100 Years Ago: September 1924

[George Thomas Wilson]

100 Years Ago: September 1924

 

This is the 116^th entry in my series of reviews of 100-year-old National Geographic Magazines.

 

 

The first article in this month’s issue is entitled “Crossing the Libyan Desert” and was written by A. M. Hassanein Bey.  It has the internal title: “Crossing the Untraversed Libyan Desert” along with a subtitle reading “The Record of a 2,200 Mile Journey of Exploration which Resulted in the Discovery of Two Oases of Strategic Importance on the Southwestern Frontier of Egypt.”  The article also has an introductory editorial, in italics, telling how the expedition was supported, and paid for, by His Majesty King Fuad I of Egypt, a member of the National Geographic Society.  The article contains forty-six black-and-white photographs taken by the author. Seventeen of these photos are full-page in size.  It also contains a sketch map of the expedition’s route on page 236.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

To him who had the wanderlust, no other motive for exploration was needed than the knowledge that a region was unknown to civilized man.  The author had the additional incentive of exploring the western frontiers of his native Egypt and of the Sudan.  After his desert journey to the Oasis of Kufra in 1921, the author’s sovereign showed interest in bridging the gap between Kufra and El Fasher.  On December 21, 1922, the author landed in Sollum and organized a caravan which took him on a six-month trip through the Libyan Desert, that vast desert lying west of the Nile, from the Mediterranean down to the Sudan.  The Libyan Desert was inhabited in the north, down to Kufra, by white Bedouin Arabs.  In the south, that region was inhabited by tribes of blacks – Tebu, Goran, and Bidiat.  The readers connected the Libyan Desert with the word Senussi. Many thought it was a tribe; but it was a sect of the Moslem religion.  It was a recent sect, being only 80 years old [in 1924].  On his way to Mecca, Sidi Mohammed Ibn Ali El Senussi, saw fertile fields for his teachings in Tripoli and Cyrenaica.  He preached a very primitive form of Islam, shorn of all luxuries.  It was said that the tribes of Cyrenaica were religious fanatics because they would refuse foreigners permission to enter their territory.  The author found that it was not religious, but patriotic fervor to be the impelling principle.  They did not want any aliens to come into the country, for they said foreigners meant domination, domination meant taxes, and they did not want to pay taxes.  Preventing any stranger from entering the region was the best way to avoid taxes.  Who were the outsiders who came to their country?  They were European explorers – Christians.  Therefore, no Christians were permitted to enter.  Explorers had been forbidden to go into the interior, but the author, being Moslem, was tolerated, temporarily at any rate.

The author’s first objective from Sollum was Siwa, where he arrived after a nine days trek.  It was one of the oldest oases of the Libyan Desert, and the most prosperous because of its date trees and numerous springs.  Its geographical position had made it a center for Bedouins trading between Egypt and the interior of Cyrenaica.  There, one still found the old houses built on the hilltop to ward off attacks; but, in 1922, it was a peaceful place, inside Egyptian territory.  The chief occupation was harvesting dates.  Olive trees were also grown and olive oil extracted.  The dates of Siwa were famous all over the world.  At the date market, everyone, rich or poor, brought all his dates, and put them in heaps.  They allowed any stranger or any poor man to eat as much as he liked, provided he did not take any away with him.  Therefore, nobody starved at Siwa.  Some of the women were unusually comely.  They dressed in very loose garments and adorned themselves with necklaces of bangles.  Their hair was plaited and the locks were oiled from time to time.  After leaving Siwa, the author put aside his khaki clothes and assumed desert garments, traveling as a Bedouin sheik.  The word “sheik” in Arabic meant “an old man,” and it had come to mean the oldest man of the tribe – that is, its chief, or the head of the religion, or the head of a caravan.  From Siwa, his route lay to Jaghbub, the great education center of the Senussi sect.  Near there, he encountered Sayed Idris El Senussi, head of the Senussi, who was on his way to Egypt. The authors friendship with that powerful leader was, in large measure, responsible for the success of the expedition, as well as the previous one in 1921.  It was through his solicitude and the letters he gave the author that they were able to overcome hostility at many a camp farther south.  Jaghbub was a small oasis, having no trade and no industry.  Its existence depended solely on the university.  It had a mosque which accommodated 600 persons, and within the enclosure was the great dome under which was buried the Great Senussi, founder of the sect.

They stayed in Jaghbub for five weeks, having trouble obtaining camels.  The author finally secured a Zwaya caravan going westward.  Two days’ journey from Jaghbub, on the way to Jalo, they came across a petrified forest.  The big bits of petrified trees were used as landmarks on the way, set up according to age-old practice of the desert.  It was customary, when a caravan found small stones lying about along the route, to heap them up, to show that someone had passed, since tracks in the sand were obliterated by the wind.  It was encouraging to see two or three stones stacked after trekking through sand for five or six days.  The most interesting feature of the trip to Jalo was eight days of sandstorm.  The desert was usually very calm, with an occasional breeze, which became stronger and stronger; then gradually the fine sand rose.  As the winds got stronger, heavier grains were lifted.  When the sand got as high as one’s head, it became distressing, and perhaps dangerous.  He had to go slow and be vigilant or he might miss his way.  One had to keep moving; to stop meant to be drowned in the sand.  The camels instinctively knew that and continued forward.  On the other hand, the moment the rain came, they would stop or even kneel down.  Sometimes, toward sunset, the wind would stop dead.  For an hour or more the fine sand and dust would settle slowly, like a falling mist.  A short while afterward the moon would rise, and the desert would assume a new aspect.  At Jalo, the preparations for the big march to the south was completed.  The author’s reorganized caravan consisted of 15 men and 37 camels.  The arms for the trip were 9 rifles, 4 revolvers, and 3,000 rounds of ammunition.  Three of the rifles were old Egyptian army weapons.  The others were Italian, Russian, and German guns smuggled into Senussi country by German submarine gunrunners during the World War.

During the desert journey they were seldom used, except on their approach to a Bedouin settlement in an oasis, on which each man of the caravan to fire three rounds as a salute, and to impress the natives of their armed strength.  Sometimes, gazelle and other game were shot to provide food for the men.  Most of the members of the caravan remained with the author throughout the journey, going back to Cairo.  Jalo was one of the most important oases in Cyrenaica, partly because of the dates it produced, but especially because it was the destination of the caravans coming north from Kufra.  Ivory and ostrich feathers from Wadai and Darfur came to Jalo to be forwarded eastward to Egypt or northward to Bengazi.  The trade was chiefly in the hands of the Majbari tribe, whose head men were the merchant princes of the Libyan Desert.  From that oasis, they moved south to Buttafal well, a day’s journey from Jalo, where water was obtained for the trek across desolate sand flats to the wells of Zieghen.  In addition to the men and camels, an important member of the expedition was Baraka, the author’s chestnut Arabia horse, which made the entire journey.  The mascot of the caravan was Bibo, a nondescript dog.  His vitality was amazing, but he also had a certain canny instinct, for when weary he indicated the fact and appealed to one of the boys, who would lift him aboard a camel.  There, he would perch upon a sheepskin waterbag, the coolest spot in the desert.  Their shelter equipment consisted of four tents – three bell tents and an A tent.  The last frequently was not erected, as it required considerable effort.  Four cameras and a motion-picture outfit were carried as part of the expedition’s equipment, together with an enormous supply of film.  Most explorers in tropical regions developed their film within a few hours of their exposure; with few exceptions, the author’s photos were not developed until after he returned to civilization, from one to eight months.

