Round
About Sicily With Lawrence Durrell
Here are some
excerpts from "Sicilian Carousel," Lawrence Durrell's first travel
book in 20 years, recently published by Viking. It is an account of a package
bus tour of Sicily, starting at Catania. Mr. Durrell's other travel books are
"Bitter Lemons," "Reflections on a Marine Venus" and
"Prospero's Cell." His novels include "The Alexandria
Quartet."
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The plane hovered and tilted and the
green evening, darkening over the planes of coloured fields girdling Catania,
swam up at us. The island was there, below us.
Thrown down almost in mid-channel like a
concert grand, it had a sort of minatory, defensive air. From so high one could
see the lateral tug of the maindeep furling and unfurling its waters along
those indomitable flanks of the island. And all below lay bathed in a calm
green afterglow of dusk. It looked huge and sad and slightly frustrated, like a
Minoan bull -- and at once the thought clicked home. Crete! Cyprus! It was, like
them, an island of the mid-channel -- the front line of defence against the
huge seas combing up from Africa. Perhaps even the vegetation echoed this, as
it does in Crete? I felt at once reassured; as if I had managed to situate the
island more clearly in my mind. Magna Graecia!
"There!" said my companion at
long last and Etna took the centre of the stage to capture our admiring vision.
It was very close indeed -- for we had come down low to prepare the run in on
Catania airport. It looked like a toy -- but a rather dangerous one. Moreover
it gave a small puff of dark smoke -- a languid gesture of welcome, as if it
had heard we were coming. Though we were flying not directly over it (I
presumed because of the hot currents which it siphoned off), we were not too
far to the side to avoid looking down into the charred crater -- a black pit in
the recesses of which something obscure boiled and bubbled. Then as the range
spread out a little I saw that it was not simply one crater but a whole network
of volcanoes of which Etna was the most considerable in size and beauty. But
everywhere there were other little holes in the earthcrust, for all the world
as if the whole pie had burst out because of the heat in minor geysers. It was
beautiful in its toy-like way, this range, and yet I could not avoid a slight
feeling of menace about it. There was really no reason, in spite of the
occasional severity of an outburst of lava. Etna had become an almost
domesticated showpiece, and we were promised an "optional" ascent to
the crater in the last week of the tour.
And then there was the little red bus
which we had not as yet met, and which was at this moment drawing up outside
the hotel to await us. It was a beautiful little camionette of a deep
crimson-lake colour and apparently quite new. It was richly upholstered and
smelt deliciously of fresh leather. It was also painstakingly polished and as
clean inside as a new whistle. It gave a low throaty chuckle -- the Italians
specialize in operatic horns -- and at the signal the chasseurs humped our
baggage and started to stow.
We were introduced to its driver, a
stocky and severe-looking young man, who might have been a prize-fighter or a
fisherman from his dark scowling countenance. His habitual expression was
sombre and depressive, and it took me some time to find out why. Mario was a
peasant from the foothills of Etna and understood no language save his own
dialect version of Sicilian. He also distrusted nobs who spoke upper class --
and of course Roberto [the guide] spoke upper class and was a nob, being a
university man. But from time to time when a word or a phrase became
intelligible to Mario the most astonishing change came about in that black
scowling face. It was suddenly split (as if with an axe-blow or a sabre-cut) by
the most wonderful artless smile of a kindly youth. It was only lack of
understanding that cast the shadow; the minute light penetrated he was
absolutely transformed.
Roberto tactfully sat in a stall for a
good 10 minutes to let us admire, and then launched into a succinct little
vignette about the church [St. Nicolo, in Catania] and the site which, I am
ashamed to say, interested nobody. It is not that culture and sunlight are
mutually exclusive, far from it; but the day was fine, the voyage was only
beginning, and the whole of the undiscovered island lay ahead of us.
