guess. They are consumed with an inexhaustible curiosity to get the “natives’” point of view, and exchange secret glances of surprise and pleasure at the exhibition of human intelligence in a people so remote from Cracow. When the necessary change of train detaches them from their eager investigations Peripatetica is still futilely engaged in her persistent endeavour to combat in the European mind its strange delusion as to the real relations of the sexes in her own land.

... “No; the American man in no respect resembles the Sicilian donkey ... no; he does not ordinarily spend his life toiling humbly under the intolerable loads laid upon him by his imperious mate.... No; he is not a dull unintelligent drudge wholly unworthy of the radiant beings who permit him to surround them with an incredible luxury.... No; the American woman is not his intellectual superior. In everything of real practical importance he is immensely the superior.... No; he isn’t this.... No; he isn’t that.... He isn’t any one of the things the European thinks he is and—good bye!”

The mountains all this while have been peaking up; mounting, climbing, rolling more wildly, and at last two of them soar splendidly, sweep up close on to three thousand feet into the sky ... Castrogiovanni and Calascibetta, and the train drops Jane and Peripatetica at their feet.

Memory has cast out, or has pushed into the background, the long weary jolting up to the wild little wind-swept town; makes no record of the hotel or the fellow tourists; has jotted down a certain straight wild beauty in the inhabitants, who have eagle-like Saracen profiles, but grey Norman eyes. Has left well in the foreground a dark castle, and a cluster of half-ruined towers. All else of modern details she has rejected, except a great wash of blue, a vast vista of tumbling broken landscape, huge and stern, for she has been busy with a picture of the past; building up an imagination of vanished gods moving about their mighty affairs, playing out Olympian dramas in this lofty land. Here is the very centre of the God’s-land, the “umbilicus Siciliæ,” the Key of Sicily, Enna “the inexpugnable,” the strongest natural fortress in the world, which no one ever took except by treachery; which the Saracens besieged in vain for thirty-one years, and when they finally got it, through a treason, the Normans in their turn could not dislodge them until all Sicily had been theirs for a quarter of a century, and then only through another betrayal. In the great slave war Eunus, the serf, held it against the whole power of Rome for two years until he too was betrayed.

Broken and wild as is the land it is still cultivated; the olive still climbs up to where the clouds come down, but where are the magnificent forests, the wonder and joy of antiquity? Where the brooks and streams and lakes, whose dropping waters sang all through the records of the elder world? Where are those fields so blessed by Demeter that they offered to the hands of men illimitable floods of golden grain? Where are the vines that wreathed the mountains’ brows with green and purple grapes, as if it had been the brow of Dionysius the wine god? Where, too, are the meadows so thick with flowers that for the richness of the perfume the hounds could not hold the scent of the game? Meadows where the bees wantoned in such honeyed delight that the air vibrated with their murmuring as with the vibrating of multitudinous harp strings?...

Listen to the story, which, when it was told was only a prophecy and a warning, but a warning never heeded.

Erysicthon cuts down the grove sacred to Demeter. A grove so thick “that an arrow could hardly pass through; its pines and fruit trees and tall poplars within, and the water like pale gold running through the conduits.” One of the poplars receives the first stroke, and Demeter, hearing the ringing of the axe, appears, stern and awful, hooded and veiled, and carrying poppies in her hand. To the ravager of her groves she threatens a divine curse of an everlasting thirst, of an insatiable, unsatisfied hunger, and the workmen, awed, depart, leaving the axes sticking in the trees, but Erysicthon drives them to their task again with blows, and soon the grove is levelled, and the heat of the day enters where once all was sweet shade. Erysicthon laughs at the futile curse of the goddess; he has had his will and nothing has happened. The water still runs and he can slake his drought, but the water escapes as he stoops for it, sinking into the earth before his eyes, leaving upon his lips only choking dust. No one can safely ignore the warnings of the gods, and he wanders, whipped by intolerable longings, and dies dreadfully, raving of his own folly.

Neither Greeks, Romans, Saracens, nor Norman heed this parable, told ages and ages before the meaning of the loss of forests was understood. All over the land the clothing of oaks, chestnuts, and pines was stripped from the hills, and slowly but surely the curse of Demeter has turned it into a place of thirst. To-day less than five per cent of the whole island contains timber, and these high lands, these “fields which in the days of the Greeks returned one hundred times the amount of seed sowed, now yield but seven-fold, and only one-ninth of all the land is productive.” This is the story of the ravaging of Enna, once the true garden of Paradise, and now a rocky waste burned to the bone.

Always from the very earliest records the goddess of the harvest was worshipped in this place. Long before the coming of the Greeks the Siculians had here a shrine to Gaia, the Earth Mother, from whose brown breast man sucked his life and food. And the Siculians had traditions of the Sikels making pilgrimages to Enna to give thanks to a goddess representing some principle of fertility, by whose power the earth was made blessed to its children. Very vague and shadowy are the traditions of the worship of this Bread-giver. There are hints of a great cave with a rude dark figure within, this idol having, curiously, a head roughly resembling the head of a horse, where the people timidly laid their offerings of the first fruits of their primitive culture. This figure is heard of later at Eleusis, to which the Greeks transpose the image and the worship, but the myth, so sympathetic to the Greek nature, becomes refined and spiritualized; takes on many new plays of thought and colour, and when the great temple of Demeter is built here the story has cleared and defined itself, and is hung about with the garlands of a thousand gracious imaginings.

