Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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THE HOME-COMING
339
that the cactus is like Sicily. However many
springs it may blossom, it is still the gray land of
poverty.
It is hard to realize that everything has remained
quiet and the same. Scylla and Charybdis ought to
have begun to roar as in former days. The stone
giant in the Girgenti temple should have risen with
reconstructed limbs. The temple of Selinunto
ought to have raised itself from its ruins. All
Sicily should have awakened.
If you continue your journey from Messina down
the coast, you are still impatient. You see that the
peasants are still ploughing with wooden ploughs
and that their horses are just as thin and broken
and jaded.
Yes, everything is the same. The sun sheds its
light over the earth like a rain of color; the
pelargoniums bloom at the roadside; the sea is a soft pale
blue, and caresses the shore.
Wild mountains with bold peaks line the coast.
Etna’s lofty top shines in the distance.
You notice all at once that something strange is
taking place. All your impatience is gone. Instead
you rejoice in the blossoming earth and in the
mountains and in the sea. You are reclaimed by the
beautiful earth as a bit of her lost property. There
is no time to think of anything but tufts and stones.
At last you approach your real home, the home
of your childhood. What wicked thoughts have
filled your mind while you have been away! You
never wished to see that wretched home again,
because you had suffered too much there. And
then you see the old walled town from afar, and it
smiles at you innocently, unconscious of its guilt.
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