Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell
The theory of Hades snatching at him was all the more plausible as down here there had once been a shrine to the chthonic deities—another bewilderment of contradictory ascriptions—and it was just the place where a Protestant Bishop might expect to run afoul of a pagan God. Anyway, this accident put us all in a very good humor and we felt a little touch of pride in the classical aspect of the whole affair. Though we were mere tourists we had a touch of the right instinct. As for poor Persephone, that is another story. But I could feel no trace of her sad spirit calling from its earthen tomb—the sunlight made such fictions too improbably cruel to contemplate. The chthonic deities had little reality for us on that sunny morning. It was hard to admit that one so beautiful had, as one of her attributes, the title of “bringer of destruction.”
But what was a real knockout on this extensive and rather chaotic site was the enormous figure of the recumbent telamon—that gigantic figure whose severed fragments have been approximately assembled on the ground to give an indication of his enormous height and posture. This temple of Zeus is the most extraordinary in conception and has a strangeness which makes one wonder if it was not really constructed by some strange Asiatic race and left here. It feels somehow unlike anything else one may think of in the Greek world of temples, and particularly here in Sicily. I found the thing as barbaric and perplexing (despite its finish) as an Easter Island statue, or a corner of Baalbek. Who the devil executed this extraordinary Bank—which could have been the City National Bank in Swan Lake City, Idaho, or that of Bonga Bonga in Brazil? My elated puzzlement communicated itself to Deeds who raided his battered holdall and finally found a copy of Margaret Guido’s admirable book on the archaeological sites of the island. He used no other, it seemed. From it he read me a bit, sitting on a fragment of pediment to do so. The great temple had, like so much else, been toppled by an earthquake; but the fragments had fallen more or less in order and some notion of its construction could be deciphered. With this lucky factor, and with the description of Diodorus Siculus who had seen it standing, it was possible to work out its shape. But the real mystery begins at this point for the wretched thing is unlike anything else in the island—it is overgrown and vainglorious and, if one must be absolutely truthful, overbearing, and grim. It makes you uneasy when you look at the architectural reconstruction.
The whole thing, to begin with, stands on a huge platform about 350 feet long, reposing on foundations nearly 20 feet deep. Around this chunk had been strung a series of Doric half columns of staggering size. Their diameter is 13 feet. The top of this wall was surmounted by a sort of frieze of enormous stone men—the telamones. They supported the architrave with the help of an invisible steel beam linking column to column. Each of these giant men was over 25 feet tall, male figures, alternately bearded and beardless. Feet together and arms raised to support the architrave they must have been really awe-inspiring. Some of this feeling actually leaks into the dry-as-dust description of Diodorus who notes with wonder that the simple flutings of the columns were broad enough to contain a man standing upright in them. “The porticos,” he writes, “were of tremendous size and height and on the eastern pediment they portrayed the battle between the Gods and the Giants in sculptures which excelled in size and beauty, while in the west they portrayed the Capture of Troy in which each one of the heroes may be seen depicted in a manner appropriate to his role.”
Nothing but ruins and conjectures remain of all this. Mutilated fragments of statues and coins and walls marked by fires. But here to my astonishment the Japanese couple suddenly began to behave strangely, overwhelmed I suppose by the giant stone figure on the ground. They screamed with laughter and pointed at it. They started to talk one hundred to the dozen and to nod and giggle. They climbed on it and photographed each other sitting on it. They clucked and beamed. They behaved like children with a new toy. And climbing about its defenseless body they reminded me of illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels. It was an intriguing reaction and I would have given a good deal to ask them what had provoked such an expression of feeling, but the limitations of language made it impossible. We walked thoughtfully around the recumbent warrior, wondering at the coarseness of the workmanship yet aware that in terms of imaginative pictorial originality the temple marked an important point in the architectural history of Sicily. There was only one other construction which in style resembled it—and that we had not seen as yet; but I made a mental note to watch out for the Temple labeled F at Selinunte, and was struck by the suggestion that perhaps this heavy treatment of the building may have come here via Egypt—where of course they worked in heavy and recalcitrant stones for their religious buildings.
But what earthquakes and weather began was more often than not finished off by the marauders—not necessarily foreign invaders, but simply lazy local builders who picked these choice bones of history and culture simply because they lay to hand and saved transport costs. Every architect will tell you what a godsend it is to find your building materials on the site, instead of being forced to transport them.
The party had spread out to visit the further corners of the site but Deeds, who knew from old not to waste time, headed me away across the meadows towards a pleasant little bar where we celebrated the Bishop’s narrow escape from Hades with a glass of beer and a roundel of salami. “It was a very singular sound he made,” said Deeds. “Like a bumble bee in a bottle. I heard it from quite a distance. It sounded like the bees in Agamemnon’s tomb.” It was another reference which carried a small built-in pang—for a whole generation had heard and remembered those bees at Mycenae; but an unlucky spraying with insecticide had silenced them and the great tomb has sunk back into its original sinister anonymity.
