“Of course there were no temples to Pluto, they wouldn’t have known how to build one,” said Peripatetica, looking from the enclosed cella to the sunlit peristyle outside. “I never quite realized before the cheerful, self-possessed publicity of Greek worship; their temples standing always in these open elevated sites; open themselves to the light and air—majestically simple. There is just the little enclosure to shelter the statue of the god, and all the rest is clear openness, where the worshippers stood under glowing sun and sky, or looking out into it. It’s essentially an out-of-door building, the Greek Temple, spreading its beauty to light and air like a flower. Pluto would have had to evolve a type of his own, he never could have fitted into this calm cheerfulness.” 202“No,” pondered Jane, “there is no room for superstitious terrors in the sunshine. I wonder does superstition turn naturally to caves and gloom, or do dark holes in the ground breed it? There is all the space of light and darkness between the sermon preached on the Mount, all beatitudes and tenderness, and the theology of the monks in the Middle Ages after the Christians had made their churches in such catacombs as those of Syracuse.”... All Girgenti’s temples are wrought from this native chrome-yellow tufa; a sort of solidified sea-beach—compacted sand, pebbles, and fossil shells. The original snow-white stucco, made of marble dust, has flaked away, save here and there in some protected niche. The dry sirocco gnaws into the soft sandstone, and on the seaside of the columns show the long deep scorings of its viewless teeth, sunk in places nearly half through the huge diameter of the pillars. Peripatetica was in two minds as to whether the temples had not been even more lovely in their original virgin whiteness. “After all,” she mourned, “they are but a frame without the pictures; for the Greek temple existed primarily to be a setting for its sculpture. Sculpture was an essential part of its planning, not a mere decoration, and without it pediment, metopes, frieze, and pedestals are meaningless forms. That sculpture that stood and walked on the pediments and gave life to the frieze; that animated the exterior, or sat calm and strong in the central shrine. To a Greek even this wonderfully preserved Concordia, bare of sculpture, would seem but a melancholy skeleton of a once fair shrine.” But Jane was obstinately sure that nothing could 203be better than the natural harmonies of the naked stone.