But the tourist who for the first time surveys Valletta from the deck of a steamer as she anchors in the Quarantine Harbor, or still better from the Grand Harbor on the other side of the peninsula on which the capital is built, sees little of this. Scarcely is the vessel at rest before she is surrounded by a swarm of the peculiar high-prowed "dghaisas," or Maltese boats, the owners of which, standing while rowing, are clamorous to pull the pa.s.senger ash.o.r.e; for Malta, like its sister fortress at the mouth of the Mediterranean, does not encourage wharves and piers, alongside of which large craft may anchor and troublesome crews swarm when they are not desired. Crowds of itinerant dealers, wily people with all the supple eagerness of the Oriental, and all the lack of conscience which is the convenient heritage of the trader of the Middle Sea, establish themselves on deck, ready to part with the laces, and filigrees, and corals, and sh.e.l.ls, and apocryphal coins of the Knights of St. John, for any ransom not less than twice their value. But in Malta, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean ports, there are always two prices, the price for which the resident obtains anything, and the price which the stranger is asked to pay. To these tariffs a new one has of late years been added, and this is that paradisaical figure, that fond legend of a golden age invoked only when the buyer is very eager, or very verdant, or very rich, "the price that Lady Bra.s.sey paid." However, even when the sojourner fancies that he has made a fair bargain (and the apprais.e.m.e.nts fall suddenly as the last bell begins to ring), the pedler is well in pocket, so well, indeed, that it has been calculated every steamer leaves behind it something like two hundred pounds in cash.

But if the rubbish sold in Valletta can be bought quite as good and rather more cheaply in London, Valletta itself must be seen _in situ_. The entrance to either of the harbors enables one to obtain but a slight idea of the place. It seems all forts and flat-roofed buildings piled one above the other in unattractive terraces. There are guns everywhere, and, right and left, those strongholds which are the final purposes of cannon. As the steamer creeps shrieking into "Port Marsa-Musciet" (the "Port" is superfluous, since the Arabic "Marsa" means the same thing) or Quarantine Harbor, it pa.s.ses Dragut Point, with Fort Tigne on the right and Fort St.

Elmo on the left, in addition to Fort Manoel and the Lazaretto on an island straight ahead. Had our destination been the Grand Harbor on the other side of Valletta, Fort Ricasoli and Fort St. Angelo would have been equally in evidence, built on two of the various projections which intersect the left side of that haven. But the forts are, as it were, only the ganglia of the vast systems of fortifications which circle every creek and bay and headland of Valletta and its offshoots. Ages of toil, millions of money, and the best talent of three centuries of engineers have been lavished on the bewildering ma.s.s of curtains and horn-works, and ravelins and demilunes, and ditches and palisades, and drawbridges and bastions, and earthworks, which meet the eye in profusion enough to have delighted the soul of Uncle Toby. Sentinels and martial music are the most familiar of sights and sounds, and after soldiers and barracks, sailors and war-ships, the most frequent reminders that Malta, like Gibraltar, is a great military and naval station. But it is also in possession of some civil rights unknown to the latter. Among these is a legislature with limited power and boundless chatter, and, what is of more importance to the visitor, the citizens can go in and out of Valletta at all hours of the day and night, no raised drawbridge or stolid portcullis barring their movements in times of peace. The stranger lands without being questioned as to his nationality, and in Malta the Briton is bereft of the _Civis-Roma.n.u.s-sum_ sort of feeling he imbibes in Gibraltar; for here the alien can circulate as freely as the lords of the soil. But the man who wishes to explore Valletta must be capable of climbing; for from the landing place to the chief hotel in the main street the ascent is continuous, and for the first part of the way is by a flight of stairs.

Indeed, these steps are so often called into requisition that one can sympathize with the farewell anathema of Bryon as he limped up one of these frequent obstacles to locomotion,

"Adieu! ye cursed streets of stairs!

(How surely he who mounts you swears)."

The reason of this peculiar construction is that Valletta is built on the ridge of Mount Scebarras, so that the ascent from the harbor to the princ.i.p.al streets running along the crest of the hill is necessarily steep. The result is, however, a more picturesque town than would have been the case had the architect who laid out the town when Jean de La Valette, Grand Master of the Knights, resolved in 1566 to transfer the capital here from the center of the island, been able to find funds to form a plateau by leveling down the summit of the mound. Hence Valletta is composed of streets running longitudinally and others crossing the former at right angles. Most of these are eked out by steps; one, the Strada Santa Lucia, is made up of flights of them, and none are level from end to end. The backbone of the town and the finest of its highways is the Strada Reale, or Royal Street, which in former days was known as the Strada San Georgio, and during the brief French occupation as "the Street of the Rights of Man." Seven main streets run parallel with it, while eleven at right angles extend in straight lines across the promontory from harbor to harbor. The Strada Reale, with the Strada Mercanti alongside of it are, however, the most typical bits of the capital, and the visitor who conscientiously tramps through either, with a peep here and there up or down the less important transverse "strade," obtains a fair idea of the city of La Valette, whose statue stands with that of L'Isle Adam over the Porta Reale at the farther end of the street bearing that name. Here the first barrier to an invasion from the landward side is met with in the shape of a deep ditch hewn through the solid rock, right across the peninsula from the one harbor to the other, cutting off if necessary the suburb of Floriana from the town proper, though Floriana, with its rampart gardens, parade ground, and barracks, is again protected on the inland aspect by other of the great fortifications which circle the seash.o.r.e everywhere.

However, the drawbridge is down at present, and a long stream of people, civil and military, are crossing and recrossing it, to and from the Strada Reale. For this street is the chief artery through which is ever circulating the placid current of Valletteese life. Soldiers in the varied uniforms of the regiments represented in the garrison are marching backwards and forwards, to or from parade, or to keep watch on the ramparts, or are taking their pleasure afoot, or in the neat little covered "carrozzellas" or cabs of the country, in which, unlike those of Gibraltar of a similar build, a drive can be taken at the cost of the coin which, according to Sydney Smith, was struck to enable a certain thrifty race to be generous. Sailors from the war-ships in the Grand Harbor, and merchant seamen on a run ash.o.r.e, are utilizing what time they can spare from the grog shops in the lower town to see the sights of the place.