In early spring, and again in the autumn
with the first rains which herald the winter, Sicily like the whole of Greece
is carpeted in wild flowers -- some six thousand varieties have been listed of
which some few flourish only in the Arcadian valley of the Styx. They are still
familiar to us, the flowers which filled Greek gardens of old --crocus, violet,
hyacinth; but northerners will be fondest of the more fragile anemone and
cyclamen. Sometimes one has seen the little white cusps of the cyclmen pushing
up through young snow like the ears of some fabulous but delicate creature from
a storybook. Then there is Star of Bethlehem, as we call it, tulip, prodigal
narcissus, humble daisy, lofty lily.
[At the cathedral in Syracuse.] What was
it that was really intriguing me? It was the successful harmonisation of so
many dissimilar elements into a perfected work of art. It didn't ought to be a
work of art but it was. It is true that the builders of the great cathedrals
did not live to see their work completed but they were operating to an agreed
ground-plan; here the miracle had been achieved by several sheer accidents. And
with such unlikely ingredients, too. Start with a Greek temple, embed the whole
in a Christian edifice to which you later add a Norman facade which gets
knocked down by the great earthquake of 1693. Undaunted by this, you get busy
once more and, completely changing direction, replace the old facade with a
devilish graceful Baroque composition dated around 1728-54. And the whole
thing, battered as it is, still smiles and breathes and manifests its virtue
for all the world as if it had been thought out by a Leonardo or a
Michelangelo.
We passed Augusta again -- how dismal it
looked by daylight with all its rusty refineries and sad clumps of rotting
equipment. But oil had come to Sicily, and with it prosperity and of course the
death of everything that makes life valuable. They were doomed to become soft,
pulpy and dazed people like the Americans so long as it lasted. But in a
generation of two, after the land had had its fill of rape and disaster the
magnetic fields would reassert their quiet grip once more to reform the place
and the people into its own mysterious likeness -- the golden mask of the
inland sea which is unlike any other.
We were entering the throat of a plain
which led directly into the mountains, and here I got a premonitory smell of
what the valley of Agrigento must be like -- it was purley Attic in the dryness,
in the dust, and the pale violet haze which swam in the middle distance foxing
the outlines of things. To such good effect that we found ourselves negotiating
a series of valleys diminishing all the time in width as they mounted, and
brimming with harvest wheat not all of which had yet been garnered. It is
impossible to describe the degrees of yellow from the most candent cadmium to
ochre, from discoloured ivory to lemon bronze. The air was full of wisps of
straw and the heat beat upon us as if from some huge oven where the Gods had
been baking bread.
The temples [at Agrigento] were bathed
in an early morning calm and light, and there were no other tourists at the
site, which gave us the pleasant sense of propriety, the consciousness that we
could take them at our ease. Drink them in is the operative tourist phrase --
and it wasn't inapposite, for the atmosphere on this limestone escarpment with
its sweeps of olive and almond, and its occasional flash of Judas was quite
eminently drinkable. The air was so still one was conscious that one was
breathing, as if in yoga. The stolid little temples -- how to convey the sense
of intimacy they conveyed except by little-ising them? They were in fact large
and grand, but they felt intimate and lifesize. Maybe the more ancient style of
column, stubby and stolid, conveys this sense of childishness. It was not they
but the site as a whole which conveyed a sense of awe; the ancients must have
walked in a veritable forest of temples up here, over the sea. But one slight reservation
was concerned with the type of light tufa used in the Sicilian temples; it was
the only suitable material available to the architect, and of course all these
columns were originally faced with a kind of marble dust composition to give
the illusion of real marble. In consequence now when they are seen from close
to the impression is rather of teeth which have lost their glittering dentine. They
are fawnish in tone, and matt in surface; while embedded in the stone lie
thousands of infinitesimally small shells, tiny wormcasts left by animalcules
in the quarries from which the stone was taken. This is not apparent at night
during the flood-lighting unless one looks really closely. But by day they
strike a somewhat second-hand note which forces one to recall that originally
all these temples were glossy -- fluted as to their columns while their friezes
and cornices were painted in crude primary colors. It is something too easy to
forget -- the riot of crude and clumsy color in which the temple was embedded.
