Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell Page A

accredited to the mysteries (which had lost all their numen , all their spiritual sap) or to win a prize for a chariot race at Olympia, or a derivative play in a Greek theater. They were marked by the thumbprint of an unnatural vulgarity, which they never succeeded in surmounting.
    But as for Pausanias, thank goodness for his passionate antiquarianism; at least he has managed to leave us an extensive notebook of all that we have lost. It is something. For most of us tend to think of the Acropolis, for example, as a stately marble hill approached by the Propylaea and crowned by the austere, almost abstract beauty of the Parthenon’s white catafalque. But it is from the jottings of this little Roman antiquarian that we see something much closer to the original during the days when it still “worked,” still performed its vatic duties for the whole Greek race. How different a picture! In its clutter and jumble one cannot help thinking of the equivalent jumble of modern Lourdes or Byzantine Tinos today.
    Only Pausanias tells of the color and life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, the golden lamps, the brazen palm tree, the strange old Hermes hidden in myrtle leaves, the ancient stone uponwhich Silenus sat, the smoke-grimed images of Athene, Diitrephes all pierced with arrows, Kleoitas with his silver nails, the heroes peeping from the Trojan Horse, Anacreon singing in his cups; all these, if we would picture the truth and not our own imagination we must learn of from Pausanias.
    Those who tiptoe round the Acropolis today in their thousands hardly realize that they are looking at something like an empty barn.… “And by the same token,” I told Deeds, who was standing on his head on the sunny balcony next to mine, for he did yoga like most Indian Army officers, “by the same token it is the merest vainglory to tell ourselves that we are going to see anything in Syracuse as the Greeks left it—it’s simply a hollow shell from which the spirit has fled. Even the temples are for the most part wiped out, gnawed down to their foundations like the molars of some old dog.” I was repeating and improvising upon the caveat of Martine who had once written to me about Pausanias apropos of the Minoan reconstructions in Crete, saying how tasteless they seemed to her. “They robbed my imagination of its due, and vulgarized something I expected to find elegant and spare and cruel—a fit sea nurse for the mainland cultures which Minoa influenced, perhaps even founded.”
    â€œIf you tell Beddoes that,” said Deeds, “he will at once ask for his money back.” I could see that he was not going to let these grave considerations disturb hismature pleasure at sightseeing in an island which had become as precious to him as it had once been for Martine. In a sense he was right. If the Greeks were gone and their monuments were dust there were still vestiges of their way of life to be found in the food, the wine and the wild flowers of the land they had inhabited and treasured.
    Today, then, Syracuse waited for us to disinter its ancient glories by an act of the imagination, aided by whatever Roberto could tell us, which was not much. Oleanders, however, and sunny white streets leading down to a bright dancing sea! There was pleasure in the air, and I did not need to sniff the horizon to determine that we were in one of those benign spots which favor happiness, encourage “all the arts—even love and introspection” as Martine used to say when she awoke from a spell of sleep on the green grass of the Abbey. Today the Carousel tackled its breakfast with dispatch and good humor; the Bishop forgot to tell the world how much he preferred bacon and tomatoes in the morning, a very good sign indeed for the rolls were not very fresh and the coffee insipid.
    Even Beddoes—Beddoes had washed . He had