no than to Monte Erice, is
the caserma, an oblong white bungalow, and scattered upon the plain are a
few fishermen's cottages, but no other dwellings. We first sent a boy
off to the caserma to tell the brigadier I had come, and then Mario,
after attending to his horses, joined me in the only trattoria in the
place and we ate our provisions.

After lunch we went to the sanctuary, the home of the famous
wonder-working picture of the Madonna which hangs over the altar. The
sagrestano pulled aside the curtains while another man pulled a cord
which operated a wheel hung with bells of different sizes, thereby making
a tremendous and discordant noise and signifying to all within earshot
that the Madonna was being unveiled, in case any one might care to offer
up a petition.

The light is better in the sanctuary than in the Matrice upon the
Mountain, but this picture of the happy Mother with the Child at her
breast holding three golden ears of corn did not thereby seem to gain as
a work of art. The people, however, look upon it less as a work of art
than as the representation of a divinity who lives for them as surely as
Venus lived for the Romans, Aphrodite for the Greeks and Astarte for the
Phoenicians, and as surely as other goddesses have lived here for other
peoples. Cofano, looking across to Mount Eryx, saw the earliest appear
on some prehistoric morning when man, born of a woman and living by the
fruits of the earth, fashioned his first image of the Giver of Life and
Increase, vivified it with the spirit of his faith and offered before it
the homage of his praise and gratitude. His faith gradually lost its
freshness and suffered corruption like the manna which the disobedient
children of Israel left until the morning, so that the image of the
goddess became a sepulchre and a breeding-place of unclean imaginings.
Then man, seeing that virtue had gone out of the work of his hands,
fashioned a new one, scarcely different in form, and breathed into it the
breath of a new faith, scarcely different from the old. Again his faith
carried with it into its stagnant prison the germs of its own decay.
Thus was established the recurrent rhythm of the death and resurrection
of the deity. Cofano has watched them come and go and will one day see
the Madonna dethroned to make way for her successor. But that day will
not dawn until, in the Sanctuary or upon the Mountain, the peasants shall
stand unmoved before this touching symbol