THE LAND OF THE EARTHQUAKE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVI, Issue 10069, 10 February 1909, Page 4

THE LAND OF THE EARTHQUAKE.

PEN-PICTURES IN SICILY AND CALABRIA. (By H. Hamilton Fyfe, in the London Daily Mail.) To see a beautiful woman ravaged by some hideous disease is always more painful than the sight of a plain, face pockmarked. So does it fill one with a deeper sense of desolation to think of disaster .falling upon the fairest spots of earth than to hear of ordinary, ugly towns or countrysides being devastated. There is a pitiful sense of incongruity in the news from Sicily. The "loveliest, isle" lives in one's memory as a sun-steeped vision of all that is beautiful. Blue sea, blue sky, the most enchanting ruins, the most attractive modern hotels, the most delicious climate the most picturesque people—one could go on with superlatives for an hour. Sicily cannot be spoken of without exaggeration. She is an exaggeration herself. She is so beautiful that she disturbs all one's previous idea 6of the beautiful. Away from her one can hardly believe one's own memory. As for conveying the full measure of her charm by description, it is a hopeless task. One can only convey some faint idea. —"Messina La Nubile." — I shall never forget the first time I saw Messina—"Messina la Nobile," which now lies crushed beneath the hoof of the EarthFiend, collapsed, ruined, in flames. _ It was a brilliant sunny December morning. The night train from Naples, having given you for an hour or so beforehand ravishing views of the piled-up, mountain masses of Sicily, purple and blue across the shining straits, runs you into Villa San Giovanni a little after eight o'clock. The sleeping-car is at once slid on to the ferryboat which plies across the narrows. Thus before nine I was gazing at Messina's busy quays, where the shipment of oranges was filling all the air with "odor. From here they shipped every year between four and five million cases' of oranges and lemons. The chances are that the orange you delicately peel and eat after dinner this evening grew arnid the scented groves of Syracuse or Taormina, and was sent down to Messina to be exported to a colder clime.

From the sea Messina is glorious. It lias a tine architectural water-front. Its white houses glow in the sunlight, casting hard shadows even so early as nine o'clock in mid-winter. Up behind are ruined forts perched on precipitous rocks which crown hills covered by vineyards and olive groves, orchards and flower gardens. Further oft are the mountains towering majestic in the golden air. As for the colors on the sea, they are fascinating in their brilliance and variety. They just make that splendid shimmering, patchy effect which impressionist painters are for ever aiming at, but scarcely ever hit off. —A City's Faith.— Frankness compels me to add, however, that Messina, like Constantinople, looks its best from the water. Earthquakes have devastated, that town before, and its buildings are not many of them vividly interesting. Along the Marina, that is, the line of quays, where the porters rush excitedly hither and thither, doing a minimum, of work with a maximum of imprecations, you get as powerful an assortment of smells as anywhere in Europe, and even Asia can hardly offer any selection more varied, or more penetrating. The Via Garibaldi (is there a town in Italy which does not call its principal street after the patriot-hero?) is noteworthy for nothing in particular. The cathedral is chiefly attractive for its mosaics, which cannot equal, however, those at Palermo, and for the famous Letter of the Virgin, of which a copy is preserved in the gorgeous shrine under the high altar. Numberless cures are said to have been performed by this precious piece of parchment, of which the contents are inscribed in golden letters at the back of the altar. In it the Blessed Virgin, dating from Jerusalem in the year of our Lord 42 ("Anno Filii nostri xlii."), commends the people of Messina to the blessing of Almighty God, and promises to be their perpetual proctectress on account of their great faith. No devil inhabiting a human body has ever been able to withstand the reading of these comfortable words. Queens have worn the letter round their necks in childbirth and had their pains marvellously lightened. All pious Messinians believe they are still under the special care of the Holy Mother of God, and at the Festival of the Assumption in August they annually show their gratitude by a fine procession, of which the principal feature is an immense car, said to be equal in height to the tops of the houses and surmounted by a beautiful young girl in the character of the Saviour, holding a child which represents the Blessed Virgin's immaculate soul. —The Sicilian Coastline. — From Messina to Catania, which has suffered also from the earthquake, is a train journey of some three to four hours along the sea-shore, with the blue water glittering in the sun, and with the mountains rising abruptly on the right hand, their lower slopes softened by masses of orange and lemon trees, and made lovely in spring by the delicate pink and white of almond blossom. Little towns are constantly passed, squeezed flat along the "water's edge, or lying back in a fold of the hills, or perched on giddy heights above the sea like Taorniiua, which you can spy, if you crane your neck, straight up above you as you' run along around the very foot of Etna, the white-capped giant which dominates the landscape of Sicily even as Fuji-yama does that of Japan. Here is a- district of fertile hind, yielding rich crops, which from time to time is the prey of the volcano. Yet the people take no measures of precaution either against Etna or against earthquakes. You ask them why they do not move to another part, or build their house more securely, (that is, less flimsily). They shrug their patient shoulders. What would be the good? If they are to be overwhelmed, they will be. Cecco from the next village went to America to avoid the lava-streams. He was killed in a fire in New Orleans. Ecco! no one can escape if his fate is written in the book. The Sicilian, so voluble and fiery and energetic in ordinary circumstances, becomes apathetic and almost helpless in face of calamity. He is a fatalist by temperament. When all goes well, hey for bright eyes and a flask of-good red wine! but..when misfortunes fall upon him, then he enters fully into the spirit of the catastrophe. He goes about with a melancholy air- of I patient resignation. It is God's will—or the devil's. What can man do, save endure? —Desolate Calabria.—

Round about Catania the country is bare and desolate, less like Sicily, as the. traveller thinks of it, than Calabria- on the other side of the straits, though, as a matter of fact, I have journeyed, for hours in the interior of the island through districts dreary as anything on the mainland. But in Calabria almost the whole province seems to be utterly hideous. For the most .part it consists of low, sandy hills or marshy plains overgrown with poisonous herbs. The towns are scarcely more than large, ill-kept villages, ruined time after time by earthquakes, with a population of half-starved peasants who extract painfully a bare living from the brown, dusty soil. It is always cold in Calabria, and the coldest places are the hotels. Wind swept over the country by day and by night—a healthy wind enough, ,no doubt, but one that leaves you with very uncomfortable memories. As a- set-off to the wind may be mentioned the cheapness of the hotel charges. Food and wine are both good, and they almost pay you to oonsume'them.

It may be brutal, but I cannot feel the same sympathy with bare and bleak Calabria as I do (and as all who know her must) with "la bella Trinacria," as Dante called Sicily, the "very ugly island with a few exquisitely beautiful spots in it," as a later author has described it. A little more or less desolation—what can it matter to Calaoria? Of course, the -victims of the_ earth-tremble must be cared for and their material wants supplied. But in a year or so the country will look much the same as before.

But Sicily, the last refuge of the spirit of Greek art, the home of Theocritus, sweet singer of simple joys, the land of matchless rjeauty —to think of that fair face scarred and seamed is pitiful; arouses in one a rebellious sense of the unfitness of things.