Part 13

When we told our smiling host that we intended to ride in one day from his hotel to Castelvetrano, the point of departure for Selinus, he said the thing was impossible. We told him that, while we admitted his judgment in all that pertained to horses, we were going to make the sixty-two miles which, according to Baedeker, lay between us and our goal between sunrise and sunset, however bad the road might be. He then, like a true sportsman, got interested, offered to bet, and when we declined begged us to telegraph back to him if we really did it.

As we had to wake up the cook the next morning, after waking up ourselves, the sun was well up in the heavens before we got off. But the coffee which cost us so much time must have told on our gait; for a fellow-countryman, whom we first met two days later at Palermo, seemed impressed by it, and rather proud of it. He asked, "Didn't I see you go through Porto Empedocle the day before yesterday morning on bicycles?" When we assented he said: "Well, I told the American Consul who was with me, 'I bet dose vas American boys.'" And the next day he repeated, as if pleased with his own sagacity, "I told the Consul, 'I bet dose vas American boys.'"

As we started the next morning toward Selinus, after passing the night at Castelvetrano, I realized that this, more even than Syracuse, was my chief object of interest in this long-delayed Sicilian journey.

The history of this short-lived colony of a colony is invested with a pathetic interest. Planted by Sicilian Megara in 628 B.C., as an outpost of Hellas toward the west, it was a standing challenge to the Phœnicians. But there was not always war between Hellas and Canaan. The Phœnicians, who had long been in possession of the west end of the island, were bent on gain, while the Greek sought rather for a free unfolding of his civic life; and so, Selinus, with a little temporizing, got on with its neighbors.

There were some strange vicissitudes in Sicilian politics. From the time when Carthage appeared in Sicily as a protector of the older Phœnician settlements, Selinus saw its advantage in siding with her against other rivals. On the great day of Himera, Gelon and Theron had to contend against Selinus as well as against Carthage. This off-side play was not, however, regarded by the other Sicilian cities as sufficient cause for shutting Selinus out of the sisterhood of states.

But, while Selinus had an eye to profit, it did not, like Akragas, forget the art of war. That she was a power in western Sicily in the days when Carthage was so strangely inactive for seventy years after Himera, is shown by an inscription of this time, which mentions a victory won by the Selinuntians "with the aid of Zeus and Phobos and Herakles and Apollo and Poseidon and the Tyndaridæ and Athena and Malophoros and Pasikrateia and the other gods, but especially Zeus." This drawing in of so large a part of the pantheon implies that it was a great victory. Probably it was won from Segesta, that most hated Elymian neighbor. But Segesta knew how to help herself. After she had lured Athens to destruction in this same quarrel, she invoked the Carthaginian on a mission of destruction. For the Carthaginian was not subdued, but was biding his time, and, when he again fell upon Sicily, it was his old ally, Selinus, that first felt the weight of his arm. Then Zeus and Phobos seemed to forsake her. But her conduct was such in that awful visitation that Hellas had no reason to blush for this daughter.

The force which Hannibal led against her was, at the lowest estimate, 100,000, which was more than the total population of the city. The first attack on the land side, where the walls were weak and out of repair because no danger had threatened for years, was repulsed. A call for help was sent to both Akragas and Syracuse. The former might have had its contingent before the walls in three days, allowing one for the messenger. But Akragas waited for the Syracusans, who were two days farther off, to come and take them on the way. She paid the penalty for this delay three years later. She, as well as Syracuse, ought to have known that at Selinus they would be fighting for their own life. Syracuse was, moreover, an ally of Selinus in the war against Athens, which was finished only three years before with such eclat as to make Syracuse a proper champion of the Greek cities against the great enemy.

It is probable that the call for help was sent out before the enemy actually made its assault, but so speedy were the movements of the Carthaginians that one might have expected even prompt aid to come too late. Selinus, however, held out with such tenacity as to frustrate all calculation. For nine days, in the consciousness that she stood as a vanguard of Hellas, while the eastern hills were eagerly scanned for the succor that was hourly expected, Selinus conducted a defence rarely equalled in history.

There were not men enough to allow reliefs in defending the wall. The same men stood at their posts day and night. The old men brought new weapons, and sharpened those that were dull. The women carried food and water. Even on the ninth day, when the fierce Iberian mercenaries broke through the wall and the weary defenders, and got inside the city, the defence did not cease. The city had to be taken house by house, men and women hurling down stones from the house-tops until the supply was exhausted. And now, house after house was pillaged by men spurred on by the promise of free plunder given by Hannibal; and delicate women fell into hands compared with which the claws of wild beasts were tender. Soldiers paraded the streets with heads on the points of their spears and strings of hands slung over their shoulders. Only 2,600 survivors somehow found their way to Akragas.

