On the morning of Sunday, 25th August, 1901, every one on Monte San Giuliano was up early and at 7.30 a brass band began to perambulate the town to announce that the festa had begun. At 8.30 the band entered the Matrice, and before Mass the sacred picture was unveiled, the band saluting it with a burst of music. Much may be done in music by allusion and suggestion. The service concluded with an extremely graceful movement in six-eight time, that drove the Madonna out of the mind of at least one listener and substituted a vision of laughing girls swaying lightly to the rhythm and singing of the dancing waves whose foam gave birth to Venus.

When the church emptied we got a better view of the picture. It is about 6 ft. high by 3 broad, painted in oils on wood prepared with gesso, and represents a smiling Madonna with the Child at her breast. She is seated on a throne in a landscape; two angels hold over her head a massive golden crown; the Child is crowned also and in His hand are three ears of corn, to signify fruitfulness; He also holds the keys. The crowns are really only half-crowns, but they are gold or silver-gilt, and are fastened into the wood of the picture. All round the Madonna’s nimbus is a raised band of gold set with twelve diamond stars, valued at 14,000 lire. A large diamond earring hangs in her right ear, the only one that is visible; three large diamond rings are on the fingers of her right hand and one on the finger of her left which supports the Child, and suspended all over her skirts is an immense quantity of jewellery. The frame is of wood entirely coated with silver, in the form of a Renaissance doorway with a fluted column on each side and a broken pediment over the top. It is almost concealed by the jewellery hung about it, earrings, chains, necklaces, rings, watches etc. These are offerings from the faithful, but what is shown is nothing like all. There is a large chest containing much more and what has been given this year is exposed in a separate case. These valuables constitute the Madonna’s dowry and she carries it with her on her journeys; but some of the more important articles never leave the mountain; her diamond stars, for instance, are removed from the picture when it goes down, and their place is taken by less valuable stars of gold.

In the afternoon there were horse-races outside the Trapani gate on a fairly level piece of road, and a concert and illumination in the balio in the evening.

In the course of the day I bought a copy of the explanatory pamphlet. Its title was L’Arca Noetica. Simbolo Mariano. Processione notturna figurativa (I Personaggi) in omaggio alla Diva di Custonaci Celeste Patrone degli Erecini. Ultimo Lunedí d’Agosto, 1901. It was to be a procession of cars, there were to be no figures on horseback. Having introduced cars, as in Jael, to give special importance to the three points of the story, viz. the opening, the climax, and the conclusion (or, as the pamphlet expressed it, Causa, Consequenza e Termine), it was, no doubt, felt that more could be done with them than with single figures on horseback in presenting the somewhat intractable subject of Noah’s Ark and the Universal Deluge.

The preparations had taken a month or six weeks. The course is for the arciprete of the Matrice, who is the head of the clergy of the district, to determine what the story shall be and how it is to be told. The designing of each personaggio, or of each group of personaggi, is then confided to one of the inhabitants, who, provided he bears in mind the general scheme, is free to follow his natural artistic instincts. The dresses are hired from Palermo, and an astonishing quantity of jewellery is lent by the families of the comune; in 1897 the personaggi carried 85 lbs. weight of it, and far more is always lent than can possibly be used. It is all gold and precious stones, no silver is to be seen, and nothing is ever lost, stolen, or mislaid; even the thieves become honest on these occasions. It is sewn on to the dresses in various designs and makes them look very rich, so that what is hired from Palermo is only the costumes in the rough, so to speak.

In wandering about the town next day, I came upon four or five of the cars lurking in obscure churches where they had been prepared. It was not easy to make much of them; there were a few rocks, banks and clouds, also the waters of the deluge, all made of papier mâche painted to appear real, and in among the rocks and banks were real plants, mostly the dwarf palm which grows plentifully on the mountain. There were wooden supports for the figures, to help them to stand in their places. Each car carried under it an apparatus to supply it with acetylene gas, used in 1901 for the first time.

