They had been to Cefalu, looking for Count Roger in the great Cathedral built by his son, but found that he had vanished long ago, and his sarcophagus was in Naples. They had found instead traces of Sikel, Greek, and Roman; had lingered long before the splendid church, so noble even in decay, and now they were back again in Palermo, still on the track of their Normans. What Jane read from her book was also inscribed over the portal of Palermo’s Cathedral before which they stood, but being carved in Cufic script, and Jane’s Cufic being—to put it politely—not fluent enough to be idiomatic, she preferred to use the guide-book’s translation rather than deal with the original. The Cathedral at Palermo—“The Last Resting Place of Queen Constance” They had been skirting about the Duomo for days, for it dominated all Palermo with its bigness. Seated in a wide Piazza that was dotted about with mussy-looking marble saints and bishops, and a great statue of Santa Rosalia, the city’s patron, the Cathedral was flanked by the huge Archepiscopal Palace, by enormous convents and public buildings, so that one couldn’t hope to ignore or escape it. Yet they had deferred the Duomo from day to day because they knew their pet abomination, the Eighteenth Century, had been there before 249them, and that they would find it but an extremely mitigated joy in consequence. They knew that the swamp full of pxapyrus plants of Haukal’s time had given way to the “Friday Mosque” which the two Rogers and William the Bad had left undisturbed, but which had been pulled down by William the Good—being somewhat ruinous, and also seeing that William was “the Good” in the eyes of his ecclesiastic historians because he reversed the old Norman liberality to his Moslem subjects. Then Walter of the Mill, an Englishman, built the Cathedral, making it glorious within and without, and time and additions only made it more lovely until the modern tinkering began. A foolish, unsuitable dome was thrust among its delicate towers, and the whole interior ravaged and vulgarised. Still, if one were hunting Normans, the Cathedral must be seen, and most of all they wished to find the last resting-place of Constance, around whose memory hung a drama and a mystery, and drama and mystery were as the very breath of their nostrils to Jane and Peripatetica.