On this very day a large force started from Syracuse; but when, united with the contingent of Akragas, it confronted the Carthaginians, the woe of Selinus was accomplished. Hannibal told these belated allies that he had dealt Selinus only its deserts, and that even its gods had pronounced against it. What a theme for a Jeremiah!

The six large temples of Selinus lie in a worse condition than that in which the Carthaginians left them. Earthquakes have been more active here than at Akragas. But these ruins, in two large groups, one on the acropolis and one on a plateau to the east, are the most interesting, as well as the most impressive, ruins in Europe. Their interest lies in the fact that they present us in tangible form the history of Greek architecture as it unfolded itself in a provincial town. There is Temple C (probably a Herakles temple; but archæologists have refrained from giving doubtful names, and designated the temples by letters. Perhaps the names given at Syracuse and Girgenti, though false, are better pegs to serve the memory than letters), with "shapeless sculpture," the well-known metope representing Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa, and another with Heracles carrying the mischievous Kerkopes flung over his shoulder. These grotesque attempts at sculpture, as well as the general consideration that the first thought of a colony was to erect a temple, allow us to date this oldest temple of Selinus as early as 600 B.C. The architecture is vastly better than the sculpture, a complete Doric style, with something of the clumsiness which marks the venerable ruin at Corinth. Then we may notice Temple E, probably a Hera temple, the southernmost of the three on the eastern plateau, a large and beautiful temple, once most gorgeously painted, and giving us, perhaps, more light than any other temple on the subject of polychromy in Doric architecture. The metopes, the best of which is Zeus receiving Hera on Mount Ida, mark this temple as a product of the early part of the fifth century, about the time of the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Then, at the other end of this line, on the eastern plateau, is Temple G, so enormous that it is supposed, like its brother at Akragas, to have been meant for none other than Zeus, the King of the gods. It is a few feet longer and a few feet wider than the great Akragas temple. Its date is given with a melancholy certainty; for it, as well as the Akragas temple, was never finished. It may well have taken a small community like this as much as the "forty and six years" which the Temple of Jerusalem required to put up such a colossal building. An especial interest attaches to it because we see it, as it were, stopped midway in a lively process of coming into being. Some of the huge drums are combined into columns, a few of which are fluted from top to bottom, while others have a little start of fluting at the top and bottom, and still others are only cut in the form of a twenty-sided polygon. But one must go to Campo Bello, about five miles distant, to feel in a still more lively manner the interruption of the building process. Here one sees a cliff where in one case workmen had just marked out, with a circular groove, a column-drum to be detached from its bed. In another place is one around which workmen have hewn for months, so that it is almost ready to be detached. Hard by are some already detached and rolled a little distance toward Selinus; still others are found transported half-way or more to the temple. The people of the country are filled with wonder at the sight. They recognize the fact that all these blocks were meant for the great temple; and some of them told an early traveller that the women of Selinus used to carry these stones on their heads from the quarry to the temple, spinning flax all the way as they went, adding, with naïveté: "But, you know, it was a race of women much larger than ours."

These interesting temples show, as they stand side by side, great freedom in the application of the rules of Doric style. For instance, the number of columns on the side of a hexastyle temple varies from thirteen to seventeen. The number of steps also varies from two to six, instead of the canonical three.

When we visited Segesta the next day and saw its temple, also unfinished, as it was when the city was stricken down by the Greek Agathocles, we felt little pity for this city which had stirred up so much mischief for its foe, Selinus, and for its friend, Athens. But perhaps, after all, this Elymian city's greatest crime was saying, "I must live." If Selinus refused to accept this proposition, Segesta called in Athens or Carthage, regardless of the woes that might in consequence come upon those who disputed her right to live.

In shooting down from Segesta to the northern shore, without further exploration of what may be called the country of Æneas, we got glimpses of Mount Eryx, the favorite haunt of Venus; and later in the day the train brought us to Palermo, "that wonderful cross-section of history." But as it was not rich in Greek history our tour in western Hellas was at an end.

DALMATIA

June, lovely June, has been the bringer of two good things to me--Sicily and the Dalmatian coast; and now that the charm of the latter is fresh it seems almost to outshine the former.

When I came on board the Austrian Lloyd steamer Galatea at Corfu I had little idea of what awaited me. One reads of this "Norway of the South," this "Switzerland in the sea"; but how little these comparisons convey until the landscape has really been seen. My main purpose was rest from the heat of Greece, and a more or less careful study of the ruins of Spalato.

