Читать книгу Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844 - Various - Страница 7

"A beautiful place this Segeste must be! One could undergo any thing to see it!" Such would be the probable exclamation of more than one reader looking over some landscape annual, embellished with perhaps a view of the celebrated temple and its surrounding scenery; but find yourself at any of the inexpressibly horrid inns of Alcamo or Calatafrini, (and these are the two principal stations between Palermo and Segeste—one with its 12,000, the other with its 18,000 inhabitants;) let us walk you down the main street of either, and if you don't wish yourself at Cheltenham, or some other unclassical place which never had a Latin name, we are much mistaken! The "Relievo dei Cavalli" at Alcamo offers no relief for you! The Magpie may prate on her sign-post about clean beds, for magpies can be made to say any thing; but pray do not construe the "Canova Divina" Divine Canova! He never executed any thing for the Red Lion of Calatafrini, whose "Canova" is a low wine-shop, full of wrangling Sicilian boors. Or will you place yourself under the Eagle's wing, seduced by its nuovi mobili e buon servizio? Oh, we obtest those broken window-panes whether it be not cruel to expose new furniture to such perils! For us we put up at the "Temple of Segeste," attracted rather by its name than by any promise or decoy it offers. Crabbe has given to the inns at Aldborough each its character: here all are equal in immundicity, and all equally without provisions. Some yellow beans lie soaking to soften them. There is salt-cod from the north, moist and putrid. There is no milk; eggs are few. The ham at the Pizzicarolo's is always bad, and the garlicked sausage repulsive. Nothing is painted or white-washed, let alone dusted, swept, or scoured. The walls have the appearance of having been pawed over by new relays of dirty fingers daily for ten years. This is a very peculiar appearance at many nasty places out of Sicily, and we really do not know its pathology. You tread loathingly an indescribable earthen floor, and your eye, on entering the apartment, is arrested by a nameless production of the fictile art, certainly not of Etruscan form, which is invariably placed on the bolster of the truck-bed destined presently for your devoted head. Oh! to do justice to a Sicilian locanda is plainly out of question, and the rest of our task may as well be sung as said, verse and prose being alike incapable of the hopeless reality:—

Crossing a rustic bridge, we pass through a garden (for it is no less, though man has had no spade in it) of pinks, marigolds, cyclamens, and heart's-ease, &c. &c.; the moist meadow land below is a perfect jungle of lofty grasses, all fragrant and in flower, gemmed with the unevaporated morning dew, and colonized with the Aphides, Alticæ, and swarms of the most beautiful butterflies clinging to their stalks. Gramina læta after Virgil's own heart, were these. Their elegance and unusual variety were sufficient to throw a botanist into a perfect HAY fever, and our own first paroxysm only went off, when, after an hour's hard collecting, we came to a place which demanded another sort of enthusiasm; for THERE stood without a veil the Temple of Segeste, with one or two glimpses of which we had been already astonished at a distance, in all its Dorian majesty! This almost unmutilated and glorious memorial of past ages here reigns alone—the only building far or near visible in the whole horizon; and what a position has its architect secured! In the midst of hills on a bit of table-land, apparently made such by smoothing down the summit of one of them, with a greensward in front, and set off behind by a mountain background, stands this eternal monument of the noblest of arts amidst the finest dispositions of nature. There is another antiquity of the place also to be visited at Segeste—its theatre; but we are too immediately below it to know any thing about it at present, and must leave it in a parenthesis. To our left, at the distance of eight miles, this hill country of harmonious and graceful undulation ends in beetling cliffs, beneath which the sea, now full in view, lies sparkling in the morning sunshine. We shall never, never forget the impressions made upon us on first getting sight of Segeste! Pæstum we had seen, and thought that it exhausted all that was possible to a temple, or the site of a temple. Awe-stricken had we surveyed those monuments of "immemorial antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of prey—temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Pæstum to be probably the most impressive monument on earth; but here at Segeste a nature less austere, and more RIANTE in its wildness, lent a quite different charm to a scene which could scarcely be represented by art, and for which a reader could certainly not be prepared by description. We gave an antiquarian's devoutest worship to this venerable survivor of 2000 years, and of many empires—we felt the vast masses of its time-tried Doric, and even the wild flowers within its precincts, its pink valerians; its erba di vento, its scented wallflower. The whole scene kept our admiration long tasked, but untired. A smart shower compelled us to seek shelter under the shoulder of one of the grey entablatures: it soon passed away, leaving us a legacy of the richest fragrance, while a number of wild birds of the hawk kind, called "chaoli" from their shrill note, issued from their hiding-places, and gave us wild music as they scudded by!

A few bits of wall scattered over the corn-fields are all that now remains of the dwellings of the men who built this temple for their city, and who, by its splendour, deluded the Athenians into a belief of greater wealth than they possessed.

Our ascent to the theatre, the day after, proved to be a very steep one, of half an hour on mule-back; in making which, we scared two of those prodigious birds, the ospreys, who, having reconnoitred us, forthwith began to wheel in larger and larger sweeps, and at last made off for the sea. We found the interior of the theatre occupied by an audience ready for our arrival; it consisted of innummerable hawks, the chaoli just mentioned, which began to scream at our intrusion. The ospreys soon returned, and were plainly only waiting our departure to subside upon their solitary domain. We would not be a soft-billed bird for something in this neighbourhood; no song would save them from the hawks' supper. Having luxuriated on the 24th of May for full four hours in this enchanting neighbourhood, we were sorry to return to our inn—and such an inn! We departed abruptly, and probably never to return; but we shall think of Segeste in Hyde Park, or as we pass the candlestick Corinthians of Whitehall. Thucydides13 relates that a prevailing notion in his time was, that the Trojans after losing Troy went first to Sicily, and founded there Egesta and Eryx. Now, as on the same authority the first Greek colony was Naxos, also in Sicily, Greeks and Trojans (strange coincidence!) must have met again on new ground after the Iliad was all acted and done with, like a tale that is told.