Cabmen and carmen driving cars without sides, and always rushing at the topmost speed of their little horses, scatter unwary pedestrians. Native women, with that curious "faldetta," or one-sided hood to their black cloaks which is a characteristic of Malta as the mantilla is of Spain, pa.s.s side by side with English ladies in the latest of London fashions, or st.u.r.dy peasant women, returning from market, get sadly in the way of the British nursemaid dividing her attention in unequal proportions between her infantile charges and the guard marching for "sentry-go" to the ramparts. Flocks of goats, their huge udders almost touching the ground, are strolling about to be milked at the doors of customers. Maltese laborers, brown little men, bare-footed, broad-shouldered, and muscular, in the almost national dress of a Glengarry cap, cotton trousers, and flannel shirt, with scarlet sash, coat over one arm, and little earrings, jostle the smart officers making for the Union Club, or the noisy "globe-trotter" just landed from the steamer which came to anchor an hour ago. A few snaky-eyed Hindoos in gaily embroidered caps invite you to inspect their stock of ornamental wares, but except for an Arab or two from Tunis, or a few hulking Turks from Tripoli with pilot jackets over their barracans, the Strada Reale of Valletta has little of that human picturesqueness imparted to the Water-port Street of Gibraltar by the motley swarms of Spaniards, and Sicilians, and negroes, and Moors, and English who fill it at all periods between morning gun-fire to the hour when the stranger is ousted from within the gates. Malta being a most religiously Roman Catholic country, priests and robe-girded Carmelites are everywhere plentiful, and all day long the worshipers entering and leaving the numerous churches, with the eternal "jingle-jingle" of their bells, remind one of Rabelais's description of England in his day. At every turning the visitor is accosted by whining beggars whose pertinacity is only equaled by that of the boot-blacks and cabmen, who seem to fancy that the final purpose of man in Malta is to ride in carrozzellas with shining shoes. In Gibraltar we find a relief to the eye in the great rock towering overhead, the tree-embosomed cottages nestling on its slopes, or the occasional clumps of palms in the hollows. These are wanting to the chief strada of Valletta. In architectural beauty the two streets cannot, however, be compared. The Water-port is lined with houses, few of which are handsome and most of which are mean, while the scarcity of s.p.a.ce tends to crowd the narrow "ramps" as thickly as any lane in Valletta. It is seldom that the shops are better than those of a petty English town, and altogether the civil part of the rock fortresses has not lost the impress of having been reared by a people with but little of the world's wealth to spare, and kept alive by a population who have not a great deal to spend.

The main street of Valletta on the other hand is lined by good, and in most cases by handsome, houses, frequently with little covered stone balconies which lend a peculiar character to the buildings. The yellow limestone is also pleasant to look upon, while the many palaces which the comfort-loving knights erected for their shelter, impart to Valletta the appearance of a "a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen." Here on the right is the pretty Opera House (open, in common with the private theaters, on Sunday and Sat.u.r.day alike), and on the other side of the road the Auberge of the Language of Provence, now occupied by the Union Club. A little farther on, in an open s.p.a.ce shaded with trees, is the Church of St. John, on which the knights lavished their riches, and still, notwithstanding the pillage of the French troops in 1798, rich in vessels of gold and silver, crosses, pixes, jewels, monuments chivalric emblazonments, paintings, carven stone and other ecclesiastical embellishments, though like the wealthy order of military monks, whose pride it was, the Church of St. John is ostentatiously plain on the outside. The Auberge d'Auvergne, now the Courts of Justice, is on the other side of the street, and hard by, a building which was formerly the Treasury of the Knights, the storehouse into which was gathered the contributions of the Commanderies throughout Europe. The Public Library fronted by some trees a little way back from the road is interesting from its containing the books of the Bailiff Louis de Tencin, the Grand Master de Rohan (who erected it), and of many of the more lettered knights, besides a good collection of the island antiquities. Close to it is the palace of the Grand Master, now the residence of the Governor, or in part utilized as Government offices. The courtyards, planted with oranges, euphorbias, hibiscus, and other greenery, and the walls covered with Bougainvillia, have a delightfully cool appearance to the pedestrian who enters from the hot street; while the broad marble staircase, the corridors lined with portraits and men-at-arms, and pictures representing the warlike exploits of the knightly galleys, the armory full of ancient weapons, and majolica vases from the Pharmacy, and the numerous relics of the former rulers of the island, are worthy of a long study by those interested in art or antiquity. The Council Chamber also merits a visit, for there may be seen the priceless hangings of Brussels tapestry. And last of all, the idlest of tourists is not likely to neglect the Hall of St. Michael and St. George, the frescoes celebrating the famous deeds of the Order of St. John, and the quaint clock in the interior court, which, according to Maltese legend, was brought from Rhodes when that island was abandoned after a resistance only less glorious than a victory. For, as Charles V. exclaimed when he heard of the surrender which led to Malta becoming the home of the knights, "there has been nothing in the world so well lost as Rhodes." The main guard, with its pompous Latin inscription recording how "Magnae et invictae Britanniae Melitensium Amor et Europae vox Has insulas confirmant AN MDCCCXIV," is exactly opposite the palace. But when the visitor sees the wealth of art which the knights were forced to leave behind them, he is apt to be puzzled how the Maltese, who contributed not one baiocco to buy it, or to build these palaces or fortifications, could either through "Amor," or that necessity which knows no law, make them over us to us, or how "Magna et invicta Britannia" could accept without compensation the property of the military monks, whose Order, bereft of wealth and influence, still exists and claims with the acquiescence of at least one court to rank among the sovereign Powers of Christendom. The knights are, however, still the greatest personalities in Malta. We come upon them, their eight-pointed cross and their works at every step. Their ghosts still walk the highways. The names of the Grand Masters are immortalized in the cities they founded and in the forts they reared. Their portraits in the rude art of the Berlin lithographer hang on even the walls of the hotels. Their ecclesiastical side is in evidence by the churches which they reared, by the hagiological names which they gave to many of the streets, by the saintly figures with which, in spite of three-fourths of a century of Protestant rulers, still stand at the corners, and by the necessity which we have only recently found to come to an understanding with the Pope as to the limits of the canon law in this most faithful portion of his spiritual dominions.

On the other hand, the secular side of the Order is quite as prominent.

Here, for instance, after descending some steps which serve as a footpath, we come to the Fort of St. Elmo, which terminates the Strada Reale. But long before there was any regular town on Monte Sceberras, when the capital was in the center of the island, this fortress on the point midway between the two harbors was a place round which the tide of battle often swirled, when Paynim and Christian fought for the mastery of the island. Of all these sieges the greatest is that of 1565, a year before the town of Valletta was laid out. Twice previously, in 1546 and 1551, the Turks had endeavored to expel the knights, but failed to effect a landing.