Selinunte is stuck in a criss-cross 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.
On we pressed in the heat [at Segesta]
bursting with vainglory and good intentions, anxious to do the honest thing by
one of the most beautiful ancient Greek theaters in existence when there came
an encounter so hubris-punishing as to be worthy of some ancient Greek fable. Beside
the road, upon a large rock, sat of couple of very fragile and very ancient
people, obviously a man and his wife, both older than the rock upon which they
perched. The man was of an incomparable distinction from every point of view --
worn but excellent light tweeds, gillie's hat, light cape, solid gold-handled
walking stick . . . He looked like a senior Druid. His wife was beautiful and
silver and fragile, a fitting mate for a man so handsome, whose silver hair
spoke of age and serenity, but whose old eyes spoke of culture. Moreover, a
lunch basket lay open between them, and she was in the act of reading from a
book -- it sounded like ancient Greek in an Erasmic pronunication.
Suddenly we appeared round the corner,
puffing our noble way uphill; the reading stopped and the couple gazed at us
with a quiet aristocratic commiseration. Scrutiny would be the word -- a long
cold scrutiny which made us aware of the extent to which we were disturbing the
peace of this honeyed place. That wasn't all. As we passed the old man spoke to
his wife in a low clear voice, not intended to be overheard, and what he said
was: "Poor tourist scum." It was like machine-gun fire -- the
whole front line wavered. We had been assailed in our poor fragile corporate
identity; we had been weighed and found wanting. We could look at ourselves now
with the proper misgiving and see just what a scruffy raggle-taggle mob we
were, ill assorted and self-assertive with our little red bus. We felt suddenly
terribly ashamed and full of self-pity. And here were these damned British
aristocrats sniffing their contempt down their long aquiline supercilious
noses. They had doubtless done things the right way -- they had probably walked
the last hundred miles, sleeping in the trees, and pausing from time to time to
read select chunks of Theocritus or Thucydides to each other. Here they were,
professionally appreciating the place in the right way while we, a sweaty mob
of people of all shapes and sizes were galloping about destroying the peace. .
. . I was furious, we were all furious, we were hopping mad. Hopping mad.
Hopping.
I knew that, like the rest of the town,
the cathedral [at Messina] had been shattered to bits by the famous earthquake,
and had been more or less shoved together. I had little hopes that this forced
restoration of the great building would be a success. It is a quite fantastic
success; it has been done so simply and without pretensions, executed with a
bright spontaneity of a Zen water-color. Whatever they found left was run into
the new structure which itself was graced with an anti-earthquake armature. The
result is simply marvelous; the huge building is among the most satisfying and
gorgeous to be enjoyed in the island; and one is moved by the almost accidental
simplicity with which it has been brought off.
At the post office I ran into the two
French ladies. They had had a great shock, and they gobbled like turkeys as
they told me about it. As usual they had been sending off clutches of postcards
to their friends and relations in France -- they seemed to have no other
occupation or thought in mind. But peering through the grille after posting a
batch they distinctly saw the clerk sweep the contents of the box into the lap
of his overall and walk into the yard in order to throw all the mail on a
bonfire which was burning merrily on the concrete, apparently fed by all the
correspondence of Taormina. They were aghast and shouted out at him -- as a
matter of fact they could hardly believe their eyes at first. They thought they
had to do with a madman -- but no, it was only a striker. He was burning mail
as fast as it was posted. When they protested he said "Niente Niente .
. . questo e tourismo . . ."
Roberto had promised to escort me to the
top [of Etna] to watch the sun come up, and thence down to the airport to catch
the plane . . .
Then the long wait by a strange watery
moonlight until an oven lid started to open in the east and the "old
shield-bearer" stuck its nose over the silent sea. "There it
is," said Roberto, as if he had personally arranged the matter for me. I
thanked him. I reflected how lucky I was to have spent so much of my life in
the Mediterranean -- to have so frequently seen these incomparable dawns, to
have so often had sun and moon both in the sky together.