“Equally mysterious, in my opinion,” she said, “is the rifling of all these graves. The monk tells me ‘the Saracens did it,’ but the Saracens were in Syracuse less than two hundred years, and of all these myriad graves only two or three have been found intact, and these two or three were graves beneath graves. Every other one for sixty miles, from the largest to the smallest, has been opened and entirely emptied. The Saracen population in Syracuse was never very large. It consisted in greater part of the ruling classes. The bulk of the people were natives and Christians, who would regard this grave-rifling as the horridest sacrilege, and if the Saracens undertook alone this enormous task they would have had, even in two hundred years, time for nothing else. The opening of the graves is as strange a puzzle as the making of them.” “Perhaps some last trump was blown over Syracuse alone,” hazarded Peripatetica, “and all the dead here rose and left their graves behind them empty.” “Come up into the air and sunlight,” said Jane. “Your mind shows the need of it.” At the little gate sat one of the monastery dependents, whose perquisite was a permission to sell post-cards, 174and such coins and bits of pottery as he could retrieve by grubbing in the rubbish of the empty graves. He had a few tiny earthenware lamps, marked with a cross and still smoke-blackened, some so-called tear jugs, and one or two small clay masks which, from the closed eyelids and smooth sunken contours, must have been modelled in miniature from real death masks. Among these they found Arsinoë—or so they named her—whose face was touched with that strange, secret archness, that sweet smiling scorn so often seen on faces one day dead. The broad brow with its drooping hair, the full tender lips so instinct with vivid personality, went with them, and became to them like the record of some one seen long ago and dimly remembered, though the lovely benignant original must have been mere dust of dust for more than a thousand years. A nun in a faded blue gown has been showing them the relics of Santa Lucia. She has also been telling them how the Saint, when a young man admired her eyes, snatched them out of her head with her own hands and handed them to the young man on a plate. “What a very rude and unpleasant thing to do!” comments Jane in English. “But invariably saints seem so lamentably deficient in amiability and social charm.” The nun unlocks the gate of the Cappucini Latomia, and Jane and Peripatetica descend the long stair cut in the rocks. They are seeking the place where the remnant of that army Alcibiades so skilfully introduced into Catania, finally perished.