There was considerable misconception as to the amount of water required by the desert traveler.  In winter it was possible to subsist on a glassful in the morning and another in the evening.  Occasionally, on the daylight marches, a third glass was taken at midday.  When it became hot, they tried to save water by resting during the day and trekking by night.  The author’s horse required a third of a sheepskin of water daily, or half a sheepskin every other day when the supply was scant. Their food consisted chiefly of rice, flour, dates, and Bedouin butter, the latter almost invariably in liquid form, made from sheep’s milk and usually rancid.  The standby of desert travelers, however, was tea – a potent black brew made from one handful of tea and sugar placed in a small pot holding a pint of water.  That was boiled and the liquid was served in tiny glasses holding two ounces.  Two glasses of that drink imbued the user with remarkable vitality.  He became wakeful, watchful, and eager for the journey.  The effect was exhilarating without being intoxicating.  The staff of life in desert travel was not bread, but rice, which was boiled fresh at each halt.  Bread was made without leaven, and was a heavy, unpalatable food, eaten chiefly during the day’s march.  The Bedouin could travel long and far on a limited amount of food, but when plenty was at hand, his powers of consumption were phenomenal.  Once in the desert, master and man were on the same plane, and each shared with the others all that he had.  When an oasis was reached, a feast was tended to the leader by the sheik, and less pretentious entertainment provided for the men of the caravan.  No resentment was felt at such discrimination; but out on the sands, each subsisted as every other man in the caravan and do his share of the day’s work, without regard to rank.  Beside his share of camp work, the author also had the responsibility of entering the scientific data – wind, compare the six watches he carried, label and store the geological specimen collected, and record the film used.

The theodolite was difficult to use because the Bedouins were extremely suspicious of the instrument.  When Europeans surveys Arab land, armed forces followed for the purpose of conquest.  The author needed to practice pardonable deception in order to utilize the instrument.  Readings were taken late in the afternoon, and always away from native settlements.  It was a trek of nine days from Buttafal well to Zieghen, across one of the most desolate parts of the world.  Birds migrating to Europe flew 250 miles without a drink of water.  In daylight, a Bedouin used his shadow for a compass.  About midday he would have trouble because his shadow was under his feet.  During that stage of the journey, they lost three camels.  Arriving at Zieghen, the author was able to correct its location on the map.  Rohlfs, the German explorer, 45 years prior, had located it 62 miles from where it really was.  Near Zieghen there had been tragedies, because if a traveler went a little to the right or the left, he would miss the well and find no water, for there the well was not walled in with masonry, but was merely a water hole.  Often, a patch of damp sand indicated the presence of water, and the guide would dig a little and find the well.  Three days from Zieghen there was an old landmark called Garet El Fadeel.  In the desert, whenever anything was named for a man, it meant a bit of tragedy.  El Fadeel was one of the finest guides between Jalo and Kufra.  On his last journey, at that site, he missed his well in a sandstorm.  On the march from Zieghen to Kufra, the author encountered the worst sandstorm of his life.  Around midnight, his tent began to shake; at 2:00, the tent collapsed, breaking one of the author’s chronometers.  He reached Kufra on April 1, 18 days after leaving Jalo.  The most attractive feature of that oasis was a beautiful lake having an area of two square miles.  The author had letters from Sayed Mohammed El Abed, cousin of Sayed Idris El Senussi.  He was very helpful and most hospitable.

Among the Bedouins of Kufra, one saw only old women or very young girls.  Married women were generally in the house, because that was the woman’s place in the desert.  The Bedouins led very chivalrous and romantic lives.  When a young man wished to marry, he went to his sweetheart’s camp and sang to her.  If she liked him, she sings back.  If her family approved, there was a marriage.  Occasionally, there were elopements, and sometimes vendettas began thus.  The Bedouins married more than one wife if they could afford it, and, in many cases, the wives lived on good terms with each other, but the first remained the mistress of the house.  Bedouins still bought and sold slaves, but the trade was inconsiderable in 1924.  When the author visited Cyrenaica in 1916, he was offered a slave girl for $24; in 1924, a girl costs $150.  Men were cheaper – about half the price.  Only by using the letters from Sayed Idris was the author permitted to remain in Kufra long enough to rest his men and animals.  The oasis had been visited by only three travelers from the outside world – the German explorer, Rohlfs in 1879, and Mrs. McGrath and the author in 1921.  At Kufra, the author learned that a French military reconnaissance party had reached the Sara well, which was on his planned route.  He thereupon decided to cut across from Kufra by an unfrequented route which might lead to the lost oases of Arkenu and Ouenat.  Having decided upon that new objective, he had great difficulty in persuading the men.  After leaving Kufra, the chief adventure of the expedition began.  There, at last, the author was plunging into the untraversed and the unknown.  Sayed El Abed sent three representatives to see them off at 4:30 in the afternoon of April 18.  Their caravan was still making daylight treks, though the unbearable heat of early summer would soon end those.

The camel-driver on march was an interesting subject to study.  There was, between him and his beast, an affection hardly less strong than that between the Arab horseman and his steed.  The camel was the essential of life in the sands.  Travel and trade were dependent upon him.  On march, the camel went best when his driver sang.  Those songs, or chants, mostly were about the virtues of the beast.  His praises were sounded in most extravagant terms, and the animal seemed to like it.  The camel driver was able to instantly identify his camel’s footprint in the sand and, also, its son’s footprint.  The average animal carried a burden from 250 to 300 pounds.  Where supplies were plentiful, the animals were given grass and barley, but in desert trekking they were fed twice a day on dried dates, two double handfuls per meal.  The animals were serviceable up to 23 to 25 years, and were valued at from $50 to $100.  When water supplies were exhausted, caravan leaders had slain their weakest camel and the drivers all the moisture possible from the stomachs of the animals.  In winter, a camel in good condition could go 15 days without water; in summer, from 10 to 12 was the limit.  If an animal became exhausted on the trek, it was killed.  That was one of the saddest experiences of the desert, for a camel was really a member of a caravan and not merely a beast of burden.  From the standpoint of temperature, the march south from Kufra was the worst stretch of the entire journey, for it was too hot to travel in the middle of the day, and too cold at night.  They finally broke the trek into two parts from 2:00 in the morning until 9:00, and from 4:00 in the afternoon until 8:30 in the evening.  Finally, one morning just before dawn, after laboring over a series of steep sand dunes, there loomed up in the distance a range of mountains.  The author allowed the caravan to go on without him, and for a half an hour he sat atop the dune gazing at those hitherto legendary mountains.  Behind those hills laid the valley of the first of the two lost oases – Arkenu.

The Arkenu range was a series of conical masses rising abruptly from the floor of the desert and sheltering a fertile valley.  The oasis had no permanent village nor was it inhabited throughout the year, but black Bedouins, Tebus, and members of the Goran tribe took camels there during the grazing season.  Sometimes, after driving their herds into the valley, they closed the narrow entrance with rocks and left the animals for three months.  At the end of that time, the animals were in wonderful condition.  The mountain chain of Arkenu ran for 10 miles from north to south and, perhaps, 12½ miles from east to west, but the author had no opportunity to explore it fully in the latter direction.  That oasis allowed for exploring the southwest corner of Egypt, which up to the author’s discovery, had not been penetrated either by military parties or by travelers.  No one up to that time had known of the existence of a dependable water supply in that part of the desert.  Arkenu might have strategic value at some future date, for it stood at the meeting point of the western and southern boundaries of Egypt.  With one half of their objective achieved, the author set forth in high spirits on the short journey to Ouenat.  It was the end of April so he decided to leave at 9:30 in the evening, thus inaugurating their first all-night trek.  The advantage in night travel was that one never failed to march less than 12 hours, and often 13 and even 14.  Their longest continuous trek was 14½ hours (between Ouenat and Erdi), covering over 40 miles.  From 10 to 1 o’clock at night was the most trying period of desert travel.  It was then that the vitality of both men and animals seemed to be at lowest ebb.  Night marches had their disadvantages, such as difficult, rock ground – bad going for the feet and camels – and when there was no moon, danger in missing one’s way in crossing sand dunes.  But with the first break of dawn, the desert traveler seemed to take a miraculous new lease on life.  It was as if he had been suddenly rejuvenated.

