Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell Page B

Syracuse. Mario played his chuckling horn, sometimes it seemed for pure pleasure as there was hardly any traffic on the road. It was a horn on two notes, like a magpie’s rattling call. In silent villages he let out this pretty call sign to register our presence. Answer came there none. Then as we climbed a hillock and took a smooth curve Roberto announced that we had reached Augusta and this was well worth sitting up for.
    It was of an extraordinary beauty, this little oil port. A thousand tulips of light and colored smoke played about its derricks and towers and drums—a forest of refineries whose beauty was made quite sinister by the fact that the whole was deserted. There was not a soul in the whole place, not a dog, nor a cat: there wasn’t even a guard post. Yet the light played about in it, the smoke gushed and spat, as if it were the very forge of the Titans, and a thousand invisible trolls were hard at work in it. Its beauty was quite breathtaking. I watched it in diminishing perspective, reflected in the windows of the bus, and it seemed like a thousand wax lights afloat on the waters of chaos. Two days later we were to pass it in daylight and to have our ardor quenched by its hideous ugliness, its ungainly spider-like instruments. But indeed it was an important guarantee of Sicily’s economic progress. No more would she be a poor relation of the north. Roberto spared us statistics tonight out of sheer tact, and because he knew that intwo days’ time he could spout them all out by daylight. “Augusta,” said Deeds shaking his head. “All through the damn war we tried to shell it, with never a single hit. How could it have escaped? But it did.” I thought I knew the answer. “Every time the Fleet Air Arm tried to bomb Augusta or even Catania the Italians came back and knocked a piece off my balcony in Alexandria. Finally there was no balcony left.” The little spots of light receded into the rolling hills, until Augusta looked like a small forest fire, or the brindles on a tiger’s hide. It hung for a while like a sinking constellation and then extinguished itself while ahead of us, more warming but less spectacular, glowed the lights of Syracuse. We had begun to feel hungry and watched with a certain envy the Americans who poured out coffee from a vacuum flask and ate a sandwich in a lingering way. I thought that, after all, I would sleep like a lead soldier tonight once I had had dinner and a drink.

Marble Stele: Syracuse
    One day she dies and there with splendor
    On all sides of her, for miles and miles,
    Stretches reality in all its rich ubiquity,
    The whole of science, magic, total time.
    The hanging gardens of folly, the aloof sublime,
    Just as far as thinking reaches,
    Though lost now the nightingale’s corroboration
    Of spring in meadows of dew uprising.
    Only the avid silence preaches.
    â€œWhence came we, blind one?” asks the nursery rhyme,
    â€œAnd whither going, say?” The cherub questions us
    â€œIn the dark of his unknowing clad
    He charms eternity, makes all process glad.”
    Time has made way at last, the dream is ended
    Least said is soonest mended.
    Hear old Empedocles as calmly wise
    As only more than mortal man can be
    Who stands no nonsense from eternity.
    â€œThe royal mind of God in all
    Its imperturbable extravagance,
    Admits no gossip. All is poetry.
    There is no which, nor why, nor whence.”

Syracuse
    T HE TOWN SEEMED quiet and with little movement despite the earliness of the hour; there was a trifling contretemps at the hotel, where we found that the porters were on strike for the day. We had to hump our suitcases for the night.
    This would not have been a very serious matter had the lift not been so cramped, and had the French diplomatic couple learned the elementary art of packing. There seemed to be something absolutely necessary to their peace of mind in each of half a dozen suitcases—so the poor husband