All day long people kept on coming up the mountain and pouring into the town. Those who did not come on foot left their carts and horses outside, and they all swarmed up through the narrow, irregular, roughly paved streets from the Trapani gate to the balio, till by nightfall the Piazza was as crowded as Piccadilly on Mafeking night. Every one who has been present at an Italian festa knows what it is like men shouting and elbowing their way through the people with flaming lamps fitted to their baskets, selling water and syrups, cakes and confectionery, melon seeds and peanuts others going about with halfpenny buttonholes of gelsomina, each neatly folded up in a vine-leaf to keep the scent in three independent piano-organs and a brass band in the middle distance an enthusiastic blind singer, a survival of Demodocus in the Odyssey, with a falsetto voice and no bridge to his nose keeping a group of listeners spellbound in the foreground with their favourite ballad, illustrated by a large sheet of oil paintings in eight tableaux, about the man who murdered his wife and mother with one bloody knife there it is lying on the supper-table and was ultimately taken by the carabinieri and executed.

This blind singer with no bridge to his nose is a humorist; on one occasion when he was fibbing in a particularly flagrant manner, he enforced his remarks by calling upon heaven to strike him blind and smash his nose if he was not speaking the truth.

While you are thinking that the tumult must be at its height, peaceful nuns are creeping up the convent stair, silently, one by one, they reach the roof, every one can see them collecting together in the moonlight and taking hold of the dangling bell-ropes. All of a sudden you realize what a mistake you had been making about the tumult as the riotous bells fling their additional accompaniments out into the night, all over the town, over the whole comune, down to Trapani, to Cofano and out to the islands.

In the meantime those in charge of the cars had been giving their final directions and seeing that everything was in order, and the personaggi, who had been being dressed ever since early in the afternoon, were ready to receive visitors. About 10 p.m. each of them began to hold an At Home. They sat there silent and motionless in their houses among trays full of superfluous jewellery and surrounded by lighted candles, gazing imperturbably in front of them while people streamed through the room admiring them, fingering their dresses and jewels, and asking questions of their relations and friends. About 11.30 I was conducted along the illuminated streets through the crowd to a house where I stood on a balcony looking up a street down which the procession was to come.

We had to wait till long after midnight, but at last the moving lights began to shine on the high houses in the distance, the band was heard approaching, and at 1.45 the first car staggered into sight. It represented The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men; there were three of each, reclining in the front part of the car and offering flowers to one another, instigated so to do by the Monster of Iniquity, a loathsome dragon, who was insinuating himself among them from rocks behind, while the Angel of the Lord, a singularly beautiful child, stood on a high cloud in the background, in an attitude of horror, about to take wing from such a world of wickedness. Cupid was there also, sitting at the feet of the daughters of men and taking aim generally.

The second car brought Sin, a bearded man in an imperial attitude with a golden sceptre resting on his hip. He dominated a globe round which the old Serpent had coiled himself. He was dressed in dark-blue velvet, and wore a voluminous red cloak. On his breast was a bunch of grapes, made entirely of diamond rings; each grape was a separate ring isolated from the others and so sewn on that the hoop, being passed through a hole in the material, was not visible, and only the rose of diamonds was displayed. There were fifty-five grapes, and they sparkled and glittered in the flickering lights as the car lurched down the street and passed the balcony.

The third car represented The Voice of God, a beautiful figure of an Angel blowing a trumpet, and the words written on the cloud behind were “Delebo hominem.” In the front of the car sat a youth and a girl holding hands to represent the wicked population destined to destruction.

Then The Universal Deluge came pitching and tossing round the corner rather an ambitious car. The foreground was occupied by the water, with the head of a drowning man throwing up his arms, and the indication of another entirely submerged. The waves were beating against a steep bank up which a tigress was climbing, carrying her cub in her mouth. On the top of the bank stood a lovely woman endeavouring to save her terrified child. She was the only living figure on the car, everything else, even the terrified child, being of papier mâche.

The Ark came on the fifth car and had no living figure at all, being merely Noah’s Ark resting on Mount Ararat with a dove in front. This may sound rather uninteresting and as though designed to support home industries, but, to the initiated, it palpitated with significance, for it symbolized the Madonna herself, the only means of salvation from the waters of punishment; and as the Ark rested on Mount Ararat while the flood subsided, so does the Madonna di Custonaci rest upon Mount Eryx while the calamity is stayed.