But the mystery of the Japanese behavior was absolute; we could not evolve a theory to account for this little wave of hysteria. Unless, as Beddoes suggested, they were suddenly filled with the conviction that this gorgon-like figure was a sort of carnival joke, placed there to evoke innocent merriment.
Miss Lobb walked about with a pleasant air of having done her duty. The two old apple people sat down in a clump of bushes and began to eat fruit which the old man peeled with a small pocketknife. They were radiant, obviously without fear of the Underworld. The Bishop had recovered his composure and was once more pacing out the temples and behaving as if he were suspicious about being overcharged for them. If they were not of the stipulated size he would report them to the agency. Roberto, still shaken, drank Coca Cola. Mario blew his sudden horn at last and we awoke to action once more.
Selinunte
DOWN THE CURVING roads we went now, among the almond groves, to where the little port of Empedocles lay glittering in the sun; but not quite. Just before we reach it the main coastal road turns sharply to the right and begins to head away towards the next objective—another cluster of temples in a different situation but set in a countryside which presents a complete contrast to the smiling hillsides we were just leaving. “In about half an hour,” said Deeds, “there will be a sudden deterioration of morale and general good humor. People will get out of sorts and start contradicting one another. Roberto says that it is always along this strip, and he thinks it is due to fatigue and a rather late lunch. I have only experienced it twice, but he says that it happens every time. Just watch.” In his own view this strange surge of bad humor was due to the sudden conviction that this journey was not only fatiguing but also morally indefensible; nobody should treat Agrigento like that. “We should have given it more time and more thought, not have been rushed through it like marauding Visigoths. Two weeks or two months—that is what it deserves. And then there is also the feeling of surfeit; people suddenly realize just how thick with old monuments of every period the island is. So they get grumpy.”
The astonishing thing is that it fell out exactly as stated. The Bishop’s wife crossed swords with the German girl about an open window which allowed the dust to blow in; the Count complained about the shag that Beddoes smoked. While the parent Microsc
Nor was the country through which we passed reassuring because of the heat and the dust streaming up from the lorries we passed. Then came a bundle of package-like valleys of green parched smallholdings and so at last came Selinunte. Mario nosed along the valley towards the sea headland upon which the main part stood, going so very slowly that I felt we were advancing almost on tiptoe. The bone structure of the assembled headlands and valleys was thus revealed to us in a slow sweep and we climbed until at last the bus came out in a clearing of olives over the hazy sea. What a contrast to Agrigento—all sunlit glitter and blueness. Selinunte is stuck in a crisscross of grubby sand dunes crammed into the mouth of a small mosquito-ridden river. A little hardy scrub was all that had managed to surface in these dunes. And yet it was becoming obvious that the array of temples and vestiges was far richer than Agrigento and their disposition more complex and intriguing than anything else we had seen in Sicily. To be hot and in a bad temper was no help, however, and I wondered whether the best time for such a visit would not be at sundown on a full moon. There was in fact a whole city of temples dotted about among the smashed altars and statues. It was as if some had got bored and just wandered off for a stroll among the surrounding dunes only to be silted up and fixed by the sand—this bilious looking tired sand. The landscape was made out of darkish felt. The sky hazed in. The river choked.
Needless to say, here the ascriptions are even more hazy than anywhere else—one could hardly spell out the identity of a single one of these monuments to a heroic past. They stood there in the echoless sand, glinting with mica, and they gave off a melancholy which was heart wrenching. It was worldless, out of time. Moreover, the heat was quite blistering and there was no scrap of wind to cool the traveler’s fevered brow. All this, one felt, was Roberto’s fault.… The party took refuge in the diffuse shade of a thorn tree, and Miss Lobb almost went so far as to “have words” with Mario because the Chianti was a bit too warm. So the prophetic words of Deeds came true. But worst of all was the fact that we were now conscious that if we were really going to appreciate this site properly and redeem our casual philistinism at Agrigento it would entail a circuit of about two miles in the burning dunes, the blackish dunes. We betook ourselves to lunch, sitting upon various bits of marble, edged together to stay in the shade. Then the Microscopes went to look at a broken column and were startled by the appearance of a huge snake—probably harmless. They behaved as if Roberto had personally put it there to frighten them.
I decided, however, to shake off both the apathy and the ill temper, and make use at once of Deeds’s knowledge of the site and of his stout binoculars. We climbed in the hot sunlight up to the nearest eminence, a sort of Acropolis from which the surrounding country could be studied through the glasses, thus obviating a long walk. I was still acting under advice, for on Selinunte Martine had been fairly explicit, and I had re-read her letters the night before.
Your first impression is one of great loneliness and melancholy; but in a moment you will reflect that what is really wrong with the site is the fact that the headland is not really high enough over the sea, and then that the blocked mouth of the river is responsible for the tatty vegetation and the flies which abound everywhere and the mosquitoes. But this said, the wretched place grows on you as you walk about it.