They continued until the sun had appeared above the horizon, giving warning that the time of heat and suffering had arrived.  It was then that camp must be quickly made, tents raised, food cooked and eaten; then sleep, which lasted three or four hours until the heat made it impossible.  It often happened that within 15 or 20 minutes from the time that halt was called, their entire camp would be slumbering.  The manner in which a Bedouin guide found his way across the desert at night was a source of wonder.  In a region which provided no familiar landmarks, he depended solely upon the stars.  As they preceded in a southwesterly direction during most of their night trekking, the polestar was at the guide’s back.  He glanced over his shoulder, turned so the polestar was behind his right ear, then took sight of a star to the south in that line.  He would march for five minutes, then turn and repeat the process.  The stars to the south progressed westward, so a new star was needed repeatedly.  If a Bedouin followed a star for too long, his bearings shifted westward, out of the true line of march.  A guide was lost and helpless in morning and evening twilight, with neither stars nor sun to guide him.  At those times, it was necessary for the author to take the lead, following his compass bearing.  At 6 o’clock on the morning after their first all-night trek, they came to the northwest corner of the Ouenat Mountains and, an hour later, had made camp under their rocky walls.  The range in the vicinity rose in a sheer cliff from the desert floor.  Heaped against it were masses of boulders, worn smooth by wind and sand.  They found ample water in the deep-shaded recesses of the cliffs.  Both Arkenu and Ouenat differed from all the other oases in that part of Egypt, in that they were not depressions in the desert with underground reservoirs, but mountain areas, where rain water collected in natural basins in the rocks.  There were said to be seven such basins at Ouenat.  The author visited four of them and found the water cool and of good quality.

It was at Ouenat that the author made the most interesting find of his 2,200-mile journey.  He had heard rumors of the existence of pictographs on rocks, so he set out with a small contingent of his caravan and traveled all night until 10 o’clock the next morning.  After breakfast of rice and tea, they slept until 4 in the afternoon.  Upon waking, he was led by a native to the picture rocks.  The animals were rudely drawn, but not unskillfully carved.  There were lions, giraffes, ostriches, and all kinds of gazelles, but no camels.  The author asked the native, a Tebu, who had made them; and the reply was that it was the work of jinn.  Here was a puzzle which was left to the archeologists.  There were no giraffes in that part of Africa.  More significant was the absence of camels.  The camel came to Africa from Asia not later than 500 B. C.  Could those carvings antedate that event?  Or had the character of that country undergone a change from a fertile region to a desert.  With the inspection of those rock carvings, the author’s hasty exploration of Ouenat was concluded.   It was now his chief concern to get safely back to civilization with the scientific data which he had collected, including the verification and the location of those two hitherto-mythical oases.  The march from Ouenat to Erdi, on the French Equatorial Africa frontier, was one of the most difficult experiences of the entire six months of travel.  It required long treks over rocky country.  Their guide was a 65-year-old man from the Goran tribe.  He was lame and it had been seven years since he last passed that way.  Some camels dropped by the wayside and had to be destroyed; their water ran low; and a sandstorm nearly swallowed them one night.  Happily, on the morning of the eleventh day, they descended into the valley of Erdi, with its trees, its grass, and its water.  They still had a far way to go, but the treks between villages were short and devoid of hardships, since the natives were no longer unfriendly.  Their receptions at El Fasher and El Obeid gladdened the author.

 

 

The second article in this month’s issue is entitled “The Most Valuable Bird in the World” and was written by Robert Cushman Murphy, American Museum of Natural History, author of “South Georgia, An Outpost of the Antarctic” in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article contains twenty-five black-and-white photographs taken by the author, five of which are full-page in size.  One of those full-page photos serves as the frontispiece for this article.  The article also contains a sketch map of the Peruvian Coast on page 282.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

The title of this article was a statement of opinion, not a claim of omniscience.  What mortal could appraise a living thing?  Which of the 18,000 kinds of birds could be called most valuable, and upon what criteria?  Excluding from the reckoning domestic poultry, and the stork of European baby lore, it was hard to judge their value.  A swallow rid the air of the insects so detrimental to crops, while vultures cleared away carrion.  There were many important game birds, and the woodland dwellers helped fertilize trees and flowers.  Also, there were egrets and birds of paradise, victims of a large traffic which they paid with their blood for the value man set upon them.  Figuring in dollars and cents, and with reference to effects upon human life and human geography, the author presented his candidate for king among avian benefactors – the Peruvian cormorant, or guanay, known to science by the ponderous name of Phalacrocorax bougainvillei.  Readers of The Geographic had already made acquaintance with the guanay through the article, “Peru’s Wealth-Producing Birds,” by Dr. Robert E. Coker in the June 1920 issue.  Dr. Coker’s remarks on the cormorant were included in a general account of the ornithology and life conditions of the Peruvian coast, made during the years 1906 and 1907.  The author felt lucky working in the same field, with Dr. Coker’s manuscript in hand.  Since the status of the guanay had changed greatly during the intervening years, largely due to one of the most effective steps toward conservation that had ever been put into force, that classic sea bird was worth a closer look.  For a description of the geographic and climatic environment in which the guanay existed in countless millions, the author referred the reader to Dr. Coker’s article.  The range of the species was restricted to coastal waters along the arid, western shores of South America between Point Parina and Corral, Chile.

That stretch of shoreline, some 2,400 sea miles long, was bathed by a relatively narrow, northward-flowing oceanic stream, the Humboldt Current, the water of which was notably cooler than the outlying tropical Pacific.  Chiefly because of that low temperature, the current was populated by a profusion of marine organisms, including anchovies and other small fishes which were the food of the guanay and made possible a correlated abundance of the birds.  The guanays were strictly creatures of the Humboldt Current; their huge flocks moved up and down the coast as the birds foraged among the migrating schools of fish.  They bred in vast numbers upon the many islands lying from one to a score of miles from the coast.  The islets of the Humboldt Current, which were most thickly distributed along the northern two-thirds of Peru, had the same desert climate as the   opposite mainland.  That climatic fact was the secret of the guanay’s economic importance.  The guano of the seabirds was preserved without loss of fertilizing efficacy, like moisture would cause.  From prehistoric times, guano from those islands had been used in the agriculture of the native peoples of Peru, but the importance and money value of that natural fertilizer and of its chief producer were greater in 1924 than in any time in the past.  On a calm ocean, dark flocks of guanays formed rafts which could be spied miles away.  Slowly, the dense mass of birds pressed along the sea, gobbling up fish in their path.  At other times, when the guanays were moving toward distant feeding grounds, they traveled not in broad flocks, but rather as a solid river of birds which streamed in an unbroken column close above the waves.  A single formation took four or five hours to pass a given point.  Equally impressive were the homeward flights of those cormorants after a day of gorging upon anchovies, when, in late afternoon, slender ribbons, wedges, and whiplashes of guanays in single file twisted and fluttered, high in the air, toward the rounded plateaus of white islands.