N was The Sacrifice and represented Noah, an imposing old man with long white hair and beard, standing at an altar where a real sheep lay dead under a net and his three sons were in front praying.

N was The Rainbow, another lovely girl as an angel standing between a bank of clouds and a rainbow. On the breast of this figure was worked in jewels Noah’s dove with an olive-branch; this was particularly appropriate, as it happens also to be the badge of the town.

The procession was closed by a long car carrying first a band of musicians, then a chorus of youths attired as angels and crowned with roses, the whole backed by a sort of temple front framing a copy of the sacred picture. This car had to stand still from time to time while its occupants performed music composed specially for the occasion, and the continual stopping dictated the movements of the other cars and was signalled to them by bells, so that there might always be about the same space between them.

The cars were drawn by men and the figures made no attempt to stand rigidly still anything of the kind would have been out of the question, for they must have been on the move between five and six hours. The last car passed my balcony at 3.30, an hour and three-quarters after the first had come into sight, and one could tell the next day that they had been through nearly the whole town, for hardly a street was safe to walk in they were all so slippery with the wax that had dropped from the candles. The constant moving of their limbs by the figures, though they never lost the general idea of the attitude, together with the tottering motion caused by the roughness of the paving, prevented any sense of the pose plastique or living picture.

Every one of the female figures, except The Voice of God, had her breast encrusted with jewels, usually in a floral design, and the borders of their dresses were heavy with jewellery; the male figures also wore as much as could be suitably sewn on their costumes.

Omitting consideration of the final car, which was there to close the procession and bring on the music and the Madonna, and also of the Ark, which could hardly have been otherwise, there were six cars, three carrying groups and three practically single figures, for the boy and girl at the feet of The Voice of God, though they were the children of Donna Anna, my landlady, were not really necessary. Of the groups, the one representing The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men was certainly the finest. It told its story in the right way and was full of the right kind of imagination. The Sacrifice was next best, and owed much to the extreme dignity of the principal figure. I should have liked The Flood better if it had had more living figures and less papier mâche, though I am not ashamed to admit that I have no idea how this could have been done. Shakespeare himself, who apologizes for trying to make a cockpit hold the vasty fields of France, might have been excused for not attempting to decant The Universal Deluge into a receptacle scarcely bigger than a costermonger’s barrow. Of the three remaining cars, Sin was beyond comparison the finest both in conception and execution. Perhaps he would have looked the part more obviously if he had had more of a once-aboard-the-lugger expression on his kind and gentle face; on the other hand, the designer of this car may have intended that Sin is most successful in seducing the righteous when he appears with nothing repulsive in his aspect. The other two were merely just what they should have been ordinary business cars, so to speak. Had these three single figures appeared on horseback with grooms to lead them, as in former times, the procession would have gained in variety and the importance of the groups on the cars would have been emphasized.

But this is a small matter. The procession as it was, with its car after car jolting along under an August full moon, the sparkling of the jewels, the flashing of the torches, the blazing of the gas, the beauty of the figures and the immense multitude of reverent worshippers made up a scene never to be forgotten. The impressiveness was deepened by the knowledge that this Mountain, where Astarte, Aphrodite and Venus have all reigned in turn, is also a place where much that has helped to mould the poetry and history of the world has happened since the Sicans first girded it with its megalithic cincture. Added to this was the conviction that for many and many an age some such procession has been winding through these narrow, irregular streets, the form changing, but the intention remaining ever the same Praise to the Giver of the Increase.

The programme for the next day contained nothing till 5 p.m., when there were more horse-races, then Vespers in the Matrice, brilliantly illuminated; after dusk fireworks outside the Trapani Gate, and at night a concert in the illuminated balio.

In the afternoon of Wednesday, the 28th, a procession of fifty-nine mules and horses passed through the town. Each animal was accompanied by its owner, a peasant of the comune, and was loaded with bags of grain, an offering for the Madonna. This grain was to be sold and, in the mean time, was estimated to be worth 2500 lire. About 1500 lire was collected during the festa, partly at the church doors and partly in the value of unused wax candles, and the municipio gave 1000, so that altogether the receipts were about 5000 lire. Against this the expenses of the festa were expected to amount to about 4000 lire, and the balance will go towards the expenses of the next.