But in the year mentioned Sultan Solyman, The Magnificent, the same Solyman who thirty-four years before had driven them from Rhodes, determined to make one supreme effort to dislodge the Order from their new home. The invading fleet consisted of a hundred and thirty-eight vessels under the Renegade Piali, and an army of thirty-three thousand men under the orders of Mustafa Pasha. These sea and land forces were soon afterwards increased by the arrival of two thousand five hundred resolute old Corsairs brought from Algiers by Ha.s.san Pasha, and eighteen ships containing sixteen hundred men under the still more famous Dragut, the Pirate Chief of Tripoli, who, by the fortunes of war, was in a few years later fated to toil as a galley-slave in this very harbor. The siege lasted for nearly four months. Every foot of ground was contested with heroic determination until it was evident that Fort St. Elmo could no longer hold out. Then the knights, worn and wounded, and reduced to a mere remnant of their number, received the viatic.u.m in the little castle chapel, and embracing each other went forth on the ramparts to meet whatever lot was in store for them. But St. Angelo and Senglea, at the end of the peninsula on which Isola is now built, held out until, on the arrival of succor from Sicily, the Turks withdrew. Of the forty thousand men who on the 18th of May had sat down before the Castle, not ten thousand re-embarked; whilst of the eight or nine thousand defenders, barely six hundred were able to join in the Te Deum of thanks for the successful termination of what was one of the greatest struggles in ancient or modern times. Then it was that "the most ill.u.s.trous and most Reverend Lord, Brother John de la Valette," to quote his t.i.tles inscribed over the Porta Reale, determined to lay out the new city, so that, before twelve months pa.s.sed, the primeval prophecy that there would be a time when every foot of land in Monte Sceberras would be worth an ounce of silver bade fair to come true. St. Elmo is still the chief of the island fortresses, and the little chapel which the knights left to fall under the Turkish scimitars is again in good preservation, after having been long forgotten under a pile of rubbish. But though churchmen and soldiers, the masters of Malta were, if all tales are true, a good deal more _militaires_ than monks. Eye-witnesses describe the knights as they sailed on a warlike expedition waving their hands to fair ladies on the sh.o.r.e. In their albergos or barracks the "Languages" lived luxuriously, and though dueling was strictly prohibited, there is a narrow street, the Strada Stretta, running parallel with the Reale, in which this extremely unecclesiastical mode of settling disputes was winked at. For by a pleasant fiction, any encounter within its limits was regarded as simply a casual difficulty occasioned by two fiery gentlemen accidentally jostling each other!

Turning into the Strada Mercanti, the San Giacomio of a former nomenclature, we come upon more reminders of this picturesque brotherhood.

For close by the Hospital for Incurables is the site of their cemetery, and farther up the steep street is the Military Hospital, which was founded by the Grand Master, Fra Luis de Vasconcelos. This infirmary, as an old writer tells us, was in former days "the very glory of Malta."

Every patient had two beds for change, and a closet with lock and key to himself. No more than two people were put in one ward, and these were waited upon by the "Serving Brothers," their food being brought to them on silver dishes, and everything else ordered with corresponding magnificence. Nowadays, though scarcely so sumptuous, the hospital is still a n.o.ble inst.i.tution, one of the rooms, four hundred and eighty feet in length, being accounted the longest in Europe. But there are no silver dishes, and the nurses have ceased to be of knightly rank. The University, an inst.i.tution which turns out doctors with a celerity which accounts for the number of them in the island, is an even less imposing building than the public p.a.w.nbroking establishment hard by, and neither is so noteworthy as the market, which is remarkable from a literary point of view as being perhaps the only edifice in Valletta the founder of which has been content to inscribe his merits in the vulgar tongue. On the top of the hill, for we have been climbing all the time, is a house with a fine marble doorway, which also is the relic of the knights. For this building was the Castellania, or prison, and the pillory in which prisoners did penance, and the little window from above which prisoners were suspended by the hands, are still, with the huge hook to which the rope was attached, to be seen by those who are curious in such disciplinary matters. But like the rock-hewn dungeons in which the knights kept their two thousand galley-slaves, in most cases Turks and Moors who had fallen in the way of their war-ships, which still exist in the rear of the Dockyard Terrace, such reminders of a cruel age and a stern Order are depressing to the wanderer in search of the picturesque. He prefers to look at the Auberge of the Language of Italy, where the Royal Engineers have their quarters, or at the Palazzo Parisi, opposite (it is a livery stable at present), where General Bonaparte resided during that brief stay in Malta which has served ever since to make the French name abhorred in the island, or at the Auberge de Castille, the n.o.blest of all the knights' palaces, where the two scientific corps hold their hospitable mess.

We have now tramped the entire length of the two chief longitudinal streets of Malta, and have seen most of the buildings of much general interest. But in the Strade Mezzodi and Britannica there are many private dwellings of the best description, and even some public ones, like the Auberge de France (devoted to the head of the Commissariat Department), warrant examination from a historical if not from an architectural, point of view. All of these knightly hotels are worthy of notice. Most of them are now appropriated to the needs of Government offices or, like the Auberge d'Arragon (an Episcopal residence), to the housing of local dignitaries. But where the Auberge d'Allemagne once stood the collegiate church of St. Paul has been built, and if there ever was an Auberge d'Angleterre (for the language of England was suppressed when Henry VIII.

confiscated the English Commanderies and was early succeeded by that of Bavaria), the building which bore her name was leveled when the new theater was built. It is nevertheless certain that the Turcopolier or General of the Horse was, until the Reformation, selected from the Language of England, just as that of Provence always furnished the Grand Commander, France the Grand Hospitaller, Italy the Admiral, Arragon the Drapier, Auvergne the Commander, Germany the Grand Bailiff, and Castile the Grand Chancellor of the Sovereign Order, whose Grand Master held among other t.i.tles those of Prince of Malta and Gozo.

We are now at the Upper Barracca, one of those arcades erected as promenades by the knights, and still the favorite walk of the citizens in the cool of morning and evening. From this point also is obtained a good bird's-eye view of Valletta and much of the neighboring country, and if the visitor continues his walk to St. Andrew's Bastion he may witness a panorama of both harbors; one, which the Maltese affirm (and we are not called upon to contradict them), is surpa.s.sed by the Bosphorus alone. It is at all events the most picturesque of the island views. There at a glance may be seen the two chief harbors alive with boats, sailing vessels, and steamers, from the huge ironclad to the noisy little launch.

We then see that beside the main peninsula upon which Valletta is built, and which divides the Quarantine from the Grand Harbor, there are several other headlands projecting into these ports in addition to the island occupied by Fort Manoel and the Lazaretto. These narrow peninsulas cut the havens into a host of subsidiary basins, bays, and creeks, while Valletta itself has overflowed into the suburbs of Floriana, Sliema, and St.

Julian, and may by-and-by occupy Tasbiesch and Pieta; Bighi, where the Naval Hospital is situated, and Corradino, a.s.sociated with gay memories of the racecourse, and the more sombre ones which pertain to the cemeteries and the prisons, all of which are centered in this quarter, where in former days the knights had their horse-breeding establishments and their game preserves.

