ummer, however, that the caprices of the weather interfere but little
either with the salt works or the excursions.

If there is no excursion or no special occupation, we go to the caffe or
the club, or call on the chemist who is sure to be surrounded by friends,
or sit in the balio smoking and talking nonsense by the hour. And there
is always the inexhaustible wonder of the great view. The spacious dome
of the sky, which curves above and around, unites at the horizon with the
inverted dome of the earth and sea, which curves around and below, the
two together forming an enormous hollow globe in the midst of which the
top of the mountain seems to be suspended like the floating island of
Laputa. Conte Pepoli can sit in his castle and watch the half-tame
ravens, with little silver bells on their necks, as they flit around the
window and perch on the crazy wooden balcony where an old priest is
asleep in a chair, over the edge of a precipice of many hundred feet,
backed by leagues upon leagues of Sicily.

CHAPTER IX--THE MADONNA AND THE PERSONAGGI

In August, 1901, I was on the mountain and saw a procession representing
Noah's Ark and the Universal Deluge--one of those strange and picturesque
cavalcades that were formerly more common than they are now.

Usually, in other parts of Italy, the same story is repeated at the same
season: in one place, always the Passion at Easter; in another, always
the Nativity at Christmas, and so forth. On the mountain they have the
procession at irregular intervals, after perhaps three or four years, and
the story, though now, as a rule, scriptural, is never the same again.
When it does occur, it is as an extra embellishment of the annual harvest
thanksgiving; it takes place by night and always introduces the Madonna
di Custonaci. And now it is time to say a few words about this famous
Madonna, whose influence is felt throughout the whole comune at all
times, but nowhere more than on the Mountain, and at no time more than
during the harvest thanksgiving.

Mount Eryx, as every one knows, was in classical times famous for the
worship of Venus: here stood perhaps the most celebrated of all her
temples--the one with which her name is most familiarly associated--and
here, long before Horace wrote of "Erycina ridens," she was worshipped as
Aphrodite by the Greeks, and as Astarte or Ashtaroth by the Phoenicians.
Hardly any vestige of a temple can now be made out, but the remains of
th