The sun was over the border now, rapidly westering, apparently increasing speed in its long slide into the ocean. Our little red bus swung itself clear of the crooked streets of Trapani and then started its tough climb up the dark prow of Eryx. Adieu Via Fardella, Via Pepoli! The road now began to mount in short spans on a steepening gradient, swinging about first to the right, then to the left; and there came a gradually increasing sobriety of spirit, a premonition perhaps of the Erycinean Aphrodite whose territory we were approaching. I am not romancing, for several of my fellow travelers expressed a sharpened sense of excitement in their several ways. Mario varied his engine speeds with great skill and the little motor had us valiantly swarming up the steep cliffs in good order.
The vegetation gradually thinned away, or made room for hardier and perhaps more ancient plants to cling to the crevices and caves in the rock. The precipices hereabouts were bathed in the condensations of cloud, as if a rich dew had settled on them; or as if the whole of nature had burst into a cold sweat. Yes, there were clouds above us, hanging lower and lower as we climbed, but they seemed to part as we reached them to offer us passage. At each turn — for we were still tacking up the cliffs like a sailboat — the view increased in grandeur and scope until the whole province of Trapani lay below us bathed in golden light and bounded by the motionless sea. Far off twinkled the Egadi, with Marettimo printed in black letter — the island which Samuel Butler so surprisingly decided must be the historical Ithaca in his weird book about the supposed female author of the Odyssey. I love wrong-headed books. But a short residence in modern Greece would have made Butler somewhat uncertain about the main theme of his book. Only a man, only a Greek could have written the poem — at least so think I.
We worked our way with elephantine determination round the northeastern flank of our two-thousand-meter odd mountain. There was only one little village to traverse, Parparella, perched up in solitude like a nest and empty of inhabitants at that hour. Bare rock now, with sudden ferns, cistus, caper, and an occasional asphodel to surprise one. And the views below us went on steadily unwinding like a scroll. The air had become purer, colder, as if filtered by the passing clouds. Once or twice our engine sneezed and Mario cocked an alert ear; but there was no trouble and on one of the penultimate loops we called a halt designed to let the amateur photographers in the party record the scene below. But while they clicked happily away at Trapani I found myself craning upwards to gaze at the crest of Eryx, printed on the unfaltering blue of the evening sky, still touched by the sun’s rays. You could see a dabble of ancient wall and some higgledy-piggledy towers and minarets just below the summit. They must mark the site of the now vanished temple of Aphrodite. From the rugged Cyclopean bases the walls mounted in a faltering and somewhat ramshackle fashion — improvised in layers, in tiers, in afterthoughts and false starts — Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Norman.
Once we had broken the back of the ascent, the road spanned pleasant but lonely pinewoods which scented the still air and led us in mysterious hesitant fashion to the gates of the little town, the Porte Trapani, where Roberto got down for a long confabulation with a clerk from the Mairie while the rest of us set about digging into our luggage for pullovers. The dusk was about us now though the higher heavens were still lit by the sun and up there the swifts darted and rolled, feasting on insects. A chill struck suddenly and the Bishop shivered.
There had been a hitch, said Roberto, and we had been switched to an older hotel; this was irritating. Like all guides he decried the old-fashioned and only respected modernity. But in this case there was no need for apologies; the hotel was a fine old-fashioned tumbledown sort of place but with all the right amenities. Mario turned the bus round and conducted us steeply downhill upon a forest road; but it was not far, for we emerged upon a sort of ledge like an amphitheater above the sea. It was a spacious site and belonged to spacious times when they built hotels with comfortable billiard rooms and lounges and terracotta swimming pools. It was fine to be thus perched over the sea in the middle of a pine forest. The wooden floors creaked under our feet in comfortable fashion. There were several dusty bars full of dusty half-full liqueur bottles. But at the back underneath the dining room there came a short stretch of forest followed by an astonishing vertical drop — a sheer drop to the bottom of the world as represented now in diagrammatic fashion by a Trapani with its saltpans and harbor picked out in lights. We were a bit below the castle here and the little town was not visible. A heavy mist from the precipice rose and dispersed, rose and dispersed. “It’s all very well, but I have got cold feet and I want my money back,” said Beddoes to the distress of Roberto who took everything he said seriously. Despite the season the mountain chill and the fatigue had chastened us and we were glad to settle for a drink and dinner and early bed.
The Count walked about in the dark for a while before turning in — I saw the glow of his cigar. Deeds found a crossword in an ancient paper while Miss Lobb replaced her book and appropriated another. I retired to my narrow wooden chamber which reminded me a bit of a ship’s cabin, or a room in a ski chalet. The wood smelled lovely and it was not too cold to step out upon the balcony with its great view. All along the horizon line there was a tremulous flickering of an electrical storm, soundless from this great distance. It reminded me of the only naval engagement I have ever witnessed — if that is the correct word; the ships were all out of sight and only this steady flicker (followed centuries later by the thunder of guns) was to be seen. It went back and forth regular as a scythe stroke.
I watched, straining to hear the following thunder, but none came for ages. It was up here, perhaps in this very room that Martine had spent a night of “intense nervous expectation.” It was so intense that she could not sleep, and it was at last with weary elation that she had watched the dawn break over the exhausted sea. She felt as if she had escaped whatever it was that had been haunting her subconscious in the form of vague premonitions of something doom laden which she would encounter here at Erice. Nor was she completely wrong. Nor had she escaped, for months afterwards she realized that it was here, and more especially on that sleepless night, that she had felt the first twinges in the joints, the first stiffness of the neck and backbone which were only to declare their meaning long months afterwards. “I recognize now in retrospect just what I went to Erice to find. It was a rendezvous which would finally lead me towards death — one must not fuss too much since it is everyone’s lot. Only now I know what I did not at Erice — I know roughly when. Yes, I am going into a decline in a year or two. Or so they say, the professors in Rome. I like the Victorian phrase, don’t you? It has pride and reserve — though I was never a woman of ice, was I?”
But all this was at another season, and the hotel had been deserted, and the rock levels of Venus’s temple had been smothered in tiny spring flowers she could not identify. Now I had followed her, not with quite such an acute apprehension of momentous happenings, but with something nevertheless which troubled and disturbed me and made me expectant. During that first night (I could hear the desultory click of billiard balls, where Beddoes was still up. Floors creaked.), during the long vigil she had spent some time