But there are certain suburbs of Valletta which no good Maltese will describe by so humble a name. These are the "Three Cities" of Vittoriosa and Senglea, built on the two peninsulas projecting into the Grand Harbor, and separated by the Dockyard Creek, and Burmola or Cosspicua, stretching back from the sh.o.r.e. These three "cities" are protected by the huge Firenzuola and Cottonera lines of fortifications, and as Fort Angelo, the most ancient of the Maltese strongholds, and Fort Ricasoli, recalling the name of its builder, are among their castles, they hold their heads very high in Malta. Indeed, long before Valletta was thought of, and when Notabile was seen to be unfitted for their purpose, the knights took up their residence in Borgo or the Burgh, which, as the Statue of Victory still standing announces, was dignified by the name of Citta Vittoriosa after their victory over the Turks. Strada Antico Palazzo del Governatore recalls the old Palace which once stood in this street, and indeed until 1571 this now poor town was the seat of Government. Antique buildings, like the Nunnery of Santa Scolastica, once a hospital, and the Inquisitor's Palace, now the quarters of the English garrison, are witnesses to its fatten dignity. Burmola is also a city of old churches, and Senglea named after the Grand Master De la Sengle, though at present a place of little consequence, contains plenty of architectural proofs that when its old name of "Chersoneso," or the Peninsula, was changed to Isola, or "The Unconquered," this "city," with Fort Michael to do its fighting, played in Malta militant a part almost as important as it does nowadays when its dockyard and a.r.s.enal are its chief t.i.tles to fame.

Turning our survey inland, we see from the Barracca a rolling country, whitish, dry, and uninviting, dotted with white rocks projecting above the surface; white little villages, each with its church and walled fields; and topping all, on the summit of a rising ground, a town over which rise the spires of a cathedral. This is Citta Vecchia, the "old city" as it was called when the capital was transferred to Valletta, though the people round about still call it by the Saracenic name of "Medina," (the town), the more modern designation of "Notabile" being due to a complimentary remark of Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Castile. No town in Malta is more ancient. Here, we know from the famous oration of Cicero, that Verres, Praetor of Sicily, established some manufactories for cotton goods, out of which were made women's dresses of extraordinary magnificence, and here also the same voluptuous ruler did a reprehensible amount of plundering from temples and the "abodes of wealthy and honorable citizens." In their time-honored capital the Grand Masters had to be inaugurated, and in its cathedral every Bishop of Malta must still be consecrated. But the glory of Notabile is its memories, for in all Christendom there is no more silent city than the one towards which we creep by means of the island railway which has of late years shortened the eight miles between it and Valletta. Every rood, after leaving the cave-like station hollowed out of the soft solid rock, and the tunnels under the fortifications, seems sleepier and sleepier. Every few minutes we halt at a white-washed shed hard by a white-washed "casal." And all the "casals" seem duplicates of each other. The white streets of these villages are narrow, and the people few. But the church is invariably disproportionately large, well built, and rich in decorations, while the shops in the little square are much poorer than people who support so fine a church ought to patronize. There is Hamrun, with its Apostolic Inst.i.tute directed by Algerian missionaries, Misada in the valley, and Birchircara.

Casal Curmi, where the cattle market is held, is seen in the distance, and at Lia and Balzan we are among the orange and lemon gardens for which these villages are famous. The San Antonio Palace, with its pleasant grounds, forms a relief to the eye. At Attard, "the village of roses," the aqueduct which supplies Valletta with the water of Diar Handur comes in sight, and then, at San Salvador, the train begins the steep pull which ends at the base of the hill on which Notabile is built.

On this slope are little terraced fields and remains of what must at one time have been formidable fortifications. But all is crumbling now. A few of the Valletta merchants are taking advantage of the railway by building country houses, and some of the old Maltese n.o.bility cling to the town a.s.sociated with their quondam glory. But its decaying mansions with their mouldering coats of arms, palaces appropriated to prosaic purposes, ramparts from which for ages the clash of arms has departed, and streets silent except for the tread of the British soldiers stationed there or the mumble of the professional beggar, tell a tale of long-departed greatness.

A statue of Juno is embedded in the gateway, and in the shed-like museum have been collected a host of Phoenician, Roman, and other remains dug out of the soil of the city. Maltese boys pester us to buy copper coins of the knights which are possibly honest, and their parents produce silver ones which are probably apocryphal.

In Notabile itself there is not, however, a great deal to look at, though from the summit of the Sanatorium, of old the Courts of Justice (and there are dreadful dungeons underneath it still), a glance may be obtained over the entire island. To the prosaic eye it looks rather dry to be the "Fior del Mondo," the flower of the world, as the patriotic Maltese terms the land which he leaves with regret and returns to with joy. There to the south lies Verdala Palace, and the Boschetto, a grove in much request for picnic parties from Valletta, and beyond both, the Inquisitor's summer palace, close to where the sea spray is seen flying against the rugged cliffs. The Bingemma hills, thick with Phoenician tombs, are seen to the west, and if the pedestrian cares he may visit the old rock fortress of Kala ta Bahria, Imtarfa, where stood the temple of Proserpine, and Imtahleb near the seash.o.r.e, where in the season wild strawberries abound.

Musta, with its huge domed church, is prominent enough to the northeast, while with a gla.s.s it is not difficult to make out Zebbar and Zeitun, Zurrico, Paola, and other villages of the southeastern coast scattered through a region where remains of the past are very plentiful. For here are the ruins of the temples of Hagiar Khim and Mnaidra, rude prehistoric monuments, and on the sh.o.r.e of the Marsa Scirocco (a bay into which the hot wind of Africa blows direct), is a megalithic wall believed to be the last of the temple of Melkarte, the Tyrian Hercules.

But in Notabile, far before Apollo and Proserpine, whose marble temples stood here, before even the knights, whose three centuries of iron rule have a singular fascination for the Maltese, there is a name very often in many mouths. And that is "San Paolo." Saint Paul is in truth the great man of Malta, and the people make very much of him. He is almost as popular a personage as Sir Thomas Maitland, the autocratic "King Tom," of whose benevolent despotism and doughty deeds also one is apt in time to get a little tired. Churches and streets and cathedrals are dedicated to the Apostle of the Gentiles, and from the summit of the Sanatorium a barefooted Maltese points out "the certain creek with a sh.o.r.e" in which he was wrecked, the island of Salmun, on which there is a statue of him, and the church erected in his honor. It is idle to hint to this pious son of Citta Vecchia that it is doubtful whether Paul was ever wrecked in Malta at all, that not unlikely the scene of that notable event was Melita, in the Gulf of Ragusa. Are there not hard by serpents turned into stone, if no living serpents to bite anybody, and a miraculous fountain which bursts forth at the Apostle's bidding? And is not "the tempestuous wind called Euroklydon" blowing at this very moment? And in the cathedral we learn for the first time that Publius, on the site of whose house it is built, became the first bishop of Malta. For is not his martyrdom sculptured in marble, and painted on canvas? And by-and-by we see the grotto in which St. Paul did three months' penance, though the reason is not explained, and over it the chapel raised to the memory of the converted Roman Governor, and not far away the Catacombs in which the early Christians sheltered themselves, though whether there is an underground pa.s.sage from there to Valletta, as historians affirm, is a point in which our barefooted commentator is not agreed.

