and covered his face all over with grinning wrinkles; but on knowing him better, I found he was really extremely intelligent and perfectly good.  He was about sixteen, but would have passed for twenty.  His general appearance was grey, the actual colour of his face, hands and clothes being powdered out of sight by the dust which held all together like a transparent glaze over a painting.  He drove us along between flowery fields of cistus until the temples of Selinunte came in sight, then down to the Marinella, a handful of houses on the shore under the low cliff.  We drew up at the locanda which distinguished itself by displaying over the door, in a five-ounce medicine bottle, a sample of a cloudy, canary-coloured fluid to advertise the wine Angelo had spoken of, and the forlorn bunch of five or six faded sprigs of camomile which hung on the same hook constituted the bush.  We left our

basket with instructions and drove off to inspect the acropolis and the ruins, returning in about an hour and a half.

The locanda was an immense, cavernous room divided into front and back by a partition about seven feet high with an opening in the middle.  There was no regular window, but we were only a few feet from the sea which reflected the sunshine through the open door and up into the arched roof and illuminated the front part.  In the obscurity behind the partition were dim ladders leading up to trap-doors and, through a few holes in the roof and in the end wall, blinding rays of light glinted on piles of earthenware—saucepans, jugs, cups and saucers, coloured crockery lamps, rough basins glazed green inside, heaped up in stacks and protected from one another by straw.  There were hanks of rope, fans of hawks’ feathers for blowing the fire, palm-leaf brooms and oil-jars big enough for thieves.  There were horns on the walls to keep off the evil eye, prints of the Madonna, some with sprigs of camomile stuck into the frame, a cheapissimo coloured lithograph of S. Giuseppe with the Bambino, and in front of it on a little bracket, in half a tumbler of

oil, floated a burning wick.  In a corner was the landlord putting his whole soul into the turning about of a sieve full of coffee beans which he had roasted and was now cooling.  And everything was covered with a grey dust like the bloom on a plum or like Cicciu.

Our table was spread in a clearing among the pottery in the front part of the room and everything was ready on a clean white cloth, wine and all.  Besides the landlord and his wife there were two men in uniform, one a corporal of the coastguards and the other a policeman.  There was also a third man in ordinary clothes—I did not find out what he was, but they were all, including the landlord, friends of Angelo who, in his capacity of padrone, invited them to join us at lunch.  We were just about to begin when I missed Cicciu.  Angelo said we need not wait for him, he had only gone to the sea to wash his feet.  So we sat down without him and presently he returned saying he had washed all over, but he looked just as dusty as before his bath.

There must be something in the air of Selinunte that encourages bathing, for they told me that in a few days an annual festa was to

take place there, the pilgrims arriving the evening before and spending the whole night bathing in the sea, the men in one part and the women in another; at dawn they would come out of the water, dress and attend to their religious duties.  I said I should like very much to see it, whereupon the corporal, who sat next me and clinked glasses with me every time he drank, invited me to stay—there would be plenty of room in the caserma and they could make me comfortable for as long as I would remain.  I had, however, made appointments elsewhere, so I told him it was unfortunate, but I could not alter my plans and was sorry I must decline his invitation.

After lunch by general consent we all went strolling up the cliff and through a garden belonging to a large house.  I assumed that Angelo had been arranging something in dialect and asked the corporal, who happened to be next me, where we were going.  He first picked a geranium most politely and stuck it in my button-hole; then he told me we were going to the big house which was the caserma.  It appeared that he had been so overcome by my hospitality that he had invited Angelo to bring me to call upon the brigadier and his companions-in-arms at

the guard-house.  It was really Angelo who had shown the hospitality, nevertheless, though not directly responsible for all details, I was responsible for having shifted the responsibility on Angelo by making him padrone of the expedition, so that the hospitality was in a sense mine.  But if left to myself, I should never have had the courage to invite two such influential members of the legal profession as a coastguard and a policeman to lunch with me, not to speak of the third man who might have been anything from a sheriff’s officer to the Lord Chancellor himself.  But they were all friends of Angelo and so was I and in Sicily the maxim “Gli amici dei nostri amici sono i nostri” is acted upon quite literally.

Passing through the door of the caserma we entered a large oblong room; at each end were three or four beds and on the side opposite the door two open windows.  Through the windows across a barley-field, lightly stirred by the breeze from the sea, the Temple of Apollo was lying in the heat, an extinct heap of ruins, as though the naughty boy of some family of Cyclopes had spilt his brother’s box of bricks.  In the middle of the room ten or twelve men were

sitting round a table on which were dishes of what at first I took to be some kind of frutta di mare, objects about the size and shape of sea-urchins.  The brigadier received me with great courtesy and put me to sit next him, and the corporal sat on the other side of me.  A dreamy Sunday afternoon feeling pervaded the air, the brigadier said they were slaughtering time (“bisogna ammazzare un po’ di tempo”).  Being to a certain extent soldiers, their business was to kill something and they were compassing the destruction of their present enemy by drinking wine and eating not sea-urchins but cold boiled artichokes.  He gave me some and begged me to make myself at home.  The corporal clinked glasses with me and said that the wine was better than that at the locanda, wherein I agreed with him, but I did not tell him I found the artichokes a little uninteresting.  They were so very small and there was so much to do to get what little there was of them that they were more trouble than shrimps or walnuts.  Looked at from the brigadier’s point of view, as a means of passing the time on Sunday, they reminded me of the Litany; pulling off each leaf was like listening to each short clause and eating the unimportant little bit

at the end was like intoning the little response; then the larger piece that was left, when all the leaves were off, followed like the coda and finale of the Litany after the more monotonous part has been disposed of.  The Litany has, however, the advantage that it comes only one at a time, we do not kneel down to a whole plateful of it; on the other hand, there was wine with the artichokes and they were free from any trace of morbid introspection.

The brigadier and Angelo were in earnest conversation about something, and, as my mind began to wander from the artichokes (here again they resembled the Litany) and was able to attend more to what was going on, I became aware that