Whence came that astonishing seabird, which had made the Peruvian coast its own?  The evolutionary history of present-day animals was in most cases impossible to decipher unless we had a clear fossil record.  There was no clue offered to the primeval home of the guanay’s ancestors, but fortunately, we could read the history of the species in other pages of Nature’s textbook.  For the guanay belonged to a well-defined Antarctic branch of the cormorant family, all the members of which were characterized by white breasts and warts above the bill.  Other species of that branch inhabited high southern latitudes.  The guanay’s nearest relatives were cormorants of the Strait of Magellan, New Zealand, various subantarctic islands, and the shores of the Antarctic Continent, while its relationship with other cormorants of South America or the Northern Hemisphere was relatively remote.  In the northward extension of that representative of an Antarctic group to a point within six degrees of the Equator, the author recognized one of the profound effects of the Humboldt Current.  The cool stream, lying between a tropical continent and the heated waters of the open South Pacific, formed a tongue of littoral ocean in which the environment, and consequently the marine flora and fauna, was such as ordinarily held for the subantarctic zone rather than for equatorial or even temperate seas.  That condition was common to all western continental coasts, but nowhere were its results, as expressed by the distribution and abundance of life, so marked as in the Humboldt Current.  Given a belt of cool ocean waters replete with small organisms of polar type, together with nesting sites on islands which could never be encumbered with vegetation, the geographic stage was set for the northward emigration of the ancestors of the guanay.  Because of the superabundance of food, the birds’ numbers were limited only by the amount of safe, insular space for reproduction.

Although suitable islets were very numerous, the enormous food supply in the Humboldt Current was still out of all proportion to the area of the breeding places.  In the middle of a bounteous sea there was a constant tendency for the cormorant population to become more and more congested upon the islets.  Those facts suggested that the geographic background did not tell the whole story.  Evolution was, at least in part, the result of interaction between a living being and its surrounding.  The guanay had had to undergo considerable modifications to fit into a new environment.  Several of those adaptive changes were apparent, changes which had progressed so far that they strongly differentiated the Peruvian species from its Antarctic cousins, and from every other cormorant in the world.  For instance, the guanay, unlike any other cormorant, “hawked” its food – that is, hunts exclusively by sight and from the air.  Most cormorants hunted individually, swimming alone then plunging in a favorable place then hunting submerged.  They mostly hunted bottom-living fish, often diving down many fathoms.  But the guanay fed altogether on surface-swimming fish – anchovies, small herring, and silversides.  Those fish traveled in tremendous schools, which were assailed en masse by proportionally large flocks of birds.  Due to the numbers of fish and the gregariousness of the cormorants, the birds evolved a system of efficient cooperation, reminiscent of ants and other social insects.  The vast flocks of guanays, which spent their nights on the islands, did not start hunting in a body when morning broke.  The birds first sallied forth in small parties, flying erratically above the ocean and hovering once they saw fish below.  The dropping of the scouts to the surface was the signal that caused the approach of rivers of birds.  The guanays spread out like a great fan over the anchovies, which were likely harried from below by bonitos and sea lions.  From the crop and gullet of a dead guanay, 76 anchovies, 4 to 5 inches long were taken.

Sometimes, the guanay pursued fish to the very beaches.  The guanay stood and walked erect, somewhat like a penguin.  Its height was around 20 inches and the weight of an adult bird was about 4½ pounds.  It had a glossy green and black-blue neck and back, a white throat-patch, a white under surface, and pinkish feet.  During courtship season, a crest of plumes developed at the back of the head.  The guanay’s iris was brown, but an area of green, naked skin surrounded the orbit. A second ring of turgid red skin outside the staring “green eye” heightened its extraordinary expression.  The birds bred upon the plateaus and windward hillsides of the Peruvian islands in concentrated communities, the nests averaging three per square yard.  No fewer than a million adult birds dwelt within a single colony on South Chincha Island.  The breeding season was practically continuous, but it reached climax during the southern summer months of December and January.  In its adaptation to an all-year nesting habit, the species had diverged widely from its Antarctic relatives, whose reproductive season was fixed by the climatic cycle.  In October 1919, the author arrived on South Chinchi Island, off Pisco, Peru.  The breeding grounds were covered with one year’s accumulation of sunbaked guano, and the cormorants were getting ready to nest again.  They stood in compact bodies, each comprising thousands of birds.  When an observer made his way slowly and quietly into the heart of a colony which nesting had begun, the guanays retreated, and one could sit down in a clear circle which, at first, was 50 feet in diameter.  Almost imperceptibly the birds edged in again, until the bare circle narrowed to but three or four paces.  The ground was covered with as many birds as there was room for, but new arrivals plumped down by the hundreds every minute.  Over the ocean, to the north, south, east, and west, one saw endless black files still pouring in toward the island.

Toward the evening most of the guanay were courting, after strenuous hours at sea.  Privacy did not enter into their notion of fitness, and while six or seven birds occupied each square yard of ground, the lovemaking antics were often in full progress.  Those were, in general, not unlike the courtship habits of the closely related Antarctic cormorants.  [See: “South Georgia, an Outpost of the Antarctic,” April 1922, National Geographic Magazine.]  Two guanays stood side by side, or breast to breast, and waved their heads back and forth or caressed each other’s neck. The crests upon their crowns were frequently erected, and the feathers of the nape puffed out so that their velvety necks appeared twice their normal thickness.  Cheek and chin-pouches continually trembled, and chattering bills were held wide open.  Now and again, one would bend its body forward and, at the same time, extend their head upside down along the spine toward the tail, and hold that pose for several seconds.   Sometimes, birds of a pair snapped so much at one another that it was hard to judge whether they were making love or quarreling.  Quarrels between birds of different pair also went on without cessation, and occasionally many joined in the melee.  In the early stages of courtship, it often happened that several cocks selected the same female for their addresses.  But by no means all the birds were engaged in lovemaking at every moment, for the spent much time preening their feathers.  Visible actions, rather than unusual sounds, alarmed the courting birds.  A quick motion of the hand would start sudden pandemonium.  On the other hand, the firing of a gun straight into the air produced scarcely a stir.  The effect of human conversation was, however, most amusing.  Whenever the author began to talk to the guanays in a loud voice, a silence fell over the audience within hearing.  Their mumbles and grunts died away, and they listened for a while in amazement.

During the course of a few hours’ resting on any island, the birds got befouled with fresh guano, which hardened on their plumage.  They periodically rid themselves of that by flying of the leeward side of the island, where they plunged and violently beat the water with their wings.  When most of the birds do that at the same time, it produced a thunderous roar, which could be heard from afar.  The guanay never spent the night upon the ocean, as the native pelicans often did.  Instead, they returned to their island roosting places even when the journey lasted long into the night.  A few white gannets often accompanied them, but fully 999 out of a thousand birds were guanays.  The homeward flight was at its maximum was during the hour before sunset.  The instinct of following a leader was strong; if, for any reason, a file was broken, the rear birds going left instead of right say, those behind obeyed the signal and all swung into the new course.  It went without saying that such gregarious creatures as the guanays had natural enemies to prey upon their abundance.  Sea lions had been accused of devouring the fledglings when they first took to the water, but the author saw no evidence of that.  The naked, black-skinned chicks were apt to be thickly infested with feather-eating lice transferred from their parents’ plumage, but, as long as they were protected from the hot sun, they appeared to have no ill effects of the infestation.  Other birds appeared to be their only serious enemies.  When the author landed upon Asia Island, off central Peru, on December 4, 1919, great destruction of guanay eggs had been wrought by gulls, turkey vultures, and condors.  Although the colony, containing countless eggs and young, covered half the western slope, the other half had become a waste of empty nests and broken eggshells, and had been deserted for the season by the parent birds.

