he Mussulmans had never thoroughly subdued the
north-eastern highlands of Sicily. Satisfied with occupying the
whole western and southern sections of the island, with planting
their government firmly at Palermo, destroying Syracuse, and
establishing a military fort on the heights of Castro Giovanni, they
had somewhat neglected the Christian populations of the Val Demone.
Thus the key to Sicily upon the Italian side fell into the hands of
the invaders. From Messina Roger advanced by Rametta and Centorbi to
Troina, a hill-town raised high above the level of the sea, within
view of the solemn blue-black pyramid of Etna. There he planted a
garrison in 1062, two years after his first incursion into the
island. The interval had been employed in marches and
countermarches, descents upon the vale of Catania, and hurried
expeditions as far as Girgenti, on the southern coast. One great
battle is recorded beneath the walls of Castro Giovanni, when six
hundred Norman knights, so say the chroniclers, engaged with fifteen
thousand of the Arabian chivalry and one hundred thousand foot
soldiers. However great the exaggeration of these numbers, it is
certain that the Christians fought at fearful odds that day, and
that all the eloquence of Roger, who wrought on their fanaticism in
his speech before the battle, was needed to raise their courage to
the sticking-point. The scene of the great rout of Saracens which
followed, is in every respect memorable. Castro Giovanni, the old
Enna of the Greeks and Romans, stands on the top of a precipitous
mountain, two thousand feet above a plain which waves with corn. A
sister height, Calascibetta, raised nearly to an equal altitude,
keeps ward over the same valley; and from their summits the whole of
Sicily is visible. Here in old days Demeter from her rock-built
temple could survey vast tracts of hill and dale, breaking downwards
to the sea and undulating everywhere with harvest. The much praised
lake and vale of Enna[1] are now a desolate sulphur district, void
of beauty, with no flowers to tempt Proserpine. Yet the landscape is
eminently noble because of its breadth--bare naked hills stretching
in every direction to the sea that girdles Sicily--peak rising above
peak and town-capped eyrie over eyrie--while Etna, wreathed with
snow, and purple with the peculiar colour of its coal-black lava
seen through light-irradiated air, sleeps far off beneath a crown of
clouds. Upon the cornfields in the cent