All these are to him irreverent doubts. Notabile, with its cathedral, and convents, and monasteries, its church of St. Publius, the "stone of which never grows less," the seminary for priests, the Bishop's Palace and the Bishop's Hospital, is no place for scepticism touching Saint Paul and his voyages. Any such unbeliefs we had better carry elsewhere. The day is hot and the old city is somnolent, and the talk is of the past. At the wicket gate of the little station at the hill foot the engine is, at least, of the present. And as we slowly steam into Valletta, and emerge into the busy street, we seem to have leapt in an hour from the Middle Ages into the Twentieth Century. The band is playing in the Palace Square, and the politicians are in procession over some event with which we as seekers after the picturesque are not concerned. But in Valletta we are in the land of living men. Behind us is a city of the dead, and around it lie villages which seem never to have been alive.

XIII

SICILY

Scylla and Charybdis--Messina, the chief commercial center of Sicily--The magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater at Taormina--Omnipresence of Mt. Etna--Approach to Syracuse--The famous Latomia del Paradiso--Girgenti, the City of Temples--Railway route to Palermo--Mosaics--Cathedral and Abbey of Monreale--Monte Pellegrino at the hour of sunset.

To the traveller who proposes to enter Sicily by the favorite sea-route from Naples to Messina the approach to the island presents a scene of singular interest and beauty. A night's voyage from the sunny bay which sleeps at the foot of Vesuvius suffices to bring him almost within the shadow of Etna. By daybreak he has just pa.s.sed the Punta del Faro, the lighthoused promontory at the extreme northeastern angle of this three-cornered isle, the Trinacria of the ancients, and is steaming into the Straits. Far to his left he can see, with the eye of faith at any rate, the rock of Scylla jutting out from the Calabrian coast, while the whirlpool of Charybdis, he will do well to believe, is eddying and foaming at the foot of the Pharos a few hundred yards to his right. Here let him resolutely locate the fabled monster of the gaping jaws into which were swept those luckless mariners of old whose dread of Scylla drove them too near to the Sicilian sh.o.r.e. Modern geographers may maintain (as what will they not maintain?) that Charybdis should be identified with the Garofalo, the current which sweeps round the breakwater of Messina seven miles to the south; but Circe distinctly told Ulysses that the two monsters were not a "bowshot apart"; and the perfectly clear and straightforward account given of the matter by aeneas to Dido renders it impossible to doubt that Scylla and Charybdis faced each other at the mouth of the Straits. The traveller will be amply justified in believing that he has successfully negotiated the pa.s.sage between these two terrors as soon as he has left the Pharos behind him and is speeding along the eastern coast of the island towards the city of Messina.

Very bold and impressive grows the island scenery under the gradually broadening daylight. Tier on tier above him rise the bare, brown hill-slopes, spurs of the great mountain pyramid which he is approaching.

These tumbled ma.s.ses of the mountains, deepening here where the night shadow still lingers into downright black, and reddening there where they "take the morning" to the color of rusty iron, proclaim their volcanic character, to all who are familiar with the signs thereof, unmistakably enough. Just such a ferruginous face does Nature turn towards you as you drop down at twilight past the Isleta of Las Palmas, in Gran Canaria, or work your way from the eastern to the western coast of Teneriffe, round the spreading skirts of the Peak. Rock scenery of another character is visible on the left, among the Calabrian mountains, dwarfed somewhat by the nearer as well as loftier heights of the island opposite, but bearing no mean part in the composition of the land- and sea-scape, nevertheless.

Mile after mile the view maintains its rugged beauty, and when at last the town and harbor of Messina rise in sight, and the fort of Castellaccio begins to fill the eye, to the exclusion of the natural ramparts of the hills, the traveller will be fain to admit that few islands in the world are approached through scenery so romantic and so well attuned to its historic a.s.sociations.

There are those who find Messina disappointing, and there is no doubt that to quit the waters of a rock-embosomed strait for the harbor of a large commercial seaport possessing no special claim to beauty of situation, is to experience a certain effect of disenchantment. It would not be fair, however, to hold the town, as a town, responsible for this. It is only some such jewel as Naples or as Algiers that could vie with such a setting. Messina is not an Algiers or a Naples; it is only an honest, ancient, prosperous, active, fairly clean, and architecturally unimpressive town. The chief commercial center of Sicily, with upwards of eighty thousand inhabitants, a Cathedral, an Archbishop, and a University, it can afford, its inhabitants perhaps believe, to dispense with aesthetic attractions. But its s.p.a.cious quays, its fine and curiously shaped port, the Harbor of the Sickle as it was called by the ancients when after it they named the city "Zancle," have an interest of their own if they are without much claim to the picturesque; and the view from the Faro Grande on the curve of the Sickle, with the Sicilian mountains behind, the Calabrian rocks in front, and the Straits to the right and left of the spectator, is not to be despised.

Still, Messina is not likely to detain any pleasure-tourist long, especially with Taormina, the gem of the island, and one might almost say, indeed, of all Italy, awaiting him at only the distance of a railway journey of some sixty to a hundred miles. The line from Messina to Giardini, the station for Taormina, and the spot whence Garibaldi crossed to Calabria in the autumn of 1860, skirts the sea-coast, burrowing under headlands and spanning dry river-beds for a distance of thirty miles, amid the scenery which has been already viewed from the Straits, but which loses now from its too close neighborhood to the eye. The rock-built town of ancient Taormina is perched upon a steep and craggy bluff some four hundred feet above the railway line, and is approached by an extremely circuitous road of about three miles in length. Short cuts there are for the youthful, the impetuous, and the sound in wind; but even these fortunate persons might do worse than save their breath and restrain their impatience to reach their destination, if only for the sake of the varying panorama which unfolds itself as they ascend from level to level on their winding way. There can be no denying that Taormina stands n.o.bly and confronts the Straits with a simple dignity that many greater and even higher cities might well envy. To see it from a favoring angle of the battlemented road, with the southern sunlight bathing its bright white walls and broken lines of housetops, with the tower of Sant' Agostino traced against the cone of Etna, and the wall that skirts it almost trembling on the utmost verge of the cliff, while at the foot of the declivity the Straits trend southward in "tender, curving lines of creamy spray," to see this is at least to admit that some short cuts are not worth taking, and that the bridle-path up the hillside might well be left to those animals for whose use it was constructed, and who are generally believed to prefer an abridgment of their journey to any conceivable enhancement of its picturesque attractions.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