Early in the morning, guanay were leaving their breeding ground to pour over the Pacific in an unbroken column, which was following a school of fish toward the north.  The colony was still densely peopled by home-keepers – i.e. the birds of each pair which remained to cover the eggs or the newly hatched, squeaking chicks.  The nests were luxuriantly feathered with molted quills, which the brooding birds were forever stealing from one another’s foundations.  Many walked about carrying bunches of feathers, or flew elsewhere with a bill full.  In the heart of the colony stood a condor, with a small circle of abandoned and rifled nests around it.  When that pilferer was shot and picked up by the feet, the albumin and unbroken yolks of a dozen eggs slide out of its gullet.  Scarcely any pieces of shell were seen in the meal.  The condor probably sucked the contents of the eggs through its trough-shaped tongue.  In the month of December, the guanays were observed in the advanced stages of the nesting period at the Pescadores and Huaura Islands to the southwest of Callao.  There, their robber-enemies were less in evidence, probably because the government guardians had been using their guns freely.  Few empty nests or broken eggs were noted.  A certain portion of adults were incubating a second brood.  Nearly full-grown young, in salt-and-pepper plumage were abundant everywhere.  The method of obtaining food among larger chicks was to shiver and plead before their elders.  As long as adults were in the nest, the youngsters never gave up trying to ram their heads down the parental throats, sometimes two or three chicks at a time.  Older fledglings went down in droves to the rock pools around the shore, where they flapped their wings and dove until they became proficient in the ways of maturity.  Late in the afternoon, thousands of those apprentices were seen scrambling up the steep hillside, striving to get back with the crown before dark.

Such was their strange indifference to the presence of man that they made no protest when the author picked them up by their pinions and helped them along.  That lack of fear was not necessarily innate.  It might have been due to the familiarity of the birds with the guardians who never harm them.  At Mazorca Island, of the Huaura group, a splendid colony of guanay occupied practically all the southern, or windward, slope.  Breeding gannets mingled to a certain extent with the cormorants along the lower border of the nesting ground.  A few birds of both kinds had established themselves also on the northern slope, out of the wind, but there their enemies had succeeded in devouring many eggs.  It seemed to be characteristic of the vultures and gulls to attack at the edges rather than in the midst of the colony, thus they tended to annihilate projecting portions and small outlying groups.  Perhaps that was an evolutionary factor which had caused guanays to breed in such compact groups.  The birds of Mazorca clung to their nests, even when a man stepped over them.  In late afternoon, many of the broods were covered by both parents, which were huddled together so close that they looked like a single bird with two heads.  In the forenoon, the colony appeared thin and gray; but by 3 o’clock it was black, owing to the return of thousands of additional birds.  Before alighting, most of the home-comers soared back and forth in the breeze.  Whenever one came down in the wrong place, other guanays would assault the newcomer, forcing it to take wing again.  Such extraordinary reactions answered the question as to whether colonial birds always found their own homes among the myriads of seemingly identical nest-hollows distributed over acres of undifferentiated surface.  Above all else, Nature jealously guarded the unity of the family; each mating pair must fulfill its obligation of rearing offspring to maturity, and even unconscious tendencies away from that responsibility was nipped in the bud.

The guanay had not always had the freedom from disturbance which they now enjoyed [in 1924] along the whole length of the Peruvian coast.  Decades of mismanagement exhausted the ancient guano deposits and caused a vast reduction of the insular bird life seriously threatened the national agriculture.  The rehabilitation of guano traffic, the conversion of an exploitation into a true industry, the repopulation of the barren, rocky islands, and the building up from the wreck of the past of the enterprise based upon the conservation of wild animals made an inspirational story of modern Peru.  In the short span of fifteen years, the large part of the change had been accomplished.  The contract system of guano extraction, with its cutthroat competition and waste, had been abolished, and control had been centralized in a National Guano Administration (NGA).  Immediate advantage was secondary to the rigid protection of the birds upon which future resources depended.  Credit belonged to the farsighted and patriotic citizens of Peru who pushed through the legislation, but the influence of foreign investigators, such as Dr. H. O. Forbes and Dr. Coker were, by no means, overlooked.  The first undertaking of the NGA, under the directorship of Senor Francisco Ballen, was to make each of the guano island a bird sanctuary, closed all year to unauthorized visitors.  Guardians were posted as permanent residents upon ever group.  Clandestine guano extraction, the stealing of eggs for food, and other depredations, which had caused havoc in the colonies, ceased at once.  The old method of extracting guano without regards to the birds had been abolished.  Under the new rule, the islands were worked according to a system of rotation which left ample breeding grounds always available.  Moreover, after removal of the guano, an island was promptly vacated, given over to the birds for thirty months, at which time digging could only begin after a thorough reconnaissance gave the okay.

The creation of a technical section of the NGA had resulted in important scientific work upon the islands, including meteorological and zoological investigations, and a detailed study of diseases of the birds.  The same department had also conducted a progressive advertising campaign to make the value and availability of guano familiar to planters throughout the Republic.  The NGA, with its well-balanced regard for both business and conservation, had resulted in nearly uniform growth in the increment of natural fertilizer.  Ten years prior the annual output was less than 25,000 tons, while, in 1924, it was about 90,000 tons, of which 70,000 tons were used in Peru and the remainder exported.  Even 1924 figures seemed small when compared with the many million tons of guano shipped from the Peruvian islands during the latter half of the nineteenth century.  But the old exploitation only drew upon deposits of past ages, with a constantly diminishing return, while the new method built upon its future as it went.  The guanay, and birds of lesser importance were rapidly repopulating the ancestral breeding grounds.  Unless quite unexpected circumstances intervened, it was probable that the impressive, streaming flocks, which alone connoted a healthy and productive condition of the guano-making colonies, might always be seen along the famed seacoast of the Incas.

 

 

The third and final article in this month’s issue is entitled “Zigzagging Across Sicily” and was written by Melville Chater, author of “Through the Back Doors of France,” “East of Constantinople,” “The Land of the Stalking Death,” etc., in the National Geographic Magazine.  The article contains forty-four black-and-white photographs, of which twenty-two are full-page in size.  It also contains a sketch map of Sicily on page 306.

Sketch Map courtesy of Philip Riviere

The train-bearing ferry floated the author’s party’s Naples-to-Messina section across the straits of Sicily.  Behind them, on the Calabrian coast, rose Scilla’s castle-crown promontory.  Ahead laid the vast curve of Messina of old, the landmark of Charybdis’ fabulous whirlpool.  The Sicilians called it garofano (carnation).  The strait’s irregular currents, together with their currents running in opposite direction, caused some half-dozen vortices thereabout.  The captain pointed to a rotating patch of water whose circular shape and flicked-up surface suggested an enormous carnation.  Two fishermen, manning a light craft, were breaking their backs to avoid the suction.  Another current caught them, and they were rushed across the strait toward Calabria.  They had been caught unawares between Scylla and Charybdis. The author had identified Homer’s whirlpool!  But what of the sea monster with twelve dangling legs, who squatted in a sea-cave under Scilla’s promontory, devouring sailors?  It was in Messina’s fish market, aswarm with polypi, with their multiple dangling legs, which gave them the clue.  Some early Greek sailor’s yarn, plus a poet’s imagination, might easily account for Scylla.  In 1924, Scylla, the devourer, was chopped up, stewed in her own sepia, and consumed by Sicilian epicures.  To understand Sicily, one needed to take Greek mythology in small doses.  Cronus and Zeus inhabited that three-cornered island of Trinacria – as the early Greeks named it – during the Golden Age.  Athena dwelt on the northern coast, Artemis at Syracuse, and Ceres at Enna.  Daedalus, of waxen wing fame, flew there on his non-stop flight from Crete.  Hercules left on Sicily huge “footprints” (earthquake fissures).  Ulysses, sailing up is eastern coast, was captured by the Cyclops just north of Catania. And still, in 1924, shepherd boys hummed century-old tunes to their nibbling flocks, unaware that his art sprang from Daphne, the resident muse of pastoral poetry.

