sic. When it entered, the drum beat a Saracen rhythm and
there was music again. By these means the figure was detached from the
others and appeared as though belonging to another world. When the
marionettes do the Orioles play at Palermo, Christ speaks much more than
the words from the gospels and is treated more like one of the other
characters, at least nothing is done to suggest that they are giving the
Passion with the part of Christ as nearly omitted as possible.

The music at Catania was faint and scrappy. Gounod's _Meditation on
Bach's First Prelude_ occurred frequently, but it seldom got beyond the
first ten or twelve bars, sometimes not beyond the second or third. And
there were similar short references to some of the more sentimental
melodies of Bellini and Verdi. It was not intended to distract the
attention; it was rather to provide an unobtrusive background for the ear
against which the voice spoke, as the scenery was a background for the
eye against which the figures moved.

THURSDAY

This was the day for visiting the sepulchres in the churches. Turiddu
took me to the cathedral, and we saw a procession moving slowly down the
nave. It turned up one of the aisles and entered a sepulchre which had
been prepared, passing between a double file of dismal creatures entirely
shrouded in white except for two eye-holes, like those ghouls that issued
stealthily from charnel-houses in German fairy tales, and used to pursue
me in dreams when I was a boy. One by one the lights on the altar were
extinguished, Phrygian cadences dropped inconclusively from the choir
above, the archbishop came out of the sepulchre and the hooded ghosts
crept with him. A Dominican occupied the pulpit and began a sermon, but
as we could not get near enough to hear what he said, we came away.
Turiddu afterwards took me to visit a few more sepulchres, and it was a
gloomy business.

In the evening, at the Teatro Sicilia, the curtain rose on Christ bound
to the column, and there were two Turks armed with scourges. They did
not actually scourge him, it was enough that they told Misandro they had
executed their orders. Peter denied his master and the cock crew thrice.
While Judas was continuing his remorse, Peter appeared to him, and,
confessing his sin of denying Christ, proposed to expiate it by throwing
himself into a well; he tempted Judas to follow his example and preceded
him to show the way. But we saw that it was not rea