Nothing but ruins and conjectures remain of all this. Mutilated fragments of statues and coins and walls marked by fires. But here to my astonishment the Japanese couple suddenly began to behave strangely, overwhelmed I suppose by the giant stone figure on the ground. They screamed with laughter and pointed at it. They started to talk one hundred to the dozen and to nod and giggle. They climbed on it and photographed each other sitting on it. They clucked and beamed. They behaved like children with a new toy. And climbing about its defenseless body they reminded me of illustrations of Gulliver’s Travels. It was an intriguing reaction and I would have given a good deal to ask them what had provoked such an expression of feeling, but the limitations of language made it impossible. We walked thoughtfully around the recumbent warrior, wondering at the coarseness of the workmanship yet aware that in terms of imaginative pictorial originality the temple marked an important point in the architectural history of Sicily. There was only one other construction which in style resembled it — and that we had not seen as yet; but I made a mental note to watch out for the Temple labeled F at Selinunte, and was struck by the suggestion that perhaps this heavy treatment of the building may have come here via Egypt — where of course they worked in heavy and recalcitrant stones for their religious buildings.
But what earthquakes and weather began was more often than not finished off by the marauders — not necessarily foreign invaders, but simply lazy local builders who picked these choice bones of history and culture simply because they lay to hand and saved transport costs. Every architect will tell you what a godsend it is to find your building materials on the site, instead of being forced to transport them.
The party had spread out to visit the further corners of the site but Deeds, who knew from old not to waste time, headed me away across the meadows towards a pleasant little bar where we celebrated the Bishop’s narrow escape from Hades with a glass of beer and a roundel of salami. “It was a very singular sound he made,” said Deeds. “Like a bumble bee in a bottle. I heard it from quite a distance. It sounded like the bees in Agamemnon’s tomb.” It was another reference which carried a small built-in pang — for a whole generation had heard and remembered those bees at Mycenae; but an unlucky spraying with insecticide had silenced them and the great tomb has sunk back into its original sinister anonymity.
But the mystery of the Japanese behavior was absolute; we could not evolve a theory to account for this little wave of hysteria. Unless, as Beddoes suggested, they were suddenly filled with the conviction that this gorgon-like figure was a sort of carnival joke, placed there to evoke innocent merriment.
Miss Lobb walked about with a pleasant air of having done her duty. The two old apple people sat down in a clump of bushes and began to eat fruit which the old man peeled with a small pocketknife. They were radiant, obviously without fear of the Underworld. The Bishop had recovered his composure and was once more pacing out the temples and behaving as if he were suspicious about being overcharged for them. If they were not of the stipulated size he would report them to the agency. Roberto, still shaken, drank Coca Cola. Mario blew his sudden horn at last and we awoke to action once more.
5: Selinunte
DOWN THE CURVING roads we went now, among the almond groves, to where the little port of Empedocles lay glittering in the sun; but not quite. Just before we reach it the main coastal road turns sharply to the right and begins to head away towards the next objective — another cluster of temples in a different situation but set in a countryside which presents a complete contrast to the smiling hillsides we were just leaving. “In about half an hour,” said Deeds, “there will be a sudden deterioration of morale and general good humor. People will get out of sorts and start contradicting one another. Roberto says that it is always along this strip, and he thinks it is due to fatigue and a rather late lunch. I have only experienced it twice, but he says that it happens every time. Just watch.” In his own view this strange surge of bad humor was due to the sudden conviction that this journey was not only fatiguing but also morally indefensible; nobody should treat Agrigento like that. “We should have given it more time and more thought, not have been rushed through it like marauding Visigoths. Two weeks or two months — that is what it deserves. And then there is also the feeling of surfeit; people suddenly realize just how thick with old monuments of every period the island is. So they get grumpy.”
The astonishing thing is that it fell out exactly as stated. The Bishop’s wife crossed swords with the German girl about an open window which allowed the dust to blow in; the Count complained about the shag that Beddoes smoked. While the parent Microscopes said that the lavatories in the cafe had left much to be desired and they would report the matter to the responsible authorities. I was frankly hungry for something better than a box lunch and touched with the Deedsian misgivings about having been a traitor to Agrigento. This is the whole trouble about package travel. Yes, we were all put out, and in Mario’s driving mirror we looked like a gaggle of wattle-wagging turkeys. The shadow of the imperfectly grasped Agrigento lay over us.
Nor was the country through which we passed reassuring because of the heat and the dust streaming up from the lorries we passed. Then came a bundle of package-like valleys of green parched smallholdings and so at last came Selinunte. Mario nosed along the valley towards the sea headland upon which the main part stood, going so very slowly that I felt we were advancing almost on tiptoe. The bone structure of the assembled headlands and valleys was thus revealed to us in a slow sweep and we climbed until at last the bus came out in a clearing of olives over the hazy sea. What a contrast to Agrigento — all sunlit glitter and blueness. Selinunte is stuck in a crisscross of grubby sand dunes crammed into the mouth of a small mosquito-ridden river. A little hardy scrub was all that had managed to surface in these dunes. And yet it was becoming obvious that the array of temples and vestiges was far richer than Agrigento and their disposition more complex and intriguing than anything else we had seen in Sicily. To be hot and in a bad temper was no help, however, and I wondered whether the best time for such a visit would not be at sundown on a full moon. There was in fact a whole city of temples dotted about among the smashed altars and statues. It was as if some had got bored and just wandered off for a stroll among the surrounding dunes only to be silted up and fixed by the sand — this bilious looking tired sand. The landscape was made out of darkish felt. The sky hazed in. The river choked.
Needless to say, here the ascriptions are even more hazy than anywhere else — one could hardly spell out the identity of a single one of these monuments to a heroic past. They stood there in the echoless sand, glinting with mica, and they gave off a melancholy which was heart wrenching. It was worldless, out of time. Moreover, the heat was quite blistering and there was no scrap of wind to cool the traveler’s fevered brow. All this, one felt, was Roberto’s fault.… The party took refuge in the diffuse shade of a thorn tree, and Miss Lobb almost went so far as to “have words” with Mario because the Chianti was a bit too warm. So the prophetic words of Deeds came true. But worst of all was the fact that we were now conscious that if we were really going to appreciate this site properly and redeem our casual philistinism at Agrigento it would entail a circuit of about two miles in the burning dunes, the blackish dunes. We betook ourselves to lunch, sitting upon various bits of marble, edged together to stay in the shade. Then the Microscopes went to look at a broken column and were startled by the appearance of a huge snake — probably harmless. They behaved as if Roberto had personally put it there to frighten them.