hers return and ask Pasqualino whether Saru told him anything
before he died, and Pasqualino, concealing the pistol in his bosom as the
Spartan boy concealed the fox, bravely answers:

"Nothing."

One may object to the play on the ground that it breaks off instead of
coming to a conclusion--one is left wishing to see Pasqualino, grown up
and acted by Giovanni, executing the vendetta--but it is a good play and
shows what is meant by omerta. The dramatic critic of the _Times_ (2
March, 1910), on the morning after Giovanni produced it in London, opened
his notice of it thus: "Omerta must make things very difficult for the
Sicilian police." This is precisely what they intend.

Without omerta the mafia would hardly flourish, and the mafia is not so
easy to understand. I suppose the reason why Sicilians explain it badly
is that they understand it too well. The inquiring outsider cannot see
the trees for the wood, and the explaining insider cannot see the wood
for the trees. They labour to make clear things with which I am
familiar, and take for granted things which are strange to me, treating
me rather as my father treated the judges before whom he was arguing some
legal point. Their lordships interrupted him:

"Yes, Mr. Jones, you say this is so and that is so, but you do not
produce any authority in support of your statements."

"Authority, my lord?" exclaimed my father, as though perhaps he might
have forgotten something: then, leaning over the desk, he said, in a
stage whisper: "Usher, bring me _Blackstone_--or some other elementary
work."

Thus we do not make much progress, but by degrees one picks up a few
ideas about it.

My friend Peppino Fazio, of Catania, allowed me to copy and translate
part of an article he wrote in a newspaper. He is speaking of Palermo as
long ago as 1780:

The Albergheria was the quarter that harboured those men who were
most ready with their hands and most quarrelsome; they were expert
also in using their knives, with which they fenced by rule and
according to art; they obeyed a certain code of chivalry of their
own, not permitting the weak or the unarmed to be bullied, treating
as criminals those who used fraud and treachery, and not brooking the
intervention of the police. They were men whom an exaggerated
sentiment of honour and of individual courage had decoyed from the
path of social conventions, but in whom there was a fundamental