On our return towards Palermo, one of our party having a touch of ague, we crossed the street to the apothecary, (at Calatafrini, our night's halt,) and smelling about his musty galenicals, amidst a large supply of malvas which were drying on his counter, the only wholesome-looking thing amidst his stores, we asked if he had any quinine. "Sicuro!" and he presented us with a white powder having a slightly bitter taste, which, together with an ounce of green tea, to be dispensed in pinches of five grains on extraordinary occasions, comes, he says, from the East. On our observing that the quinine, if such at all, was adulterated, and that this was too bad in a country of malaria, where it was the poor man's only protection, he looked angry; but we rose in the esteem of peasants in the shop, who said to each other—"Ed ha ragione il Signor." Wanting a little soda, we were presented with sub-carbonate of potash as the nearest approach to it—a substitution which suggested to us a classical recollection from Theocritus; namely, that in this same Sicily, 2000 years ago, a Syracusan husband is rated by his dame for sending her soda for her washing in place of potash, the very converse of what our old drug-vender intended to have washed our inside withal.

The Roman Catholic religion patronises painting oddly here; not a cart but is adorned with some sacred subject. Every wretched vehicle that totters under an unmerciful load, with one poor donkey to draw six men, has its picture of Souls in Purgatory, who seem putting their hands and heads out of the flames, and vainly calling on the ruffians inside to stop. We read Viva la Divina Providenza, in flaming characters on the front board of a carriole, while the whip is goading the poor starved brute who drags it; for these barbarians in the rear of European civilization, plainly are of opinion that a cart with a sacred device shall not break down, though its owner commit every species of cruelty.

The next day found us again installed at our old quarters in Palermo, where, during our brief remaining stay, we visit a conchologist, before which event we had no notion that Sicily was so rich in shells. Two sides of a moderately large room are entirely devoted to his collection. Here we saw a piece of wood nearly destroyed by the Teredo navalis, or sailor's bore, who seems more active and industrious here than elsewhere, and seldom allows himself to be taken whole. Out of hundreds of specimens, three or four perfect ones were all that this collector could ever manage to extract, the molluscous wood-destroyer being very soft and fragile. His length is about three inches, his thickness that of a small quill; he lodges in a shell of extreme tenuity, and the secretion which he ejects is, it seems, the agent which destroys the wood, and pushes on bit by bit the winding tunnel. But his doings are nothing to the working of another wafer-shelled bivalve, whose tiny habitations are so thickly imbedded in the body of a nodule of flint as to render its exterior like a sieve, diducit scopulos aceto. What solvent can the chemist prepare in his laboratory comparable to one which, while it dissolves silex, neither harms the insect nor injures its shell. Amongst the fossils we notice cockles as big as ostrich eggs, clam-shells twice the size of the largest of our Sussex coast, and those of oysters which rival soup-plates. We had indeed once before met with them of equal size in the lime-beds at Corneto. Judging by the oysters, there must indeed have been giants in those days. But this collection was chiefly remarkable for its curious fossil remains of animals from Monte Grifone. In this same Monte Grifone, which we went to visit, is one of the largest of the caves of bones of which so many have been discovered—bones of various kinds, some of small, some of very large animals, mixed together pell-mell, and constituting a fossil paste of scarcely any thing besides. None of the geologists, in attempting to explain these deposits, sufficiently enter into the question of the origin of the enormous quantity, and close juxtaposition, of such heterogeneous specimens.

By eight o'clock we are on board the Palermo steamer, which is to convey us hence to Messina. The baked deck, which has been saturated with the sun's heat all day, is now cooling to a more moderate warmth, and soothing would be the scene but for the noise of women and children. Large liquid stars twinkle here and there, like so many moons on a reduced scale, over the sea, and the night is wholly delightful! A bell rings, which diminishes our numbers, and somewhat clears our deck. The boats which carry off the last loiterers are gone, shaking phosphorus from their gills, and leaving a train of it in their tails; and the many-windowed Pharos of the harbour has all its panes lit up, and twinkles after its own fashion. Round the bay an interrupted crescent of flickering light is reflected in the water, strongest in the middle, where the town is thickest, and runs back; and far behind all lights comes the clear outline of the darkly defined mountain rising over the city. Our own lantern also is up, the authorities have disappeared, Monte Pelegrino begins to change its position, we are in motion, and a mighty light we are making under us, as our leviathan, turning round her head and snuffing the sea, begins to wind out of the harbour. A few minutes more, and the luminous tracery of the receding town becomes more and more indistinct; but the sky is all stars, and the water, save where we break its smoothness, a perfect mirror. Wherever the paddles play, there the sea foams up into yellow light and gerbes of amber-coloured fireballs, caught up by the wheels, and flung off in our track, to float past with incredible rapidity. Men are talking the language of Babel in the cabin; there is amateur singing and a guitar on deck—Orion is on his dolphin—adieu, Palermo!