plums were
forming inside their faint pink and snowy blooms; there were almonds and
blossoming pomegranates, asparagus and tomatoes, artichokes in disorderly
tufts and beans combed into tidy rows. In the hollow places, like marshy
pools reflecting the sky, lay beds of pale blue flax to be woven into
wedding sheets for Mount Eryx.

San Cicciu looked upon it and saw that it was good, and he blessed all
that fertility. He was doing for the campagna what the Cyclopean
arciprete had asked the Madonna to do for Berto and Giuseppina.

TRABONELLA

CHAPTER XII
SULPHUR

Caltanissetta is a busy town of some 45,000 inhabitants near the middle
of the island and about 2000 feet above the sea. It depends for its
prosperity on almonds, grapes, olives and sulphur, especially the last,
for there is much sulphur in the pores of the rock. I have several
friends there of whom one, Beppe (Giuseppe) Catena, is an engineer with
an interest in Trabonella, the largest sulphur mine in the neighbourhood,
and another, Gigino (Luigi) Cordova, is an advocate. Sometimes Beppe is
in the town and sometimes Gigino and I go to Trabonella and find him
there. It is an hour's drive along a road that winds among rolling
hills. Through the depressions between the near hills other hills
appear, and through their depressions higher hills, and beyond these are
higher hills again until the view is bounded by the Monti delle Madonie
where the snow lingers until May. It must have been some such country as
this that was in the mind of him who first spoke of the sea running
mountains high.

I do not know whether it is more beautiful in spring or in autumn. I
know that in spring the grass under the orange trees is spotted with
purple flowers, and that crimson vetch incarnadines the hills, as though
Lady Macbeth had dipped her little hand into their multitudinous green;
the hedges bloom with rosemary and scarlet geranium, the banks with sweet
pea and brilliant mesembryanthemum, and the rough places are full of
asphodel; there are a few eucalyptus trees and now and then a solemn row
of cypresses; we may pass a hut of grey thatch and perhaps a few horses
or a sprinkling of tethered goats; sometimes we see a herd of bullocks
tended by a boy who has come out this morning in black sheep-skin
leggings up to his hips, and I think he learnt his song from happy
nightingales that set the April moonlight to music.

But in autumn the prospect is as fair.