At Taormina one may linger long. The pure, inspiriting air of its lofty plateau, and the unequaled beauty of the prospect which it commands, would alone be sufficient to stay the hurried footsteps of even the most time-pressed of "globe-trotters"; but those who combine a love of scenery with a taste for archaeology and the cla.s.sical antique will find it indeed a difficult place to leave. For, a little way above the town, and in the center of an exquisite landscape stand the magnificent ruins of the Greek Theater, its auditorium, it is true, almost leveled with the plain, but more perfect as to the remains of its stage and proscenium than any other in Sicily, and, with one exception, in the world. But there is no need to be a scholar or an antiquarian to feel the extraordinary fascination of the spot. Nowhere among all the relics of bygone civilizations have Time and Nature dealt more piously with the work of man. Every spring and summer that have pa.s.sed over those mouldering columns and shattered arches have left behind them their tribute of clasping creeper and clambering wild flower and softly draping moss. Boulder and plinth in common, the masonry alike of Nature and of man, have mellowed into the same exquisite harmony of greys and greens; and the eye seeks in vain to distinguish between the handiwork of the Great Mother and those monuments of her long-dead children which she has clothed with an immortality of her own.

Apart, however, from the indescribable charm of its immediate surroundings, the plateau of the theater must fix itself in the memory of all who have entered Sicily by way of Messina as having afforded them their first "clear" view of Etna, their first opportunity, that is to say, of looking at the majestic mountain unintercepted at any point of its outline or ma.s.s by objects on a lower level. The whole panorama indeed from this point is magnificent. To the left, in the foreground, rise the heights of Castiglione from the valley of the Alcantara; while, as the eye moves round the prospect from left to right, it lights in succession on the hermitage of S. Maria della Rocca, the Castle of Taormina, the overhanding hill of Mola, and Monte Venere towering above it. But, dominating the whole landscape, and irresistibly recalling to itself the gaze which wanders for a moment to the nearer chain of mountains or the blue Calabrian hills across the Strait, arises the never-to-be-forgotten pyramid of Etna, a mountain unrivaled in its combination of majesty and grace, in the soft symmetry of its "line," and the stern contrast between its lava-scarred sides, with their a.s.sociations of throe and torture, and the eternal peace of its snow-crowned head. It will be seen at a closer view from Catania, and, best of all, on the journey from that place to Syracuse; but the first good sight of it from Taormina, at any rate when weather and season have been favorable, is pretty sure to become an abiding memory.

Twenty miles farther southwards along the coast lie the town and baths of Aci Reale, a pleasant resort in the "cure" season, but to others than invalids more interesting in its a.s.sociations with Theocritus and Ovid, with "Homer the Handel of Epos, and Handel the Homer of song;" in a word, with Acis and Galatea, and Polyphemus, and the much-enduring Ulysses. Aci Castello, a couple of miles or so down the coast, is, to be precise, the exact spot which is a.s.sociated with these very old-world histories, though Polyphemus's sheep-run probably extended far along the coast in both directions, and the legend of the giant's defeat and discomfiture by the hero of the Odyssey is preserved in the nomenclature of the rocky chain which juts out at this point from the Sicilian sh.o.r.e. The Scogli dei Ciclopi are a fine group of basaltic rocks, the biggest of them some two hundred feet in height and two thousand feet in circ.u.mference, no doubt "the stone far greater than the first" with which Polyphemus took his shot at the retreating Wanderer, and which "all but struck the end of the rudder." It is a capital "half-brick" for a giant to "heave" at a stranger, whether the Cyclops did, in fact, heave it or not; and, together with its six companions, it stands out bravely and with fine sculpturesque effect against the horizon. A few miles farther on is Catania, the second city in population and importance of Sicily, but, except for one advantage which would give distinction to the least interesting of places, by no means the second in respect of beauty. As a town, indeed, it is commonplace. Its bay, though of ample proportions, has no particular grace of contour; and even the cl.u.s.tering masts in its busy harbor scarcely avail to break the monotony of that strip of houses on the flat seaboard, which, apart from its surroundings, is all that const.i.tutes Catania. But with Etna brooding over it day and night, and the town lying outstretched and nestling between the two vast arms which the giant thrusts out towards the sea on each side, Catania could not look wholly prosaic and uninteresting even if she tried.

We must again return to the mountain, for Etna, it must be remembered, is a persistent feature, is _the_ persistent feature of the landscape along nearly the whole eastern coast of Sicily from Punta di Faro to the Cape of Santa Croce, if not to the promontory of Syracuse. Its omnipresence becomes overawing as one hour of travel succeeds another and the great mountain is as near as ever. For miles upon miles by this southward course it haunts the traveller like a reproving conscience. Each successive stage on his journey gives him only a different and not apparently more distant view. Its height, ten thousand feet, although, of course, considerable, seems hardly sufficient to account for this perpetual and unabating prominence, which, however, is partly to be explained by the outward trend taken by the sea-coast after we pa.s.s Catania, and becoming more and more marked during the journey from that city to Syracuse. There could be no better plan of operations for one who wishes to view the great mountain thoroughly, continuously, protractedly, and at its best, than to await a favorable afternoon, and then to take the journey in question by railway, so timing it as to reach the tongue of Santa Croce about sunset. From Catania to Lentini the traveller has Etna, wherever visible, on his right; at Lentini the line of railway takes a sharp turn to the left, and, striking the coast at Agnone, hugs it all along the northern sh.o.r.e of the promontory, terminating with Cape Santa Croce, upon approaching which point it doubles back upon itself, to follow the "re-entering angle" of the cape, and then, once more turning to the left, runs nearly due southward along the coast to Syracuse. Throughout the twenty miles or so from Lentini to Augusta, beneath the promontory of Santa Croce, Etna lies on the traveller's left, with the broad blue bay fringed for part of the way by a mile-wide margin of gleaming sand between him and it. Then the great volcanic cone, all its twenty miles from summit to sea-coast foreshortened into nothingness by distance, seems to be rising from the very sea; its long-cooled lava streams might almost be mingling with the very waters of the bay. As the rays of the westering sun strike from across the island upon silver-gray sand and blue-purple sea and russet-iron mountain slopes, one's first impulse is to exclaim with Wordsworth, in vastly differing circ.u.mstances, that "earth hath not anything to show more fair." But it has. For he who can prolong his view of the mountain until after the sun has actually sunk will find that even the sight he has just witnessed can be surpa.s.sed. He must wait for the moment when the silver has gone out of the sand, and the purple of the sea has changed to gray, and the russet of Etna's lava slopes is deepening into black; for that is also the moment when the pink flush of the departed sunset catches its peak and closes the symphony of color with a chord more exquisitely sweet than all.

