Chapter 14

SULPHUR

Caltanissetta is a busy town of some 45,000 inhabitants near the middle of the island and about 2000 feet above the sea. It depends for its prosperity on almonds, grapes, olives and sulphur, especially the last, for there is much sulphur in the pores of the rock. I have several friends there of whom one, Beppe (Giuseppe) Catena, is an engineer with an interest in Trabonella, the largest sulphur mine in the neighbourhood, and another, Gigino (Luigi) Cordova, is an advocate. Sometimes Beppe is in the town and sometimes Gigino and I go to Trabonella and find him there. It is an hour's drive along a road that winds among rolling hills. Through the depressions between the near hills other hills appear, and through their depressions higher hills, and beyond these are higher hills again until the view is bounded by the Monti delle Madonie where the snow lingers until May. It must have been some such country as this that was in the mind of him who first spoke of the sea running mountains high.

I do not know whether it is more beautiful in spring or in autumn. I know that in spring the grass under the orange trees is spotted with purple flowers, and that crimson vetch incarnadines the hills, as though Lady Macbeth had dipped her little hand into their multitudinous green; the hedges bloom with rosemary and scarlet geranium, the banks with sweet pea and brilliant mesembryanthemum, and the rough places are full of asphodel; there are a few eucalyptus trees and now and then a solemn row of cypresses; we may pass a hut of grey thatch and perhaps a few horses or a sprinkling of tethered goats; sometimes we see a herd of bullocks tended by a boy who has come out this morning in black sheep-skin leggings up to his hips, and I think he learnt his song from happy nightingales that set the April moonlight to music.

But in autumn the prospect is as fair. The harvest is over; the earth, bronzed by the summer heat, is resting after her labour and nature is making variations in the ochres and umbers that in spring were half hidden, huddled together in the steep places where nothing will flourish; the stubble shows in lines of pale yellow on the brown earth among patches of almost colourless green and other patches black with burning which change the value of the olives, pistachios, carubas and aloes; here and there is a shrivelled thistle, here and there a lone pine; sometimes we see a string of mules winding in and out on its way home, losing and finding itself among the undulations like a little fleet of fishing boats that rise and fall with the swell, and I think Schubert must have passed this way when he felt stirring within him the mellow loveliness of the second Entr'acte to _Rosamunde_:

[Picture: Rosamunde]

We need not choose one or the other, we need only wait to have both; for spring is the modulation to the dominant, the awakening, the going out in search of adventure, while autumn is the return to the tonic, the coming home in search of repose, the falling asleep; the first leads to the second as naturally as youth leads to age.

Last time Gigino and I went to Trabonella it was spring, and we took with us his young brother Michelino, aged thirteen, who had never been there before. We arrived in the afternoon and found Beppe, who took us round, and we showed Michelino the works. Empty trucks were gliding down a sloping railway into the mine, while others were gliding up filled with the harvest of the deep. We saw the broken pieces of rock being put into great furnaces and we watched the treacly sulphur that was melted out of the pores and came oozing through a tap into a mould. It is then purified and made into shapes like candles, and I thought of Kentish giants handling such bars of sulphur to fumigate the hops in the glow of an oast-house fire. We introduced Michelino to the overseers, directors and managers and to the doctor. We returned to the hut where Beppe lives, and dined out of doors in the yard behind. It all seemed to me very healthy and like the accounts one reads and the illustrations one sees of life in a new country, with the advantage that Caltanissetta is only about eight kilometres away. But Beppe objected that the nearness of Caltanissetta was no advantage because it induces a feeling of "Well, it doesn't matter; I can always go to town for that," and so they put up with much that they might remedy if they were really beyond the reach of civilisation. Consequently he was not able to treat us as we deserved. We replied that we were glad it was so, because he was treating us much better.

After dinner we joined the other managers and directors in a room of a larger building; a mandoline and guitar were brought and some of them played. Presently Michelino sang. He surprised me by the beauty and power of his young voice and by his management of it, also by his musical intelligence and by his complete self-possession. He sang the tenor songs of many operas and other popular melodies, especially I remember his singing the _Stornelli Montagnoli_, which is so beautiful that the buffo said it would save itself in the Escape from Paris. To all this the guitar-player vamped an accompaniment which Michelino relentlessly silenced by a gesture when it became unbearable. It was absurd to see him lording it over the company, nearly a dozen of us and the youngest nearly old enough to be his father. When it was time to retire, beds were found for the visitors and I passed a comfortable night in Beppe's hut.

Next day we were taken into the mine to see what goes on underneath the freedom of the rolling hills. We dived down in a lift, ever so deep into the darkness, and probably it was dangerous, but when I go down lifts and see over mines, as when I wander among the tottering ruins of Messina, I have learnt to hope that the accident will be some other day. We saw nearly naked men, monsters of the abyss, crouching in cavernous places, pick-axing the sulphurous rock in the dim light of their miner's lamps, while others were bringing broken pieces along the low, dark galleries and sending them up in the trucks to the light. And the workers were groaning and moaning as they worked. Day after day, always the same monotonous groaning and moaning, always the same monotonous pick-axing the rock in the dim light, always the same monotonous sending up the broken pieces. It was very hot in some places and very cold in others, and I was glad to follow the broken pieces up and return to the fresh air and the sunshine.

