... Will travellers from the roaring cities of Central Africa come a couple of centuries hence and mark with regret the last bit of some now flourishing boscage being eaten away by Twenty-Second Century progress, and smile indulgently at one of our foolishly feeble statues, in granite frock coats, tottering to lichened oblivion? No doubt. Palermo has seen so many changes since the Phœnicians used to trade and build along this coast. For this was the Carthagenian “sphere of influence” from the first, and the Greeks were here but little, and have left no traces in Palermo, though in the long wars between Carthagenian and Greek it was captured by the latter from time to time, and held for a space. The Greeks called it Panormous—meaning all harbour, for in their day deep water curved well up into the town, where are now streets and palaces and hotels. Of course Rome held it for a while, as she held pretty nearly everything. Held it for close upon a thousand years—with the Goths for its masters at one interval—but there are few traces of Rome either, and then the Arabs took it and set their seal so deep, in less than two centuries, that after the lapse of nearly another thousand years their occupation is still visible at every turn. For under the Saracens it was a capital, and after their destruction of Syracuse, which ended Greek domination in the Island, it gained a pre-eminence among Sicilian cities never afterwards lost. That garrulous old traveller from Bagdad, Ibn Haukal, 238writing in 943, says that Palermo then had a most formidable nine-gated wall, a population of close upon half a million, and many mosques. He also says that near where the Cathedral now stands was a great swamp full of papyrus plants, serving not only for paper but for the manufacture of rope. Already Sicily was beginning to suffer from the scarcity of water, and the merchant from Bagdad, accustomed to the abundant pools and conduits of his own city, makes severe comments upon the lack of these in Palermo. It could only have been by contrast, however, that the Palermians could have seemed to Haukal dirty, because Jane and Peripatetica, going to see a part of the old Moorish quarter, in process of demolition, found multitudinous water-pipes in the houses, entering almost every chamber. Haukal says that the Greek philosopher Aristotle was buried in one of the mosques of Palermo, and he opines that the most serious defect of the citizens was their universal consumption of onions. Peripatetica—to whom that repulsive vegetable is a hissing and an astonishment—read aloud in clamant sympathy this outburst of Haukal’s: