The Project Gutenberg eBook, Seekers in Sicily, by Elizabeth Bisland and Anne Hoyt Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/seekersinsicily00wetmiala SEEKERS IN SICILY “Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children” SEEKERS IN SICILY BEING A QUEST FOR PERSEPHONE BY JANE AND PERIPATETICA Done into the Vernacular By Elizabeth Bisland and Anne Hoyt NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMIX LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD Copyright, 1909 By JOHN LANE COMPANY To ANDERS AND FRAU ZORN from the North, in memory of the Sun and the South, this book is inscribed BY A Pair of “Word Braiders” NOTE THE designs upon the cover of this book, and at the heads of the chapters, are the tribe signs or totems of the original inhabitants of the island of Sicily, which have survived all conquests and races and are still considered as tokens of good luck and defenders from the Evil-eye. 9 PREFACE When this book was written—in the spring of the year—the Land of the Older Gods was unmarred by the terrible seismic convulsions which wrought such ruin in the last days of 1908. Very sad to each of us it is when time and the sorrows of “this unintelligible world” carve furrows upon our own countenances, but when the visage of the globe shrivels and wrinkles with the lapse of ages then the greatness of the disaster touches the whole race. Sicily, whose history is so full of blood and tears, has been the victim of the greatest natural tragedy that man’s chronicles record because of this line drawn by Time upon our planet’s face—yet it leaves her still so fair, so poignantly lovely, that pilgrims of beauty will—forgetting this slight blemish—still journey to see the sweetest remnant of the world’s youth. Happily 10Messina, the one city injured, was the one city where travellers rarely paused. All the others remain unmarred and are still exactly as they were when this chronicle of their ancient beauty and charm was set down. E. B. and A. H. 11CONTENTS PAGE Preface 9 CHAPTER I On the Road to the Land of the Gods 15 II A Nest of Eagles 45 III One Dead in the Fields 126 IV The Return of Persephone 178 V A City of Temples 192 VI The Golden Shell 229 13LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS “Demeter’s Well-Beloved Children” Frontispiece PAGE “A Place Where the Past Reveals Itself” 68 “Pan’s Goatherd” 132 “Ætna, The Salient Fact of Sicily” 186