In
my mental provinces I welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the
lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science;
but I feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. I was brought up on
quite other chronologies, and I still like a history that begins with
the flood. I will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go
back with Monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous Sicily, when
the children of the Cyclops inhabited the land, and Demeter in her
search for Proserpina wept on this hill, and Charybdis lay stretched out
under these bluffs watching the sea. It is precise enough to say that
Taormina began eighty years before the Trojan War. Very dimly, it must
be acknowledged, the ancient Sicani are seen arriving and driven, like
all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the
Siculi flourish, and a Samnite colony voyages over the straits from
Italy and joins them. Here for three centuries these sparse communities
lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred
confusedly from their mainhold on Mount Taurus, or the Bull, so called
because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a
bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves.
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