nd La
Cuba and La Favara still stand, and where the modern gardens, though
wilder, are scarcely less delightful than those beneath which King
Roger discoursed with Edrisi, and Gian da Procida surprised his
sleeping mistress.[1] The groves of oranges and lemons are an
inexhaustible source of joy: not only because of their 'golden lamps
in a green night,' but also because of their silvery constellations,
nebulae, and drifts of stars, in the same green night, and milky ways
of blossoms on the ground beneath. As in all southern scenery, the
transition from these perfumed thickly clustering gardens to the
bare unirrigated hillsides is very striking. There the dwarf-palm
tufts with its spiky foliage the clefts of limestone rock, and the
lizards run in and out among bushes of tree-spurge and wild cactus
and grey asphodels. The sea-shore is a tangle of lilac and oleander
and laurustinus and myrtle and lentisk and cytisus and geranium. The
flowering plants that make our shrubberies gay in spring with
blossoms, are here wild, running riot upon the sand-heaps of
Mondello or beneath the barren slopes of Monte Pellegrino.

It was into this terrestrial paradise, cultivated through two
preceding centuries by the Arabs, who of all races were wisest in
the arts of irrigation and landscape-gardening, that the Norsemen
entered as conquerors, and lay down to pass their lives.[2]

[1] Boccaccio, Giorn. v. Nov. 6.

[2] The Saracens possessed themselves of Sicily by a
gradual conquest, which began about 827 A.D. Disembarking
on the little isle of Pantellaria and the headland of
Lilyboeum, where of old the Carthaginians used to enter
Sicily, they began by overrunning the island for the first
four years. In 831 they took Palermo; during the next ten
years they subjugated the Val di Mazara; between 841 and
859 they possessed themselves of the Val di Noto; after
this they extended their conquest over the seaport towns
of the Val Demone, but neglected to reduce the whole of
the N.E. district. Syracuse was stormed and reduced to
ruins after a desperate defence in 878, while Leo, the
heir of the Greek Empire, contented himself with composing
two Anacreontic elegies on the disaster at Byzantium. In
895 Sicily was wholly lost to the Greeks, by a treaty
signed between the Saracens and the remaining Christian
towns. The Christians during the Mussulman occupation were
divid