From Cape Santa Croce to Syracuse the route declines a little perhaps in interest. The great volcano which has filled the eye throughout the journey is now less favorably placed for the view, and sometimes, as when the railway skirts the Bay of Megara in a due southward direction, is altogether out of sight. Nor does the approach to Syracuse quite prepare one for the pathetic charm of this most interesting of the great, dead, half-deserted cities of the ancient world, or even for the singular beauty of its surroundings. You have to enter the inhabited quarter itself, and to take up your abode on that mere sherd and fragment of old Greek Syracuse, the Island of Ortygia, to which the present town is confined (or rather, you have to begin by doing this, and then to sally forth on a long walk of exploration round the _contorni_, to trace the line of the ancient fortifications, and to map out as best you may the four other quarters, each far larger than Ortygia, which, long since given over to orange-gardens and scattered villas and farmhouses, were once no doubt well-peopled districts of the ancient city), ere you begin either to discover its elements of material beauty or to feel anything of its spiritual magic. It is hard to believe that this decayed and apparently still decaying little island town was once the largest of the h.e.l.lenic cities, twenty miles, according to Strabo, in circ.u.mference, and even in the time of Cicero containing in one of its now deserted quarters "a very large Forum, most beautiful porticoes, a highly decorated Town Hall, a most s.p.a.cious Senate House, and a superb Temple of Jupiter Olympius." A spoiler more insatiable than Verres has, alas! carried off all these wonders of art and architecture, and of most of them not even a trace of the foundations remains. Of the magnificent Forum a single unfluted column appears to be the solitary relic. The porticoes, the Town Hall, the Senate House, the Temple of the Olympian Jove are irrecoverable even by the most active architectural imagination. But the west wall of the district which contained these treasures is still partially traceable, and in the adjoining quarter of the ancient city we find ourselves in its richest region both of the archaeological and the picturesque.

For here is the famous Latomia del Paradiso, quarry, prison, guard-house, and burial-place of the Syracusan Greek, and the yet more famous Theater, inferior to that of Taormina in the completeness of the stage and proscenium, but containing the most perfectly preserved auditorium in the world. The entrance to the Latomia, that gigantic, ear-shaped orifice hewn out of the limestone cliff, and leading into a vast whispering-chamber, the acoustic properties of which have caused it to be identified with the (historic or legendary) Ear of Dionysius, has a strange, wild impressiveness of its own. But in beauty though not in grandeur it is excelled by another abandoned limestone quarry in the neighborhood, which has been converted by its owner into an orangery. This lies midway between the Latomia del Paradiso and the Quarry of the Cappuccini, and is in truth a lovely retreat. Over it broods the perfect stillness that never seems so deep as in those deserted places which have once been haunts of busy life.

It is rich in the spiritual charm of natural beauty and the sensuous luxury of sub-tropical culture: close at hand the green and gold of orange trees, in the middle distance the solemn plumes of the cypresses, and farther still the dazzling white walls of the limestone which the blue sky bends down to meet.

To pa.s.s from the quarries to the remains of the Greek Theater hard by is in some measure to exchange the delight of the eye for the subtler pleasures of mental a.s.sociation. Not that the concentric curves of these moldering and moss-lined stone benches are without their appeal to the senses. On the contrary, they are beautiful in themselves, and, like all architectural ruins, than which no animate things in nature more perfectly ill.u.s.trate the scientific doctrine of "adaptation to environment," they harmonize deliciously in line and tone with their natural surroundings.

Yet to most people, and especially so to those of the contemplative habit, the Greek Theater at Syracuse, like the Amphitheaters of Rome and Verona, will be most impressive at moments when the senses are least active and the imagination busiest. It is when we abstract the mind from the existing conditions of the ruin; it is when we "restore" it by those processes of mental architecture which can never blunder into Vandalism; it is when we re-people its silent, time-worn benches with the eager, thronging life of twenty centuries ago, that there is most of magic in its spell. And here surely imagination has not too arduous a task, so powerfully is it a.s.sisted by the wonderful completeness of these remains. More than forty tiers of seats shaped out of the natural limestone of the rock can still be quite distinctly traced; and though their marble facings have of course long moldered into dust, whole _cunei_ of them are still practically as uninjured by time, still as fit for the use for which they were intended, as when the Syracusans of the great age of Attic Drama flocked hither to hear the tragedies of that poet whom they so deeply reverenced that to be able to recite his verse was an accomplishment rewarded in the prisoners who possessed it by liberation from bondage. To the lover of cla.s.sical antiquity Syracuse will furnish "moments" in abundance; but at no other spot either in Ortygia itself or in these suburbs of the modern city, not at the Fountain of Arethusa on the brink of the great port; not in the Temple of Minerva, now the Cathedral, with its Doric columns embedded in the ignominy of plaster; not in that wildest and grandest of those ancient Syracusan quarries, the Latomia dei Cappuccini, where the ill-fated remnant of the routed army of Nicias is supposed to have expiated in forced labor the failure of the Sicilian Expedition, will he find it so easy to rebuild the ruined past as here on this desolate plateau, with these perfect monuments of the immortal Attic stage around him, and at his feet the town, the harbor, the promontory of Plemmyrium, the blue waters of the Ionian Sea.

It is time, however, to resume our journey and to make for that hardly less interesting or less beautifully situated town of Sicily which is usually the next halting-place of the traveller. The route to Girgenti from Syracuse is the most circuitous piece of railway communication in the island. To reach our destination it is necessary to retrace our steps almost the whole way back to Catania. At Bicocca, a few miles distant from that city, the line branches off into the interior of the country for a distance of some fifty or sixty miles, when it is once more deflected, and then descends in a southwesterly direction towards the coast. At a few miles from the sea, within easy reach of its harbor, Porto Empedocle, lies Girgenti. The day's journey will have been an interesting one. Throughout its westward course the line, after traversing the fertile Plain of Catania, the rich grain-bearing district which made Sicily the granary of the Roman world, ascends gradually into a mountainous region and plunges between Calascibetta and Castrogiovanni into a tortuous ravine, above which rise towering the two last-named heights. The latter of the two is planted on the site of the plain of Enna, the scene of the earliest abduction recorded in history. Flowers no longer flourish in the same abundance on the meads from which Persephone was carried off by the Dark King of Hades; but the spot is still fair and fertile, truly a "green navel of the isle," the central Omphalos from which the eye ranges northward, eastward, and south-westward over each expanse of Trinacria's triple sea. But those who do not care to arrest their journey for the sake of sacrificing to Demeter, or of enjoying the finest, in the sense of the most extensive, view in Sicily, may yet admire the n.o.ble situation of the rock-built town of Castrogiovanni, looking down upon the railway from its beetling crag.