This Dalmatian line is adapted to one who wishes to travel lazily. The stops as far as Spalato are longer than the passages; the boat, however, starts in each case promptly according to the schedule. The only exception was at Corfu; when all was ready, and we were just about to hoist the anchor, a Greek boatman came up alongside with a barge loaded with casks and boxes. It was so characteristic of a Greek.

While we were moving along the coast of Albania until late in the afternoon, there was nothing new to look out for; and so there was time to get acquainted with the ship and the passengers, to get one's bearings. There were the rules for passengers printed in five parallel columns--English, French, German, Italian, and Greek--emphasizing the cosmopolitan constituency of the travelling public. In Europe, and especially in the Orient, it always pays to read regulations, particularly the English column, to see how foreigners wrestle with our language. Rule 3 said: "Every damage is to be made good by the person who _dit_ it." Rule 11: "It is prohibited to any passenger to _middle_ with the command and direction of the vessel." As I had always trusted to the captain to run his own ship, I felt safe on that point. Particular anxiety for the ladies ran through the rules. One rule was: "Gentlemen are not allowed to enter the cabins of the ladies," and as a final snapper at the end of the last rule was this sentence: "Passengers having a right to be treated like persons of education will no doubt conform themselves to the rules of good society by respecting their fellow-travellers and paying a due regard to the fair sex." As we had no ladies at all on board until the journey was about half finished it began to seem as if they had been frightened away.

The captain, like most of the captains of this line, was of Slavic origin. Of other languages than his own he knew only Italian. In this he did all his "cussing" at every port; and it seemed to produce everywhere the proper effect. His gentlest conversational tone was like the blast of a trumpet and could be heard from stem to stern. I took an early opportunity to go up to the bridge when he was there, and remark apologetically that I was travelling _per vedere qualche cosa_. His laconic reply was, "_Ma perchè no?_" With that I felt myself installed on the bridge, and I spent more hours there during the voyage than any one of the officers. Perhaps the third-class passengers standing below suspected me of attempting to "middle with the command and direction of the vessel."

Toward evening we passed Akrokeraunia, the massive headland ending off a chain of mountains back of it over six thousand feet high, in antiquity the cynosure of sailors crossing by the shortest line from Italy to Greece. The modern name, Capo Duro, suggests its pitilessness. There it stands running out to the northwest, and so bidding defiance to the strongest wind of the region. The sea has beaten against it since there was a sea; it has broken away a good deal of it, if we may judge by a single isolated island thrown out in front of it. The high mountains seem saying to the sea, "You waste your vain fury on those lower rocks. What will you do when you come to us?" But it is the business of the patient sea to help "draw down the Aonian hills," and until there shall be no more sea Capo Duro must yield inch by inch.

Having passed Akrokeraunia, we turned sharply to the right, and changed our course from north to south until we dropped anchor in the harbor of Valona. As far as Cattaro the chief function of our boat was the transportation of freight, and that was the reason why the stops were so long. The captain was an ardent fisherman; hardly was the anchor down when his little boat dropped astern, and he fished sometimes far on into the night. He counted his catch not by numbers, but by kilos; and since the other officers in a circle around the stern, leaning over the taffrail, vied with the captain, fish were plentiful on board. All along this shore were great forests of holm-oak, and the cargo that we took on here was almost entirely valonia, so much used in Europe by tanners.

In the night we got off, and I missed the site of the great ancient city Apollonia, a little to the north of our stopping-place. But in the forenoon we stopped at Durazzo, the ancient Dyrrhachium, which, situated at the beginning of the great Via Egnatia, saw the passage of so many Roman armies into Greece. Cæsar and Pompey passed that way to their great struggle for the possession of the world. In earlier days it was known under the name of Epidamnos, as the colony of Kerkyra which set its mother city at war with her own mother city, Corinth, and so lighted the fire that destroyed Greece in the dreadful Peloponnesian war. At Durazzo my only first-class fellow-passenger got off.

Of third-class passengers we had a plenty, and a nondescript crowd they were; in other words, they beggared description. Some were magnificently dressed; but even those who were in rags were picturesque. If a painter had been present he would have been troubled by an _embarras de richesse_. Red and yellow were the prevailing colors in that motley crowd; gold embroidery was abundant. The few women present kept pretty well in the background, and took little or no part in the exuberant jollity of the men, who sang and danced in true Oriental style, keeping for the most part a somewhat monotonous droning, but rising sometimes into frenzy. This, continued far on into the evening hours, was bewitching. The situation was, or at least seemed to be, made for my special benefit. I seemed to have a private steamer, with the captain and crew working for me, and these fantastic and jolly people amusing me, who had promised not even "to _middle_."

