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They are fawnish in tone, and matt of surface; while embedded in the stone lie thousands of infinitesimally small shells, tiny worm casts left by animalcules in the quarries from which the stone was taken. This is not apparent at night during the floodlighting unless one looks really closely. But by day they strike a somewhat secondhand note which forces one to recall that originally all these temples were glossy — fluted as to their columns while their friezes and cornices were painted in crude primary colors. It is something too easy to forget — the riot of crude and clumsy color in which the temple was embedded. Statues painted.… It is my private opinion that the Greeks had, for this reason, little of what we would call plastic sense in our present-day terms. I speak of our lust for volume and our respect for the parent matter out of which our sculptures are shaped. Obviously for them wholly different criteria obtained; it is intriguing to try and imagine whether we would not have been shocked rather than moved by these sites if they had been today in their ancient state of repair, bright with color washes. It might have seemed to our contemporary eyes as garish but as refreshingly childish as the painted sideboards of the little Sicilian carts which from time to time we passed in the streets of the towns. I thought back to the Pausanian description of the Holy of Holies on the Acropolis; perhaps one should make the mental effort to compare our impressions of, say, Lourdes (horrible!) or St. Peter’s or the Cathedral of Tinos….

So we slowly passed down at a walking pace in that pleasant sunshine following the sweet enfilade of the temples as they curved down towards the one to the Dioscuri — like a descending chromatic scale. One by one these huge mythological beasts came up to us, as if they were grazing, and allowed us to pat them. The image had got muddled up in my mind with another thought about temples as magical defensive banks; and by the same token with the thought that all religious architecture carries the same sort of feeling. In America the most deeply religious architecture (in the anthropological sense) is the banks, and some are watched over by precisely the same mythical animals as watched over the temples here, animals staring down from a frieze — lions or boars, bulls or bears. Just as in the Midi, added Deeds jokingly, the deeply religious architecture of the wine cooperatives betrays the inmost religious preoccupations of the inhabitants. He thinks this a boutade but has in fact made an observation of great perspicacity and truth. They are indeed very much alike, and quite religious in their style, like stout laic churches.

The Bishop now elected to fall into a shaft, gracefully and without damage, and for a moment a terrible beauty was born. One touch of music hall makes the whole world kin. All we heard at first was a kind of buzzing and booming. It was his voice from the depths giving his rescuers instructions as to how to help him clamber back into the daylight. Beddoes at once suggested that Hades had mistaken him for Persephone and had made an unsuccessful snatch at his coattails, almost dragging him into the Underworld. He would have been disappointed one supposes. At any rate a pretty scene was enacted not unworthy of its ancient Greek echoes, for his savior turned out to be none other than Miss Lobb who (like Venus on a similar occasion) undid her plaited goat-skin belt and extended the end of it to the upraised hands of the holy man. The idea was simple and efficacious. We all formed up, myself with my arms round Miss Lobb and the rest linked on as in a childish game and with a tug or two we raised the Bishop into the daylight, where he seemed none the worse for this brief adventure. The one who was really pale with anxiety was of course Roberto who at once realized that his charge could have broken an ankle. The shaft was not profound, however; the sides had subsided, that was all; and as for the Bishop he was only wounded in his amour propre.

The theory of Hades snatching at him was all the more plausible as down here there had once been a shrine to the chthonic deities — another bewilderment of contradictory ascriptions — and it was just the place where a Protestant Bishop might expect to run afoul of a pagan God. Anyway, this accident put us all in a very good humor and we felt a little touch of pride in the classical aspect of the whole affair. Though we were mere tourists we had a touch of the right instinct. As for poor Persephone, that is another story. But I could feel no trace of her sad spirit calling from its earthen tomb — the sunlight made such fictions too improbably cruel to contemplate. The chthonic deities had little reality for us on that sunny morning. It was hard to admit that one so beautiful had, as one of her attributes, the title of “bringer of destruction.”

But what was a real knockout on this extensive and rather chaotic site was the enormous figure of the recumbent telamon — that gigantic figure whose severed fragments have been approximately assembled on the ground to give an indication of his enormous height and posture. This temple of Zeus is the most extraordinary in conception and has a strangeness which makes one wonder if it was not really constructed by some strange Asiatic race and left here. It feels somehow unlike anything else one may think of in the Greek world of temples, and particularly here in Sicily. I found the thing as barbaric and perplexing (despite its finish) as an Easter Island statue, or a corner of Baalbek. Who the devil executed this extraordinary Bank — which could have been the City National Bank in Swan Lake City, Idaho, or that of Bonga Bonga in Brazil? My elated puzzlement communicated itself to Deeds who raided his battered holdall and finally found a copy of Margaret Guido’s admirable book on the archaeological sites of the island. He used no other, it seemed. From it he read me a bit, sitting on a fragment of pediment to do so. The great temple had, like so much else, been toppled by an earthquake; but the fragments had fallen more or less in order and some notion of its construction could be deciphered. With this lucky factor, and with the description of Diodorus Siculus who had seen it standing, it was possible to work out its shape. But the real mystery begins at this point for the wretched thing is unlike anything else in the island — it is overgrown and vainglorious and, if one must be absolutely truthful, overbearing, and grim. It makes you uneasy when you look at the architectural reconstruction.

The whole thing, to begin with, stands on a huge platform about 350 feet long, reposing on foundations nearly 20 feet deep. Around this chunk had been strung a series of Doric half columns of staggering size. Their diameter is 13 feet. The top of this wall was surmounted by a sort of frieze of enormous stone men — the telamones. They supported the architrave with the help of an invisible steel beam linking column to column. Each of these giant men was over 25 feet tall, male figures, alternately bearded and beardless. Feet together and arms raised to support the architrave they must have been really awe-inspiring. Some of this feeling actually leaks into the dry-as-dust description of Diodorus who notes with wonder that the simple flutings of the columns were broad enough to contain a man standing upright in them. “The porticos,” he writes, “were of tremendous size and height and on the eastern pediment they portrayed the battle between the Gods and the Giants in sculptures which excelled in size and beauty, while in the west they portrayed the Capture of Troy in which each one of the heroes may be seen depicted in a manner appropriate to his role.”