The Palici (Greek Palikoi) are the most distinctly indigenous gods of pre-Greek Sicily: twin chthonic brothers manifest in the boiling, sulphur-smelling geysers of the small Lake Naftia in the Palagonia plain (the Valle del Margi), near Mount Etna. They presided over the most binding form of oath: a litigant wrote his oath on a tablet and cast it into the steaming pool, where it was believed to float if true and to sink if false, perjury being punished at once by blindness or death. Their precinct was a famous asylum where ill-used slaves could take refuge. Greek tradition gave them divine parents (Zeus and the nymph Thaleia, or Zeus and the mountain-goddess Aetna), while an indigenous account made them sons of the Sikel fire-god Adranus. Their sanctuary at Palike on the Rocchicella di Mineo became the political and religious centre of the Sikel league founded by Ducetius around 453 BCE; modern excavations directed by Laura Maniscalco have recovered the shrine and its 'boiling waters'.