But the next day I was brought from reverie to my senses by the coming of first-class passengers. At Dulcino, the first of the two harbors recently gained by Montenegro, which thus became a maritime state, the Mayor of the town came on board to travel _via_ Cattaro up to Cettinje, the capital, a long way around, but the way of least resistance. _He_ did not break the charm, for a more gorgeously dressed and finer-shaped man one seldom sees. Scores of Montenegrins of the singers and dancers of the preceding evening, cooks and gardeners returning to their homes from Constantinople, where they are in great demand, crowded around this magnate and kissed his hand in true Oriental style, which he took in patriarchal fashion. This was in keeping with the scenes of the day before; but this giant's wife and children were nothing but ordinary, plain people. At the next port, Antivari, a regular European lady, the wife of the Lloyd agent, came on board with the whole population of the village to give her a send-off; and we at once stepped out of dream-land.

I now fell into another mood. The whole voyage, with its long and frequent stops, began to seem a regular lark, and I so entered into the spirit of the thing that I determined at the next stop to get my bicycle up out of the hold and get a little acquaintance with the country which lay back of the long mountain line of coast. As we were booked to stop at Cattaro forty-four and a half hours, that seemed a good place to begin. The big Montenegrins had interested me so much I would go up and see where such fellows grew.

Who can describe the Gulf, or, as they call it there, the Bocche di Cattaro? It enjoys the distinction of being "perhaps the finest harbor in the world." There is a break in the coast line; as you go in you find yourself in a broad bay; but that is not all; you pass through another opening, into another bay, and so on, the mountains growing higher all the time until, by passing five channels, one so narrow that it used to be stopped by a chain, and so is called to-day Catena, you reach the fifth bay, on the east shore of which, nestled up against the base of a high dark mountain, one of those from which the region Montenegro got its name, lies Cattaro, a town of five or six thousand inhabitants, the outpost of Austria to the south. For a brief period at about the end of the Napoleonic wars, Montenegro held this place and the Bocche. No doubt all Montenegrins long to possess it again; for it is their natural outlet to the sea, from which the thin line of Austria here shuts them out, except for the poor harbors farther south.

Much history has been enacted around this gulf, which was a prize too valuable not to be striven for. In fact, it is a paradise like few on earth. All the way through the devious passages one is reminded of Lake Lucerne by the mountain banks and of Como by the tropical vegetation. Many of the officers of the Austrian Lloyd have their homes on these shores. Our captain and at least one of the other officers spent two days here with their families. The latter brought back word that an American king named Morgan had just visited the Bocche on his yacht.

We arrived shortly after noon; but it took me just an hour and a half to get my bicycle through the custom-house. The officials hardly knew what to do with it. Probably no bicycle had ever entered that port, and it may be a long time before another enters. I have no doubt that they thought me a fool for bringing mine in; and one could hardly blame them for the thought. The Austrian officials, however, are so affable--I have never met an exception--that one cannot think of losing his own patience. In the cool of the day, in order to test the road, I walked, with a very little riding, up the zigzag road, getting a little taste of what awaited one who would go to Cettinje, and then dropped down again in twenty minutes after the sun had gone down. I had had enjoyment enough to pay for the experiment, and had come to the conclusion, on perhaps rather insufficient data, that on the next day, with good weather, I could get to Cettinje and back if I girded myself to it, so slight is the lateral distance on the map.

To make sure of the case, I rose early and left the ship at half-past four, with a cake of chocolate in my pocket, for the rest trusting to living on the country. Not until seven o'clock did the country offer anything. Then I got coffee from a Highland girl at a very primitive inn at the point of one of the zigzags. She had not "a very shower of beauty"; but she did have "the freedom of a mountaineer," and a kindly twinkle in her eye. A man takes kindly to the hand and face that signify refreshment in time of need. When I asked how far it was to Cettinje the mountain maid said "_tetre ore_," which, though it was a rather bad mixture of Italian and something else, probably Slavic, was extremely encouraging. Even if the climb continued for two hours more I ought to reduce her "four hours" to three. In fact, at eight o'clock, at the end of three and a half hours of steady toiling climb, I found myself at an altitude of nearly three thousand feet, almost perpendicularly above Cattaro, with the Galatea so near that it seemed as if I could drop a stone upon her deck; but I thought it best not to try; I was in a hurry. In a few minutes more I broke through the mountain which had given me so much trouble, and I was in Montenegro. I soon passed the frontier town of Njegus, in the bed of a dried-up lake, the birthplace of Prince Nicholas, the ruling sovereign, who has a country house there of such modest appearance that one could hardly believe it to belong to a prince.