Girgenti, the City of Temples, the richest of all places in the world save one in monuments of Pagan worship, conceals its character effectually enough from him who enters it from the north. Within the precincts of the existing city there is little sign to be seen of its archaeological treasures, and, to tell the truth, it has but few attractions of its own.

Agrigentum, according to Pindar "the most beautiful city of mortals," will not so strike a modern beholder; but that, no doubt, is because, like Syracuse and other famous seats of ancient art and religious reverence, it has shrunk to dimensions so contracted as to leave all the riches of those stately edifices to which it owed the fame of its beauty far outside its present boundaries. Nothing, therefore, need detain the traveller in the town itself (unless, indeed, he would s.n.a.t.c.h a brief visit to the later-built cathedral, remarkable for nothing but the famous marble sarcophagus with its relief of the Myth of Hippolytus), and he will do well to mount the Rupe Atenea without delay. The view, however, in every direction is magnificent, the town to the right of the spectator and behind him, the sea in front, and the rolling, ruin-dotted plain between.

From this point Girgenti itself looks imposing enough with the irregular ma.s.ses of its roofs and towers silhouetted against the sky. But it is the seaward view which arrests and detains the eye. Hill summit or hotel window, it matters little what or where your point of observation is, you have but to look from the environs of Girgenti towards Porto Empedocle, a few miles to the south, and you bring within your field of vision a s.p.a.ce of a few dozen acres in extent which one may reasonably suppose to have no counterpart in any area of like dimensions on the face of the globe. It is a garden of moldering shrines, a positive orchard of shattered porticoes and broken column-shafts, and huge pillars prostrate at the foot of their enormous plinths. You can count and identify and name them all even from where you stand. Ceres and Proserpine, Juno Lacinia, Concord, Hercules, aesculapius, Jupiter Olympius, Castor and Pollux, all are visible at once, all recognizable and numerable from east to west in their order as above.

It is a land of ruined temples, and, to all appearance, of nothing else.

One can just succeed, indeed, in tracing the coils of the railway as it winds like a black snake towards Porto Empedocle, but save that there are no signs of life. One descries no wagon upon the roads, no horse in the furrows, no laborer among the vines. Girgenti itself, with its hum and clatter, lies behind you; no glimpse of life or motion is visible on the quays of the port. All seems as desolate as those gray and moldering fanes of the discrowned G.o.ds, a solitude which only changes in character without deepening in intensity as the eye travels across the foam-fringed coast-line out on the sailless sea. There is a strange beauty in this silent Pantheon of dead deities, this landscape which might almost seem to be still echoing the last wail of the dying Pan; and it is a beauty of death and desolation to which the like of nature, here especially abounding, contributes not a little by contrast. For nowhere in Sicily is the country-side more lavishly enriched by the olive. Its contorted stem and quivering, silvery foliage are everywhere. Olives climb the hill-slopes in straggling files; olives cl.u.s.ter in twos and threes and larger groups upon the level plain; olives trace themselves against the broken walls of the temples, and one catches the flicker of their branches in the sunlight that streams through the roofless peristyles. From Rupe Atenea out across the plain to where the eye lights upon the white loops of the road to Porto Empedocle one might almost say that every object which is not a temple or a fragment of a temple is an olive tree.

By far the most interesting of the ruins from the archaeologist's point of view is that of the Temple of Concord, which, indeed, is one of the best-preserved in existence, thanks, curiously enough, to the religious Philistinism which in the Middle Ages converted it into a Christian church. It was certainly not in the spirit of its tutelary G.o.ddess that it was so transformed: nothing, no doubt, was farther from the thoughts of those who thus appropriated the shrine of Concord than to ill.u.s.trate the doctrine of the unity of religion. But art and archaeology, if not romance, have good reason to thank them that they "took over" the building on any grounds, for it is, of course, to this circ.u.mstance that we owe its perfect condition of preservation, and the fact that all the details of the Doric style as applied to religious architecture can be studied in this temple while so much of so many of its companion fanes has crumbled into indistinguishable ruin. Concordia has remained virtually intact through long centuries under the homely t.i.tle of "the Church of St.

Gregory of the Turnips," and it rears its stately facade before the spectator in consequence with architrave complete, a magnificent hexastyle of thirty-four columns, its lateral files of thirteen shafts apiece receding in n.o.ble lines of perspective. Juno Lacinia, or Juno Lucinda (for it may have been either as the "Lacinian G.o.ddess" or as the G.o.ddess of Childbed that Juno was worshipped here), an older fane than Concordia, though the style had not yet entered on its decline when the latter temple was built, is to be seen hard by, a majestic and touching ruin. It dates from the fifth century B. C., and is therefore Doric of the best period.

Earthquakes, it seems, have co-operated with time in the work of destruction, and though twenty-five whole pillars are left standing, the facade, alas! is represented only by a fragment of architrave. More extensive still have been the ravages inflicted on the Temple of Hercules by his one unconquerable foe. This great and famous shrine, much venerated of old by the Agrigentines, and containing that statue of the G.o.d which the indefatigable "collector" Verres vainly endeavored to loot, is now little more than a heap of tumbled masonry, with one broken column-shaft alone still standing at one extremity of its site. But it is among the remains of the ancient sanctuary of Zeus, all unfinished, though that edifice was left by its too ambitious designers, that we get the best idea of the stupendous scale on which those old-world religious architects and masons worked. The ruin itself has suffered cruelly from the hand of man; so much so, indeed, that little more than the ground plan of the temple is to be traced by the lines of column bases, vast ma.s.ses of its stone having been removed from its site to be used in the construction of the Mole. But enough remains to show the gigantic scale on which the work was planned and partially carried out. The pillars which once stood upon those bases were twenty feet in circ.u.mference, or more than two yards in diameter and each of their flutings forms a niche big enough to contain a man! Yon Caryatid, who has been carefully and skillfully pieced together from the fragments doubtless of many Caryatids, and who now lies, hands under head, supine and staring at the blue sky above him, is more than four times the average height of a man. From the crown of his bowed head to his stony soles he measures twenty-five feet, and to watch a tourist sitting by or on him and gazing on Girgenti in the distance is to be visited by a touch of that feeling of the irony of human things to which Sh.e.l.ley gives expression in his "Ozymandias."

The railway route from Girgenti to Palermo is less interesting than that from Catania to Girgenti. It runs pretty nearly due south and north across the island from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, through a country mountainous indeed, as is Sicily everywhere, but not marked by anything particularly striking in the way of highland scenery. At Termini we strike the northern coast, and the line branches off to the west. Another dozen miles or so brings us to Santa Flavia, whence it is but half an hour's walk to the ruins of Soluntum, situated on the easternmost hil