As the author’s train crawled upward and around Messina’s sickle curve, he glimpsed the roofs of the modern town, rising over the former site, which was earthquake-shattered in 1908.  Some 80,000 people occupied the red-roofed stucco houses of uniform-design, government-built, at a cost of $6,000,000.  The catastrophe of 1908, began with a 35-second shock, with aftershocks lasting a month.  It affected an arc-shaped zone 18 miles long and 12 miles at its widest.  [See: “The World’s Most Cruel Earthquake,” April 1909, National Geographic Magazine.]  The accompanying tidal wave engulfed both coasts of the strait, obliterating the Sicilian shoreline for 60 miles.  91% of Messina’s buildings were destroyed, and of its 120,000 people, 77,283 perished.  In the new Messina, one’s house did not exceed 23 feet in height, and one’s garden was proportionately large.  It was a safety-first city – low, wide, and well-spaced – which exceeded its former total area by 50% and its former open-space area (streets, gardens, and squares) by 55%.  The initial lap in the author’s 500-mile zigzag across Sicily was along the sea-skirting railway to Cape San Alessio, and from there, afoot, by mountainous detour, to Taormina.  His first surprise was the fact that, instead of reduced fares on weekends, Sicilian railways augmented their tariffs on Sundays and feast days.  As Sicily enjoyed over eighty feasts annually, the church calendar was a distinct factor in railway earnings.  His second surprise was to find that what his map showed as a river, descending the mountain near Cape San Alessio, consisted of a bone-dry bed, two-thirds of a mile wide.  With but few exceptions, the scores of streams which headed down toward Sicily’s 422-mile coastline, remained those dried-up fiumare for a greater part of the year.  Lacking roads, the Sicilian mountaineer used the fiumare as very serviceable thoroughfares.  Up the arid river the author toiled to higher levels where cement irrigation sluices, arush with water, laved outstretched terraces of lemon trees.

The miracle of cunning whereby the Sicilian, in his almost un-watered land, drilled deep to the earth’s secret springs, thereby irrigating some ten million orange, lemon, and citron trees, rivaled Moses’ rock-smiting performance in the desert.  Crowning a nearby height stood a twelfth-century Norman church, its crenelated walls constructed partly of lava blocks.  Deserted and denuded, it represented the first incursion of western Christianity into an island which had been successively ruled by Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, and Saracens.  Following mere donkey trails, the author and his fellow train travelers climbed on, at last finding themselves at Casalvecchio, dizzily set on a crag, 1,200 feet above sea level.  In its remoteness, its magnificent encirclement, and its appalling filth, it was typical of a hundred heaven-kissed Sicilian, mountain towns.  No street was horizontal.  There was nowhere to go but down, nowhere to return but up.  There were only two occupations, the boys were herding sheep on the mountainside, and the women were carding and spinning at their doorways.  The Madonna was not forgotten at the wayside shrines, where votive corn-flowers clustered about her feet.  The downhill street constituted the sewerage system.  One’s cattle bedded themselves before one’s front door.  Hercules, who cleansed the Augean stables, would have fled affrighted.  They stepped out of the ankle-deep morass and caught a breath in a doorway.  They descended the mountain and followed the seacoast to Letojanni.  The long, sunbaked street revealed the café, with its parcheesi-playing fishermen; the provision shop, with its stockfish, macaroni, and loops of Bologna sausage; and the many doorways, where sat mothers searching their children’s heads.  Nearby, heaps of lemon rinds rose to the height of small haystacks, the refuse of one of the many citrate factories which dotted the Sicilian coast.  That factory hummed with the industry of several hundred boys and girls, who sat at long benches plying knife or sponge.

The lemons were halved and crushed for juice.  Pinch the skin of a freshly plucked lemon and atomized jets, deliciously fragrant, spurted forth.  That essence, known as lemon oil, was extracted by pressing the empty rinds with a sponge in a wooden bowl.  A workman could press 1½ pounds of essence per day.  It was canned and shipped abroad for use in perfumes and liqueurs.  The exhausted rinds were used locally as cattle fodder or fertilizer.  In the provinces of Messina and Catania 600,000,000 lemons were an average crop, about one-fourth of which was used in the citrate factories.  The manufacturing season lasted from November to May, and during that season the Letojanni factory reduced more than 17,000,000 lemons to citrate and essence.  The author’s group pushed on to Giardini, where food-tax dodgers, who had shopped in Messina, were descending from the train with camouflaged cabbages and disguised fish.  Sicilian municipalities guarded their ancient system of intertown taxation, which dated back to when each city was a sovereign state.  As they stood looking up at Taormina, cliff-perched 650 feet overhead, they were accosted by a hack driver.  “Americans?” he inquired with a smirk, “You take me.”  Taormina, tourist-frequented, crowned the most majestic heights on the Sicilian coast.  Its green flanks, clad with olive and almond, plunged dizzily downward into far-flung vistas of white seashore and castle-crested promontories.  Outward one saw the blue Ionian Sea and beyond Calabria, glimmering opal-like.  Turning, another great panorama unfolded.  Shoreline stretched in a vast scimitar-curve to where sky-cutting slopes culminated with snow-crowned Etna.  At Taormina’s back doors rose mountains and yet more mountains.  From the town’s seaward-facing plaza, one saw the bare cape of Naxos, that Plymouth Rock of the first Greek colonists, who landed there in 735 B. C.  Taormina’s byways revealed a Greek theater, over-botched by Roman brickwork, Saracenic tombs and a Gothic palace.

Fifteen nations had occupied Sicily during 3,000 years, their respective rules lasting anywhere from a generation to five centuries.  In ancient times was the bridge – and in modern times the stepping-stone – between Europe and Africa.  It lied 90 miles off the Tunisian coast, while the strait, at its narrowest, was only two miles between Messina and Italy.  Naturally, Sicily’s two earliest people were the Sikanians (Libyan), and Sikelians (Latin).  The Sikelians left poetry, bronzeware, vast amphitheaters of cave tombs, and a race name which, slightly modified into “Sicilian,” had endured for 4,000 years.  The Phoenicians started trading posts on Sicily about 1000 B. C.  Two centuries later they were ousted by the Greeks, who, having enslaved the Sikelians, settled down for a 500-year stay.  Out of Africa swarmed the host of Phoenician-founded Carthage.  After 125 years of warfare Sicily called on Rome, who ousted the Carthaginians and thereafter oppressively rule for five centuries.  For another hundred years the island was plundered by Goths and Vandals; then, Constantinople reclaimed it for an ever-weakening sway of three more centuries.  Out of the East swept the whirlwind of Mohammedan conquest, and for two centuries Sicily lived under Saracen governors.  Their rule ended in a bloody sect warfare.  Next, the ten sons of Tancred, of, Normandy, wrested Sicily from the infidel and founded a kingly line, which, after a century and a half, left such splendid medieval monuments as the Palatine Chapel at Palermo and the Cathedral of Monreale.  From the thirteenth century downward, Sicily’s history, especially during the Spanish Bourbons’ regime, was a long story of misrule over a wretched, half-enslaved people.  At last, in 1860, deliverance dawned.  In six weeks, Garibaldi, with his 1,000 volunteers, stormed and took Palermo, ousted the foreign tyrants, and turning Sicily over to the Italian Crown.  From such a history of age-old exploitation and race mixture emerged the modern Sicily.

