The friends watch and wail beside the tola often throughout the whole night; and fire is always kept burning. But the principal lament occurs early on the morning of the funeral, when the body is laid in the coffin, and before the Brothers of Death come to lift the bier. The friends and relatives come from the neighbouring villages to the funeral. This assemblage is called the corteo, cortege, or procession, or the scirrata—a word which looks like the German schaar, though the origin cannot be accurately ascertained. A woman, always the poetess of the dirge which she sings, leads a chorus of wailing females. They say, therefore, in Corsica—andare alla scirrata, when the women go in procession to the house where the dead body lies; if it is the body of a man who has been killed, they say: andare alla gridata—to go to the wailing, or, more strictly, the howling. When the women of the chorus enter the house, they greet the widow, mother, or sister of the dead, as the case may be, keeping head bended towards head for about half a minute. Then a woman of the family invites the assembled females to begin the lament. They form a circle, the cerchio or caracollo, about the tola, and move round the dead body howling, breaking the circle, and again closing it, always with loud lamentation and gestures of the wildest grief.
This pantomime is not the same in all parts of the country. In some places it has become altogether obsolete, in others it has a milder form; among the mountains, far in the interior, particularly in Niolo, such usages exist in all their old pagan force, and resemble the death-dances of Sardinia. Their dramatic animation and ecstatic fury shock and horrify the spectator. They are all women who dance, wail, and sing. Like Mænads, the hair dishevelled and flying about the breast, eyes darting fire, their black mantles waving, they sway to and fro and round the tola, shriek, strike their hands together, beat their breasts, tear their hair, weep, sob, throw themselves on the bier, besprinkle themselves with dust; then the lament ceases, and these women sit silent, like a sisterhood of sibyls, on the floor of the chamber of death, breathing deeply, and calming themselves. There is a fearful contrast between this wild death-dance, with its shrieks and howling, and the corpse lying in the midst of it rigid and still, and yet ruling all the while the frantic orgies. Among the mountains, the wailers tear their faces till the blood flows, because, according to ancient heathen belief, blood is acceptable to the dead, and appeases the shade. This is called raspa or scalfitto.
There is a demoniac wildness about these wailing women, which reaches a frightful pitch when their dance and lament concern a murdered man. Then they become the very Furies themselves, the snaky-haired avengers of murder, as Æschylus has painted them. Their loose hair, howling, singing revenge, circling in their horrid dance, the effect of their chant on the murderer who hears it is frequently so overpowering, that, seized with shuddering horror and agony of conscience, he betrays himself. I have read of a murderer who, disguised in the cowled capote of the Brothers of Death, had the hardihood to hold one of the tapers by the bier of him whom he had helped to assassinate; and who, when he heard the dirge begin to shriek for vengeance, trembled so violently that the taper fell from his hand. In criminal trials, affirmations on the part of witnesses that the accused has been seen to tremble during the lament, are received as condemnatory proof. Yes! there is many a man in this island like the Orestes of Æschylus, of whom the prophetess might say—
"On the navel-stone behold a man
With crime polluted to the altar clinging,
And in his bloody hand he held a sword
Dripping with recent murder;
. . . . .
And, stretch'd before him, an unearthly host
Of strangest women, on the sacred seats