Chapter 3

There remains one bloody and characteristic episode to Ibrahim's victory. The king, says the Arab chronicler, was pious and naturally compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. In the midst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was the Bishop Procopio. The king spoke to him gently and nobly, "Because you are wise and old, O Bishop, I exhort you with soft words to obey my advice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of your companions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered from me. If you will embrace my laws, and deny the Christian religion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be more dear to me than all the Agarenes." The prelate only smiled. Then, full of wrath, the king said: "Do you smile while you are my prisoner? Know you not in whose presence you are?" "I smile truly," came the answer, "because I see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words into your mouth." Furious, the king called to his attendants, "Quick, break open his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand the secrets of his mind." While the command was being executed, Procopio reproved the king and comforted his companions. "The tyrant, swollen with rage, and grinding his teeth," says the narrative, "barbarously offered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it." Then he bade them strike off the bishop's head (who, we are told, was already half dead), and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all together. And as St. Pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; and Ibrahim, having accomplished his work, departed.

Some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them Crisione, the host of St. Elia. He went to bear the tidings to the saint; and being now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell his future. He met the customary fate of the curious in such things. "I foresee," said the discomfortable saint, "that within a few days you will die." And to make an end of St. Elia with Crisione, let me record here the simple Daniele's last act of piety to his master. It is little that in such company he fought with devils, or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful Psalter, the old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff into a lake. Such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by making a circuit of six miles he found the Psalter miraculously unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. But it was a mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge poor Daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do. Other survivors of the sack of Taormina, more fortunate than Crisione, watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the Greek emperor once more. He could not maintain war with the Saracens, but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful Taorminians in the possession of the city. After forty years of peace under this treaty it was again besieged for several months, and fell on Christmas night. Seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors into slavery in Africa. Greek troops, however, soon retook the city in a campaign that opened brilliantly in Sicily only to close in swift disaster; but for five years longer Taormina sustained continual siege, and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of Saracenic victory, we may well believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the city was left except its memory. Its name even was changed to Moezzia.

The Crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of Count Roger, the Norman, the great hero of mediaeval Sicily, who recovered the island to the Christian faith. Taormina, true to its tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory warfare Count Roger sat down before it with determination. He surrounded it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. Each day he inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a very narrow passage over the precipices. They rushed out on him, and, as he was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their cries attracted one Evandro, a Breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief's peril, threw himself between, and died in his place. Count Roger was not forgetful of this noble action. He recovered the body, held great funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church. The story appealed so to the old chronicler Malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse. After seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. It is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see.

Taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert; but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for five hundred years to come. It was like a rock of the sea over which conflicting billows break eternally. I will not narrate the feudal story of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order set up monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is now left but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend the librarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left. Among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learning, but their deeds and virtues may sleep unwaked by me. The kings and queens who took refuge here, and fled again, Messenian foray and Chiaramontane faction, shall go unrecorded. I must not, however, in the long roll of the famous figures of our beach forget that our English Richard the Lion-hearted was entertained here by Tancred in crusading days; and of notable sieges let me name at least that which the city suffered for its loyalty to the brave and generous Manfred when the Messenians surprised and wasted it, and that which with less destruction the enemies of the second Frederick inflicted on it, and that of the French under Charles II, who, contrary to his word, gave up the surrendered city to the soldiery for eight whole days--a terrible sack, of which Monsignore has heard old men tell. What part the citizens took in the Sicilian Vespers, and how the Parliament that vainly sought a king for all Sicily was held here, and in later times the marches of the Germans, Spaniards, and English--these were too long a tale. With one more signal memory I close this world-history, as it began, with a noble name. It was from our beach yonder that Garibaldi set out for Italy in the campaign of Aspromonte; hither he was brought back, wounded, to the friendly people, still faithful to that love of liberty which flowed in the old Taorminian blood.

I shut my books; but to my eyes the rock is scriptured now. What a leaf it is from the world-history of man upon the planet! Every race has splashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. It is only a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such a city, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of human fate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, are great centres of history; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of events. Here on this bare rock there is no thronging of illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial crime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. Again I use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the Mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. The torch of Greece, the light of the Cross, the streaming portent of the Crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from Greek democracy to Bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; Roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate at moments the hard human lot. And what has been the end? Go down into the streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. The men will hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form that speaks not of the want of individuals, of one generation, or of an age, but of the destitution of centuries stamped physically into the race. There is, as always, a prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate and better-born; but the common people lead toilsome lives, and among them suffering is widespread. Three thousand years of human life, and this the result! Yet I see many indications of a brave patriotism in the community, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, to stimulate, to encourage--the spirit of free and united Italy awakening here, too, with faith in the new age of liberty and hope of its promised blessings. And for a sign there stands in the centre of the poor fishing-village yonder a statue of Garibaldi.

