This led to a good deal of argument and counterargument; the Microscopes were a bit irritated to be bracketed with heathen towns and asked me to register their skepticism translating from the French and to convey the same to Miss Lobb; but she simply pursed her lips and said, quite firmly, “Nevertheless!” Whatever that meant.
By the time Deeds came back to his seat we were deep in the penetralia of this strange system, without, however, being able to determine how the maps had been established — how could a town have a birthday? Nevertheless once stuck into this business the public interest forced us to continue. We forthwith announced: in the sign of the Balance, or the Scales in English, were grouped China, Tibet, Argentina, Upper Egypt, and Indochina; while the cities in the same sign numbered Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Vienna, Nottingham, and Amiens.
“I think the whole thing is highly questionable,” said the Bishop, forever guardian of the nation’s conscience. “It depends how much one can bring oneself to believe.” Beddoes shot back, “What about the Thirty-nine Articles?” and Deeds pacified the contestants by asking what their birth sign was. The Bishop had a troublesome Saturn and Beddoes a badly aspected Mars which explained, though it did not excuse, everything. Miss Lobb pursued her quietly triumphant way with the air of an early Christian with faith enough to snuff out the stake.
But of course like everyone else I was really only profoundly interested in my own sign — the wretched Fishes, with their coiling uncertainties and fugues; I obtained no comfort from the knowledge that Portugal and Normandy came under this sign, and also Nubia, the Sahara and Galicia; but it certainly did give me a start to find that among the towns which found themselves under the fishy influence were both Alexandria and Bournemouth — though what they had in common with Seville, Compostella, Ratisbon and Lancaster I could not tell.… Anyway, after this instructive session Miss Lobb put away her book and resumed her seat with a quiet air of self-approbation, as if she had done her duty. A discursive argument now broke out around the general theme of astrology. The Bishop was conciliatory and Beddoes was snarly. I think the remark about the Thirty-nine Articles had made a hole in the Bishop’s intellectual lining; at any rate he kept hull down and did not provoke any more grapeshot. On we went.
I dropped into a doze and saw the dunes of Selinunte rise in my memory with a sort of concentrated melancholy. What was interesting to notice was that at this point in the journey a new rhythm had set in, a rhythm based on fatigue and fresh air. We had started to catnap at all times of the day like bedouin. Quarter of an hour was enough to restore good humor and extinguish heat weariness. We had also learned to double up a bit — it is no use pretending that traveling in a bus does not gradually begin to feel cramping, restricting. Thus when we passed a series of caravans with highly decorated sideboards it was no surprise to see that the gypsies (for they were gypsies and not villagers) who occupied them, were blissfully asleep, lying anyhow on the jogging bottom, like a litter of puppies, dead to the world. It was the rhythm of the open road. And I think we poor tourists felt a subconscious tug towards the freedom and adventure of the Romany life — it contrasted so radically with our own. Some of the fatigue had leaked into my dream, and I yawned as I saw the string of temples rising one after another on the dunes. Then other vaguer thoughts and visions came to intrigue me. I remembered Martine writing, “Then somewhere before Trapani everything changes and becomes — not to exaggerate — ominous; or at least fraught with moment. It is the spirit of Erice advancing to meet you. I was terrified. I expected It to happen when I reached Erice. What? I don’t know what. Just It.”
A large bird smashed itself against our windshield and was dashed aside into death — leaving a large smear of blood on the glass. Mario swore and wiped the spot clean with a cloth.
The thump of the collision woke me up.
Birdsong: Erice
Rock-lavender full of small pious birds
On precipices torn from old sky,
Promiscuous as the goddess of the grove.
No wonder the wise men listening pondered why
If speech be an involuntary response to stress,
How about song then? Soft verbs, hard nouns
Confess the voices submission to desire.
A theology of insight going a-begging.
This Aphrodite heard but cared not,
The unstudied mating call of birds was one
With everything in the mind’s choir.
Someone sobbing at night or coughing to hide it.
The percussion of the sand-leopard’s concave roar
A vocabulary hanging lightly in viper’s fangs.
All this she knew, and more: that words
Releasing in the nerves their grand fatigue
Inject the counter poison of love’s alphabet.
6: Erice
AT ERICE ONE feels that all the options of ordinary life are reversed. I do not know how else to put it. We steer our lives by certain beliefs which are perhaps fables but which give us the courage to continue living. But what happens even before you reach the “sickle” of Trapani is that you lose your inner bearings, become insecure. It’s as if the giant of the mountain up there, riding its mists, had kicked away your crutches. History begins to stammer; the most famous and most privileged temple to Aphrodite in the whole of the Mediterranean has vanished without leaving a trace. The one late head of Aphrodite is nothing to write home about. The holy shrine of Eryx has been blown out like a light, yet as at Delphi, one can still smell the sulphur in the air. You feel it in the burning sun like a cold touch on the back of the neck. But I am going too fast for we are still approaching Trapani, that deceptively happy and unremarkable town so beautifully perched upon its seagirt headland. The old part of the town, rather as in the case of Syracuse, occupies a firm promontory thrust out into the sea like a pier; the town has developed on the landward side. Salt pans and windmills, yes, and the view from the so-called Ligny Tower is a fine one; but what is really fine is the fresh sea wind, frisky as a fox terrier, which patters the awnings and bends the trees and sends old sailors’ caps scuttering along the cobbles of the port. Westward a fine expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea, smoldering in the sinking sun; two of the Egadi Isles with the choice names of Levanzo and Favignana glow with a kind of mysterious malevolence.
We were tired, we were really in no mood for further sightseeing, and Roberto let us off easily with a short visit to an indifferent church and a glimpse of the stern battlements constructed by Charles V. But the main thing was the frolicking wind whose playfulness allayed somewhat the curious feeling of tension and misgiving which I felt when I gazed upwards towards the ramps of Monte Giuliano and saw the sharp butt of Erice buried in the mountain like a flint axe head which had broken off with the impact. There was a short administrative pause while Mario made some growling remarks to the world at large and some adjustments to his brakes. Somewhere in the town a small municipal band had slunk into a square and started to play fragments of old waltzes and tangos. The sudden gusts of wind offered the musicians a fortuitous nautical syncopation — the music fading and reviving, full of an old-world charm. The Petremands ate a vividly colored ice cream and bought one for Mario. The Bishop had broken a shoelace. The old pre-Adamic couple were fast asleep in their seats, arm in arm, smile in smile, so to speak. It is pleasant when sleeping people smile and obviously enjoy their dreaming; they looked like representations of the smiling Buddha — though he is very far from asleep, sunk rather in smiling meditation. At last we began the ascent.