Beppe told me that Trabonella is the largest sulphur mine in Europe, that the total length of its galleries is thirty kilometres, which is about as far as from the Albert Hall to Windsor Castle. They employ a thousand miners, and the boys begin work outside the mine at twelve and inside at fifteen. There has been an alteration in the law; formerly they began younger and were deprived of the little education for which they now have time, and the hard work so deformed their tender bodies that they could not pass the army test. This is their modulation to the dominant, their awakening to life. It is not a pleasing prospect; nor is the early autumn of ill-health and decrepitude to which it naturally leads any more pleasing. They pass their lives in the dark, morally and physically, and frequently a sudden fall of rock cripples, if it does not destroy, the victim; then there are broken pieces of a different kind to be taken along the low dark galleries and brought up to the light.

I was in Caltanissetta one Saturday evening and saw the funeral of two who had been killed in this way that morning. First came a band playing a funeral march, that was all the more melancholy because the instruments were distressingly discordant, as though in their grief the men had not had time to tune them. Then came comrades carrying candles, and comrades bearing first one coffin, then the second, plain wooden coffins with no pall. Others carried chairs on which the coffins were rested when the bearers were changed. There were no priests. But there were priests the next day for the wedding of another comrade. Beppe told me that about 90 per cent of their funerals are conducted without priests and about 90 per cent of their weddings are conducted with priests.

They told me of one sulphur-miner who, having seen enough funerals, left the mine and went to Palermo in search of work. He was taken on by a contractor who was levelling a piece of high ground, on which blocks of dwellings have since been erected behind the Teatro Massimo, and began work at six o'clock one morning. Five minutes later he was killed and buried by a fall of earth.

In the mine they are in constant fear of this death. They work very hard and the air is bad; they come up to sleep, to eat and to gamble. The air they sleep in cannot be much better than that in the mine, for they are laid out in close huts on shelves, like rolls of stuff in a draper's shop. They hardly know the difference between youth and age, between spring and autumn. They scarcely get a glimpse of the landscape except on Saturdays and Sundays, and then they are intent upon something else. After their week of labour they feel the necessity of expansion; they receive their wages and go to Caltanissetta; those who are married sleep with their wives, while those who are unmarried sleep quite alone as the soldiers did after the death and burial of l'Invincible Monsieur d'Malbrough. They become free human beings for two days. I have seen the piazza full of them on Sunday morning--so full that I thought it would have been easier to walk across it, treading on their heads, than to push through the crowd. Unfortunately their notion of the life of a free human being does not stop at loafing about in the piazza. They also go to the wine shops, where they offer one another the means of forgetting that their oases of rest lie in a desert of drudgery, and sometimes this becomes the means of their forgetting everything else as well.

Gigino has written a paper upon the connection between alcoholism and crime. He told me that the consumption of alcohol in Sicily is less than in northern countries, but that there is more crime. I naturally inquired whether it would not tend to lessen the crime if the Sicilians would drink rather more. He replied that, as so often happens at the beginning of any inquiry, there are other considerations and I must not be in a hurry. As for the sulphur-miners, they need not drink more, but if they would spread fairly over the week the amount they consume during Saturday and Sunday, then, although they would risk incurring the consequences of chronic alcoholism, they would avoid those of acute alcoholism. For the need of expansion causes them to drink more than they can stand all at once, then they quarrel and commit murders. So that many of those who begin life as boys in the mine, and week after week escape the falling rocks, live to be killed in a drunken brawl, and one does not know which prospect is the more ugly.

I asked whether their condition could not be improved by raising their wages. They asked whether I wished to dislocate the commerce of the world by raising the price of sulphur. I had no such desire and, indeed, did not know, till they told me, that sulphur enters into so many manufactures as it does. Here again in seeking to ameliorate conditions with which one is imperfectly familiar one must not be in a hurry. It is not altogether a question of raising their wages, they receive from four and a half to five francs a day, which, for five days, amounts to between twenty-two francs fifty and twenty-five francs a week; there are many labourers who receive less and do more with it. Of course, they would like more wages--everyone would like more wages--but what the sulphur-miners really want is the intelligence to use wisely what they have and also some change, if it were possible, in the conditions under which their work is done. Beppe assured me that the question is not being overlooked, but it has roots which extend further and are more complicated than the galleries in the mine--roots which are tangled with the roots of other questions affecting other interests, and these again affect others. So I bowed before the other considerations and hoped that with the changes that are continually taking place in Sicily something may soon be done for the sulphur-miners, trusting that in the meantime we are not paying too dearly for the advantage of getting our sulphur so cheap.