VI

The rain-cloud is gone. The days are bright, warm, and clear, and every hour tempts me forth to wander about the hills. It is not spring, but the hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day there are new flowers--not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that I do not know their names. The trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it--but it is there. I go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on our cape, among the majestic rocks, I watch the swaying of the smooth deep-violet waters below, changing into indigo as they lap the rough clefts, or I loiter on the beach to see the fishers about their boats, weather-worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: and always I bring back something for memory, something unforeseen.

I have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of travel. It is blessed not to know what the gods will give. I remember once in other days I left the beach of Amalfi to row away to the isles of the Sirens, farther down the coast. It was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild morning, and I strained my sight, as every headland of the high cliff-coast was rounded, to catch the first glimpse of the low isles; and there came by a country boat-load of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, I saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping prow--a figure out of old Italian pictures, some young St. John, inexpressibly beautiful. I have forgotten how the isles of the Sirens looked, but that boy's face I shall never forget. It is such moments that give the Italy of the imagination its charm. Here, too, I have similar experiences. A day or two ago, when the bright weather began, I was threading the rough edge of a broken path under the hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand. Suddenly a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a little farther on a point of the crag, so strange that I was startled; but straightway I knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, the garments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. It came on me like a flash--_eccola_ the country of Theocritus!

I have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that one learns to understand the poets better. To see courts and governments, manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures and ruins--this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; but though I have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had my reward, I think no gain so great as that I never thought of, the light which travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, I should except that stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imagination which comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindred physical renderings of art. This latter advantage must necessarily be more narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar temperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and common to all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, and whatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for our possession may be an important part of life. I think none can fully taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of English song even, until he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and in the case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very great. I had trodden many an Italian hillside before I noticed how subtly Dante's landscape had become realized in my mind as a part of nature. I own to believing that Virgil's storms never blew on the sea until once, near Salerno, as I rode back from Paestum, there came a storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted--such masses of ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a commingling of all these--a revelation of the wrath of colour! The waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished, and the dark rain came down; and I said, "'Tis one of Virgil's storms." Such a one you will find also in Theocritus, where he hymns the children of Leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. The winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by showers of iron hail."

I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems. It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the campagna in the meadows, and that further _fiume freddo_, the cold stream,--"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine,"--each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.

On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to the shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often as I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on the sands.

"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea."

This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl is touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is a terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes--despair made flesh. How long has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before us the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old men. The shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now as then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures.

A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not far from here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after the fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he piped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I recover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot "every stone upon the way spins singing," make what speed I can, I come not to the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion's prayer: "Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam--dear Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!" Dead now is that ritual. Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. Sweet was his flute's first triumph over Menaleas: "Then was the boy glad, and leaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn leaps about his mother"; but sweeter was the unwon victory when he strove with Damoetas: "Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful flute. Damoetas fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. Neither won the victory, but both were invincible." And him, too, I miss who loved his friend, and wished that they twain might "become a song in the ears of all men unborn," even for their love's sake; and prayed, "Would, O Father Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and that when two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the irremeable stream: the loving-kindness that was between thee and thy gracious friend is even now in all men's mouths, and chiefly on the lips of the young." Hill and fountain and pine, the gray sea and Mother Etna, are here; but no children gather in the land, as once about the tomb of Diocles at the coming in of the spring, contending for the prize of the kisses--"Whoso most sweetly touches lip to lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his mother. Happy is he who judges those kisses of the children." Lost over the bright furrows of the sea is Europa riding on the back of the divine bull as Moschus beheld her--"With one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, and with the other caught up the purple fold of her garment, lest it might trail and be wet in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from the border-land of mythic story, that was then this world's horizon, yet more faintly the fading voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout of Herakles. Faint now as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth and maiden and children; dimly I see them, vaguely I hear them; at last there remains only "the hoar sea's infinite spray." And will you say it was in truth all a dream? Were the poor fisherman in their toil alone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a local habitation and a name? It was Virgil's dream and Spenser's; and some secret there was--something still in our breasts--that made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softened with sweet thoughts.