Our Lady of Bread—daughter herself of Zeus, the overarching sky—has one child, Persephone, the spirit of Spring, that dear vernal impulse which rejuvenates all the world and “puts a spirit of life in everything”; that is forever sweetly renewing hope of happiness. Persephone’s playmates are the maiden goddesses, Pallas and Artemis, and also those light spirits of the fields, the water and the air—the nymphs, the oreads, and the oceanides—but she is not without duties and labours too, for “Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to be in vain. In it she marked out with her needle the houses of the gods and the series of the elements, showing by what law nature, the parent of all, settled the strife of ancient times.... The lighter elements are borne aloft; the air grows bright with heat; the sea flows; the earth hangs in its place. And there were divers colours in it; she illuminated the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into the water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers; and under her skilful hand the threads with their inwrought lustre swell up in counterfeit of the waves; you might think the sea wind caused them to creep over the rocks and sands. She put in the fire zones, marking with a red ground the midmost zone possessed by burning heat; on either side lay the two zones proper for human life, and at the extremes she drew the twin zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad with the lines of perpetual frost. She works in, too, the sacred places of Dis and the Manes so fatal to her. And an omen of her doom was not wanting, for as she worked, as if with foreknowledge of the future, her face became wet with a sudden burst of tears. And now in the utmost border of the tissue she had begun to wind in the wavy line of the Ocean that goes round about all, but the door sounds on its hinges, and she perceives the goddesses coming; the unfinished work drops from her hands and a ruddy blush lights her clear and snow-white face.”...

Leaving her needle in the many-coloured web, she wanders down the mountain side to Lake Pergusa, then lying like a blue jewel in enamelled meads, but ever since that tragic day dark and sulphurous, as with fumes of hell.

This is the story of the ravishment, as told in the great Homeric Hymn that was sung in honour of the Mother of Corn.

“I begin the song of Demeter. The song of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away as she played apart from her mother with the deep-bosomed daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft grass—roses and the crocus and the fair violets and flags and hyacinths, and above all the strange flower of the narcissus, which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth for the first time to snare the footsteps of the flower-like girl. A hundred heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it, and the sky and the earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the scent thereof. She stretched forth her hands to take the flower; thereupon the earth opened and the King of the great nation of the Dead sprang out with his immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl, and bore her away weeping on his golden chariot. She uttered a shrill cry, calling upon Zeus; but neither man nor god heard her voice, nor even the nymphs of the meadow where she played; except Hecate only, sitting as ever in her cave, half veiled with a shining veil, and thinking delicate thoughts, she, and the Sun also, heard her.

“So long as Persephone could still see the earth and the sky and the sea with the great waves moving, and the beams of the sun, and still thought to see again her mother, and the race of the ever-living gods, so long hope soothed her in the midst of her grief. The peaks of the hills and the depths of the sea echoed her cry. And the Mother heard it. A sharp pain seized her at the heart; she plucked the veil from her hair, and cast down the blue hood from her shoulders, and fled forth like a bird, seeking her daughter over dry land and sea.

“Nine days she wandered up and down upon the earth, having blazing torches in her hands, and in her great sorrow she refused to taste of ambrosia, or of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her face. But when the tenth morning came Hecate met her, having a light in her hands. But Hecate had heard the voice only, and had seen no one, and could not tell Demeter who had borne the girl away. And Demeter said not a word, but fled away swiftly with Hecate, having the blazing torches in her hands, till they came to the Sun, the watchman of Gods and men; and the goddess questioned him, and the Sun told her the whole story.”...

What a picture the Greek singer makes of the melancholy earth calling for comfort to the moon! for Hecate was not Artemis, but a vaguer, vaster principle of the night; an impersonalized shadow of the Huntress, as Hertha was the shadow, formless and tremendous, of Demeter. Hecate was a pale luminous force, “half veiled with a shining veil, and thinking delicate thoughts,” and ten days later, having rounded to the full, the bereaved mother meets her “bearing a light in her hands,” though the night is nearing morning, and moon and earth turn together toward the coming sun.

The Homeric Hymn tells much of the wandering and grieving mother; of her disguises; of her nursing of the sick child Demophoon, whose own mother snatched him back from the immortality which the goddess was ensuring by passing him through the fire—as many a loving and timid mother since has held her son back from the fires that confer immortality. The Hymn tells of her teaching of Triptolemus of the winged feet, instructing him in Eleusinian mysteries—“those mysteries which no tongue may speak. Only blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his lot after death is not as the lot of other men!”

But Jane and Peripatetica loved more the story of the ending of her vigil, when Hermes descended into Hell in his chariot.

“And Persephone ascended into it, and Hermes took the reins in his hands and drove out through the infernal halls; and they two passed quickly over the ways of that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor of the rivers, and the deep ravines of the hills, nor the cliffs of the shore resisting them; till at last Hermes placed Persephone before the door of the temple where her mother was, who, seeing her, ran out quickly to meet her, like a Mænad coming down a mountain side dusky with woods.”

So these two saw Persephone come home; saw the spring return to the earth in the high places of the gods. Saw the land, even though no longer a paradise, yet—despite Erysicthon’s foolish waste of the sacred trees—saw it “laden with leaves and flowers and the waving corn,” and, having seen it, they passed on through Sicily satisfied.