Upon that island’s 10,000 square miles had poured wave on wave of peoples, none of which had been so overwhelming as to fix an enduring type.  Until the melting-pot melts, the Sicilian would remain a primitive being.  At the stir of love, revenge, or religion – those three root instincts – he overleapt mere thoughts into soul-satisfying action.  Even his religion he did not merely think or feel it; he had to enact it.  Christmas, Passion Week, and Easter were to him the names of three gorgeous dramas.  The Christmas drama was charming. For days each family prepared a Nativity shrine.  At dusk, one week before Christmas, those scenes were set forth in shop windows and open doorways, their candles aflicker through the narrow, darkening street.  The town was visited by a Christmas epidemic of the tarantella.  In cafes and open streets, quaintly clad fisher boys and girls who had donned their grandmothers’ festa dresses, capered to the mandolin’s jig tune.  Passing couples, as if bewitched, fell into the same tarantella step.  Truly, the whole town seemed to dance madly.  On Christmas Eve, an effigy of the Holy Babe, preceded by three natives dressed as the Magi and followed by church dignitaries, was borne, street by street, through the entire town to the church.  The Passion Week drama started on Maundy Thursday afternoon, when an image of the Virgin Mother was borne through the town and deposited in the church.  The next day a glass coffin containing a life-sized effigy of the Christ was processed through the town’s main street.  At Easter noontide, the sound of bombs bursting around the cathedral, where mass was being celebrated.  Then a small boy hammered on the cathedral doors, which were thereupon thrown open, while from behind the alter rose a little waxen bambino (the risen Christ) with an Italian flag in his hand.  It was such primitive folk-drama that combined religion and the art of that people.

February’s almond-blossom season, Sicily’s lovely substitute for snow, had become a blizzard of smothered trees and drifted hillsides when the party pushed Etna-ward from Taormina.  For weeks past, the volcano, crowned with smoke clouds and spurting jets of lava, had warned them daily that they had to visit soon or not at all.  They were just in time.  Starting at Giarre and ending at Catania, in part by rail and in part by motor car, they made a 68-mile circle around the volcano, under the shadow of 10,758-foot summit.  First came the steady lift from seaboard. Through Piedimonte and Linguaglossa, with lemon orchards, leading to yet higher levels carpeted with wild flowers and shaded by oak glades.  For some hours, only the black lava blocks, of which the roadbed, fruit terraces, and irrigation ditches were built, hinted of their proximity to a volcano.  Then, approaching Randazzo, one saw the brown soil of the vineyards.  That cultivated space was literally hewn out of the surrounding lava bed.  Randazzo sheltered it entire population of 12,000 in houses built of lava.  As their road threaded onward under the great, white cone, zebra-striped where the rock peered through melting snow, they beheld the successive stages whereby ancient lava fields had become the productive soil of 1924.  First you skirted a tract of Etna’s more recent vomiting – a black, horrific lava sea.  Not a tree, not a flower, not a bird.  It was Nature’s Black Death.  Next, they passed an older lava tract, embrowned with powdery dust with some cacti here and there.  A few miles farther, a yet older tract revealed a miracle.  The deepened dust layer was covered with a veil of verdure, amid which the upstanding crags of the flow were completely covered with cacti.  And at last, in a tract of great age, they beheld smiling orchards of almonds and mulberries, and vineyards surrounded by lush meadows, where peasants were picking the wild asparagus.

A few weeks after they had circled Etna, the villages where children had yelled at their passing motor car had disappeared under a lava sea 30 feet deep and a mile wide.  The refugees had crept back to Giarre, Catena, and other lava-drowned villages to renew the Etna-dweller’s age-old struggle with Nature.  It was Catania which typified man’s triumph in that struggle.  Only 17 miles from Etna’s cone, that city of 200,000 people, built of lava blocks, was one of Sicily’s chief ports, through which some 600,000 tons of merchandise passed annually.  Catania was seen at its liveliest on a Sunday morning after mass.  The cafes were crowded while fantastically attired youths passed among the crowd, chanting the Fascist anthem.  At the cathedral door, beggars were receiving alms.  The bazaar-like market swarmed with pushcart.  Roundabout walls and street doors were covered with death announcements.  Their southward-bound train freed itself from Etna’s flanks, crossed the wide plain which was one of Sicily’s richest granaries, then swung coastward to Augusta.  Augusta and Trapani shared Sicily’s sea-salt industry.  In 1922, Trapani produced 300,000 tons of salt, the Scandinavian fish-curing industry buying most of it.  From Augusta, an inland detour by motor bus led to the cave-town of Pantalica, where thousands of tomb chambers, hewn by ancient Sikelians, honeycombed the cliffs of the Anapo River valley.  Following that stream coastward, they cut across another river, the Ciani, where boatmen poled them down to Syracuse through growths of papyrus, a Saracen import from Egypt.  The vast expanse covered by scattered remains of classic Syracuse corroborated the ancient reports that that second Greek settlement was 22 miles in circumference and contained half a million people.  Those works included Doric temples, gymnasia, a city wall, two vast aqueducts, one of the largest Greek theaters extant, and harbor fortifications which guarded the most powerful fleet in the Mediterranean.

Even more utterly had disappeared the glories of ancient Enna, which, under its modern name of Castrogiovanni, skirted the next lap of their zigzag.  It was the scene of Persephone’s kidnapping by Pluto.  From Castrogiovanni, they followed the Sulphur trail southward.  Caltanissetta, the center of the industry, showed crowds of idle miners wandering about the streets, with an army unit in case of trouble.  Due to an after-war collapse of the Sulphur boom, eight mines were reduced to half-time, then quarter-time, and, in 1924, the government paid a small dole to the workmen thus affected.  They went southward again through even more dreary country, where distant brown splashes on a hillside meant that men were burrowing, and where the land was pimpled with tiny cones.  Then suddenly they entered a vast green plain slanting upward to a crag-set town, Girgenti, and outward to the smiling sea; and amid the plain’s fixtures rose the columns of temples, seaward facing.  At Athens, the Parthenon abuts on a modern city, but at Girgenti the temples of Concord and of Juno Lacinia stood golden-brown against blue spaciousness.  Of the other five temples, or temple ruins, that of Zeus was the vastest of Greek antiquity.  Five laps around its foundation made a mile.  The temple of mighty Hercules was only recognizable by a sole column.  The exquisite corner of the Castor and Pollux temple was beautiful, as was the Winged Victory.  Picking up the Sulphur trail afresh, they drove across country to Cevalotto.  It was a stark, chimney-topped hill rising sheer from the plain, across which filed peasants bearing bags of fine Sulphur to be used as insecticide for their crops.  Atop of the hill the group was met by a group of miners, who guided them down a narrow tunnel into the bowels of the earth.  The atmosphere weighed oppressively, and they were inhaling Sulphur dust with every breath.  They toiled upward and out into the blinding sunlight.  Until very recently [in 1924], Sicily mined 95% of the world’s output.

The bluish-gray ore, was thrown into kilns built in the hillside, lit, and allowed to smelt under its own heat, and liquid Sulfur was drained into molds which turned out 100-pound blocks.  That five-day process yielded from 2 to 2½ tons of block Sulphur for shipment to Catania, Porto Empedocle, or Termini, where the refinery plants were situated.  Sicilian Sulphur production reached its peak in 1909, with 600,000 tons.  By using hot water to melt the Sulphur at the bottom of mines, America had outstripped Sicily in production.  In 1922, America produced 1,344,000 long tons, while, in 1924, Sicily declined to 200,000 tons, the industry being subsidized by the government.  They planned a sixty-mile trip from Girgenti across the island on donkey-back, but the two carabinieri, into whose care we were committed while in the mining region, said no, so a carriage was ordered.  Lovely country and small, squalid towns with crowded jails laid along their route into the interior.  Occasionally, a passing donkey, bearing a peasant mother with one baby seated before her, another behind her, and two more in the side panniers, served to remind them that the Sicilians were a prolific people.  At noontide, they lunched at a wayside hostel.  Their first night on the road was typical.  Dusk in a small town with a tough-looking crown.  No accommodation for travelers; no relaying carriage obtainable.  Their carabinieri return with the local commandant.  At the sight of him, the crowd melted away.  “No accommodations?  Liars!” he said.  He knocked on a nearby door.  It opened and a bowing man conducted them to a dingy bedroom.  No carriage?  “Liars!” he growled again and dispatched one of his men.  Within a few minutes, three jehus turned up offering rides for the morrow.  The next morning, the commandant reappeared, cut the landlord’s bill in half, and warned him not to overcharge travelers in the future.  He warned them, as they climbed into their carriage, “Never allow yourselves to be separated from your guard.”

