ourneyed to marry
him amid the din of battles, had but one cloak to protect them both
from the cold. The traveller, who even in April has experienced the
chill of a high-set Sicilian village, will not be inclined to laugh
at the hardships revealed by this little incident. Yet the Normans,
one and all, were stanch. A victory over their assailants in the
spring gave them courage to push their arms as far as the river
Himera and beyond the Simeto, while a defeat of fifty thousand
Saracens by four hundred Normans at Cerami opened the way at last to
Palermo. Reading of these engagements, we are led to remember how
Gelon smote his Punic foes upon the Himera, and Timoleon arrayed
Greeks by the ten against Carthaginians by the thousand on the
Crimisus. The battlefields are scarcely altered; the combatants are
as unequally matched, and represent analogous races. It is still the
combat of a few heroic Europeans against the hordes of Asia. In the
battle of Cerami it is said that S. George fought visibly on
horseback before the Christian band, like that wide-winged
chivalrous archangel whom Spinello Aretino painted beside Sant'
Efeso in the press of men upon the walls of the Pisan Campo Santo.

[1] Cicero's description of Enna is still accurate: 'Enna
is placed in a very lofty and exposed situation, at the
top of which is a tableland and never-failing supply of
springs. The whole site is cut off from access, and
precipitous.' But when he proceeds to say, 'many groves
and lakes surround it and luxuriant flowers through all
the year,' we cannot follow him. The only quality which
Enna has not lost is the impregnable nature of its cliffs.
A few poplars and thorns are all that remain of its
forests. Did we not know that the myth of Demeter and
Persephone was a poem of seed-time and harvest, we might
be tempted, while sitting on the crags of Castro Giovanni
and looking toward the lake, to fancy that in old days a
village dependent upon Enna, and therefore called her
daughter, might have occupied the site of the lake, and
that this village might have been withdrawn into the earth
by the volcanic action which produced the cavity. Then
people would have said that Demeter had lost Persephone
and sought her vainly through all the cities of Sicily:
and if this happened in spring Persephone might well have
been thought to have been gathering flowers at the ti