The poor Saint was not in flourishing circumstances in these later days, it would seem, judging by the bareness of his sanctuary, and the torn cotton lace upon the altars, and yet he was an industrious healer, if one might reason from the votives that hung about his picture. A few were wrought in silver, but more in wax, or carved and painted wood, reproducing with hideous fidelity the swollen limbs, the cancerous breasts, the goitered throats, the injured eyes, the carbuncles and abcesses he had healed through his miraculous intervention. Indeed, he was a general jobber in miracles, for the naïve, rude little paintings on the wall showed a spirited donkey running away with a painted cart, the terrified occupant frantically making signals of distress to San Niccola in heaven, who was preparing promptly to check the raging ass. Or he was drawing a chrome-yellow petitioner from a cobalt sea, or turning a Mafia dagger aside, or finding a lost child 210in the mountains. He certainly “studied to please,” and it did seem a pity he should be housed in so bare and poverty-stricken a shrine. Many less active saints lived amid welters of gilding and luxury. In spite of Fortunato dragging them aside later to see a little “Casa Greco,” where they could trace delicate tesselated pavements and the bases of the columns of the atrium amid the grass, they still succeeded in arriving that same afternoon at their original goal. Only the temple of Diana at Ephesus was larger than this great shrine to the spirit of the overarching sky, and even yet, though moles and churches and villas have been wrought from its remains, the gigantic ruin daunts the imagination with its colossal fragments, its huge tumble of stone, its fallen mountains of masonry. Each triglyph alone weighed twelve tons, and the enormous columns around the whole length of its three hundred and seventy-two feet were more than sixty feet high. Theron, the benevolent despot of Akragas, built it with the labours of his Carthagenian captives, and no doubt a memory of their frightful toilings in the Sicilian noons inspired the Carthagenians, when they captured the city, to their fury of destruction against the fane they themselves had wrought. It would seem as if only some convulsion of nature could have brought down that prodigious construction, but still visible upon the bases of the fallen pillars are the cuts made by the Punic conquerors, sufficient to disturb the equilibrium of even these monster columns. When their rage had at last expended itself nothing of all that incredible mass of masonry remained standing save three of the enormous Telamone—the male caryatids—that had supported the entablature. And so 211firmly were these built that they stood there for fifteen centuries more before time and a quaking of the earth at last brought them down.