A hatred for all government institutions lied at the root of the far-famed Mafia.  A century of tyrannical Bourbon rule taught the Sicilian that they could only hope for justice through secret organization among themselves.  Evil brought forth evil; tyranny produced the Mafia; and sixty-odd years of liberty had not sufficed to teach the Sicilian masses that the State was other than an oppressor to be frustrated wherever possible.  The Mafia had no headquarters, elected no officers, and indulged in no annual clambake.  It was less an organization than an ingrained spirit in men’s breasts, which could act with little prearrangement.  Originally well-intentioned, a kind of vigilante movement, it had sunk into the very unscrupulousness it was formed to combat.  For a consideration, it avenged private quarrels, assisted smugglers, and induced proprietors to advance wages.  But though the Mafia resorted to sheep-killing, crop-burning, and blackmail, it preserved its little decencies – it would not kill priests, only their brothers.  One temperamental difference between the Mafia-bred Sicilian and their Italian cousins was the fact that for every murder committed on the mainland ten were committed on the island.  Their way across the interior revealed great treeless belts of wheat and broad beans, lying between towns ten miles apart.  Sicily was once called the “granary of Italy,” but. In 1924, it barely fed its own four million people.  That was largely due to a system whereby some 787 absent landlords owned one-third of the island, and the farm tenants worked under backward conditions.  Instead of modern machinery, the Sicilians used primitive plows and garden tools.  Instead of using fertilized, he rejuvenated his field by letting I lie fallow as a cattle pasture.  The farmhouse consisted of a big, wigwam-shaped cabin of straw, where the family lived for most of the year, subsisting on bread, cheese, wine, and beans.  Since they could neither read nor write, their sole recreation consisted in story-telling.

Illiteracy was the curse of Sicily.  At its incorporation with Italy in 1860, not one person in ten could read and write.  In 1904, s compulsory-education law was brought to all large communities.  Such government coercion did not suit the Sicilians.  In 1911, illiteracy still claimed 58% of the population.  In the interior towns, often consisting of but a few hundred shut-in souls, religion was the very breath of life.  Each Saint had his unique function – Saint Lazarus for burns, Saint Lucia for trachoma, Saint Rosalia for accidents.  Every town, every hamlet, had its beloved patron in the Catholic martyrology.  Mola was a tiny village of 500 souls.  But even Mola had its patron saint, Giorgio, and its festal pageant was held at springtide’s first full moon.  Far from being England’s exclusive property, Saint George and his dragon were found and acclaimed in various European and Near Eastern countries.  He was a favorite saint of Russia and Georgia.  At Lercara, mountains and mine region ended together.  A gradual decent of 2,000 feet through the valley of the Torto led to the coast, where, nestled at the foot of a magnificent headland, laid the town of Termini Imerese.  After a week of travel through a country where bathtubs did not exist, their first question to the hotel manager was, “Is there, by any chance, hot and cold running water on the premises?”  There was – hot and cold springs bubbled out of the earth.  Some thousands of years ago, Termini’s waters were quite fashionable in the days when Pindar wrote poems about them.  Termini, with its 1924 population of 25,000, had the distinction of having contributed 15,000 emigrants to the U. S.  Nowadays [in 1924], the restrictive immigration law had modified what once was a Sicilian exodus to our shores; yet hopeful applicants for visas still exceeded Sicily’s quota tenfold.  The many hopefuls whom they encountered throughout the province of Palermo were often studying Italian-English vocabularies.

And what of the homecoming Sicilian who, after twenty years of work in New York or Chicago, turned up with a bank account which loomed large in Italian currency?  They found the answer on every hand, where, all along that charming north Sicilian coast, those Sicilian-American capitalists had settled, causing its uncultivated spaces to blossom into lemon groves.  Half a century prior, less than a hundred Sicilians emigrated per year; in 1913, a small army of 142,000 left the mother country, and, in 1907-08, the returning flow of money from Sicilians overseas totaled $5,000,000.  Tens of thousands of bank accounts, at Palermo, Messina, and elsewhere, represented a steady stream of remittances poured in by Sicilians resident in the U. S.  An hour’s train-trip, with the sea on one hand and an almost unbroken expanse of lemon orchards on the other, brought them within the vast harbor curve where, in the cup of the surrounding mountains, lied Palermo.  Small wonder that the ancient Greeks named the city, with its twelve-mile arc of bay, Panormus, or “All Harbor.”  It was during the eleventh and twelfth centuries that Palermo reached its height of magnificence under the Norman line, a magnificence which still dazzled one in such kingly gems as Palatine Chapel and the cathedral of Monreale.  In 1924, Palermo, with its 400,000 inhabitants, constituted the delightful center of Sicily’s Riviera, where one heard excellent opera, or sipped aperitifs in open-air cafes, or joined the fashionable promenade along the tree-shaded boulevards, where Paris fashion dominated.  A childlike gaiety, as of an endless carnival week, reigned at Palermo.  Each street shrine of Saint Rosalia rivaled a florist’s window.  Businessmen passed in line before her, to deposit flowers on the way to work.  Palermo’s surroundings included the famous plain of Conca d’Oro, the most fertile region of Sicily, where rock-drilling and pumping stations had created an irrigation system which had increased the orange and lemon yield twentyfold.

In 1922-23, Sicily produced 75,000 metric tons of lemons, well over half of that crop, $2,500,000 worth, being bought by the U. S.  If one drew a line along the island’s entire north coast to Messina, then down the whole length of the east coast, and you had demarked Sicily’s lemon belt; and of that, the richest spot was the Conca d’Oro.  To turn from Palermo’s wealth to its poverty, one had but tread its tortuous slums, where a suspicious eye peered at one through a sliding panel before the door was open; where two housewives purchased and split a small fish between them; and where a street merchant cried, “I buy hair!”  But just around the corner one found a cheerier side to the picture, in a humble square which contained the Teatrino dei Piccoli, or Little Theater for Little Folk.  Outside, canvas roll-ups depicted the terrific combats of Charlemagne’s mail-clad paladins, and the criminal career of Giuseppe Bruno.  Inside, a ragged audience of boys and men were applauding each sword thrust, hissing the devil, or roaring over the donkey who kicked everybody in the stomach.  Not all the movie stars in the celluloid heavens could tempt the Palerman slum dwellers from their beloved marionettes.  They went behind the scenes to congratulate the marionette masters, the Greco family.  They took photos and promised copies to the family, making them fast friends.  When asked if they would like to take their show to America, they said yes.  As they climbed aboard their steamer, Signor Greco waved a hand at them; then dramatically kissed it toward the sea horizon.  And that was their last memory of Sicily and of its primitive, often lawless, yet always lovable, children, as he stood there, blowing kisses across the Atlantic to the children of the New World.

 

 

Tom Wilson

[Keith Sargent]

$1 in 1924 = $18 in 2024. 

In 1924, the average income in the United States was $3,481, based on IRS tax documentation. The average hourly earnings in 25 manufacturing industries during that year was 56.2 cents.

Calvin Coolidge served from 1923 to 1929 as the 30th president of the United States. The population of the United States in 1924 was 114,109,000 and the world population was 1,894,874,000