I came twice, the first time with the children and we wisely waited for evening before embarking on the shuffling scramble to reach the temples, which for want of any clear evidence of their origins are simply labeled by letters of the alphabet, or like the description of a sonnet sequence. Dust and lizards and prickly heat were our portion, and we were glad for straw hats and a thermos with something cold. But as the effort increased so their beauty grew on one, though they obstinately spoke of places much further away like Leptis Magna or Troy. Straggles of prickly pear made a kind of guiding channel. Huge lizards and in one temple a hole full of bats. I had looked them up carefully before setting out but what with the heat they all swam together in a glad haze of dun whiteness. The heat throbbed; it was the pulse of the ancient world still beating somewhere, far away. Even after dark they were still blazing, for we stayed until sunset on the little promontory just to watch the mithraic animal plunge hissing into the sea.
But I want to recount an incident which happened in a desolate place just near Temple E, which was one of the happier in style and feel. Nevertheless as we approached, from a kind of gully in the sand came the clank of chains and the whistling and straining of breath, as if a human being were wrestling with the Minotaur and having all his bones crushed with the embrace. We advanced, looking around with trepidation and saw that it was a fox caught in a steel trap. It was half-mad with pain and fright and its bloodshot eyes were almost bursting from their sockets. There in the wilderness this poor creature was wrestling with this steel instrument; and of course our approach only increased its terror, which multiplied the terror and dismay of the children. We would have given anything to free it, but at every approach it showed its fierce teeth and hissed at us. The heavy steel trap would not, by the look of it, yield to any but a savage peasant hand, or possibly even a steel bar. It would have been a mercy to dispatch it but we had nothing to hand. And though we examined the whole site there was no trace of a guardian to whom we might report this death struggle. It was a barbaric interlude and it shook us all; after that the heat and the oppressive silence which succeeded the groans of the poor red fox weighed a ton. And when we returned to the acropolis we were all on the point of tears with vexation and sadness.
I thought of this incident as with the help of the glasses I identified Temple E where it had occurred and admired its stylishness, though it looked from the west rather shorn of its head trimmings—the marble decorations and cornices which Deeds informed me had been carried off to grace the museum in Palermo—a most irritating habit this, common to the archaeologists of all nations.
But apart from cherished details made more vivid by the incidents recorded by Martine the glasses revealed along the sloping hills a really extravagant assemblage of ruins of all kinds, whole sections in tumbled heaps with only one column or two standing. A whole city of confused remains. Only juniper and thorn and lentisk managed to pierce the sand, and of course the prickly pear. We stood for a long time on the quiet grass-covered acropolis trying to feel our way into the meaning of this strangely anonymous town. On each side the crooked profiles of temples and columns stretched away, and there did not seem to be any central marshalling point, a central shrine or acropolis from which they radiated. There must of course have been a heart to the great city but unlike Agrigento we could not map it out by eye—even with probability. Selinunte … the very name is like a sigh. It is derived from the wild celery stalk which must once have been abundant here.
And as for the question of a center, the guides inform us that there was indeed a central acropolis, very strongly walled and containing many of the temples still extant today. It stood on a low hill as on a platform between two rivers at their point of confluence, and at the point where they flowed into the sea; moreover the mouth of each river formed a lip with a small but serviceable harbor sheltered in it. “When you know that you can at once feel the fresh air rush into the landscape,” said Deeds folding away his glasses carefully. We crept and crawled our way back to join those of the others who had remained obstinately in the shadow of the thorn tree. Having braved the heat we had a somewhat virtuous air as we poured out a little more warmish wine. Deeds, who had done his homework and was clearly quite at home here, proved to me that the
At this point Roberto pulled himself up and proposed a visit to the temple of Apollo, unique both for its size and for the fact that it took so long to build that fashions in building outran the architectural plans. “The total effect is a curious one, for the temple is archaic in style on the east side and classical on the west. It must have reached a height of a hundred feet or more and dominated the other temples, and indeed the whole surrounding area.” Alas! There is nothing left upright, and on the ground just this awkward medley of smashed stones and columns. The prospect of crawling about among them like flies had the effect of unmanning the party and Roberto got no takers for his gallant cultural proposal. I asked how far the Malophoros sanctuary was but was disappointed to discover that it was a full half hour’s walk to the west along a footpath leading from the Acropolis. Roberto made a vaguely thoughtful offer to accompany me there, but I rapidly made an excuse that I did not want to hold up the others in the heat; so we straggled in rather ungainly fashion back to the entrance to the ruins where Mario had backed the bus under a tall fig tree—an authentic piece of shade this. Here he had fallen asleep, and so deeply, that the noise of our arrival did not wake him. We formed an affectionate circle round him watching him sleep with admiration. It is rare to see someone so thoroughly asleep. He lay with a hand across his eyes, his mouth open, very slightly snoring. It was somehow most encouraging and invigorating. All our ill humor slipped from us as we watched this noble man taking his ease. But the noise of a foot upon gravel—or was it perhaps the sheer force of our gaze upon him?—did the trick at last and he woke, blushing deeply to be thus caught napping. Hazily we climbed aboard and implored him to turn on the fresh air vane of the bus. The seats were hot. We started up and nosed our way down into the boiling valley and along to the coast road.