The church of San Giovanni is, of course, founded upon a Greek temple—most Sicilian churches are, and—of all places!—this one stands upon a ruin of a temple of Bacchus—the fragments of which poke up all through the tiny garden. The church, equally, of course, has been Eighteenth Centuried, but happily not wholly; remaining a great wheel window, and beautiful bits here and there of Twelfth Century Gothic in the outer 170walls, though the interior is in the usual dusty and neglected gaunt desuetude. The whole place is in decay, even the attendant monastery is crumbling, the number of monks shrunk to a mere handful, despite the fact that this is a spot of special sanctity, for when they descend into the massive chapel of the crypt there is pointed out to them the little altar before which Saint Paul preached when he was in Syracuse. “Of course, St. Paul was here,” said Jane. “Everybody who was anybody came to Syracuse sooner or later—including ourselves.” The guide is firm as to the altar having stood in this very chapel when that remarkable Hebrew poured out to the Syracusans his strange new message of democracy, but this is clearly the usual fine monkish superiority to cramping probabilities, for such rib-vaultings as these were as yet undreamed of by the architects of Paul’s day. The altar is Greek, and no doubt was standing in the fane of Bacchus when the Jew spoke by it. The Greeks were interested and tolerant about new religions, and the life and death which Paul described would hardly have seemed strange to them, spoken in that place. That birth and death, the blood turned to wine, the sacred flesh eaten in hope of regeneration, having so many and such curious resemblances to the legends, and to the worship of the Vine God celebrated on that very spot. “At Thebes alone,” had said Sophocles, speaking of the birth of Bacchus, “mortal women bear immortal gods.” The violent death, the descent into hell, the resurrection, were all familiar to them, and what a natural echo would be found in their hearts to the saying, “I am the true Vine.”... 171The monk only smiles bitterly when it is demanded of him to explain why a spot of so reverent an association should be abandoned to dust and decay, and to the interest of curious tourists, when the mere apocryphal vision of an hysterical peasant girl should draw hordes of miracle-seeking pilgrims to Lourdes. Perhaps there was something typical in that anguished Christ painted upon the great flat wooden crucifix that hung over the altar in the crypt; a Christ fading slowly into a mere grey shadow; the dim, hardly visible ghost of a once living agony.... The monk goes before, the flickering candle which he shades with his fingers throwing a fan of yellow rays around his tonsured head. These are the Catacombs of Syracuse. “On every hand the roads begin.”