"Get up, Riccangela; get up!" repeated the women around her.
She was not listening to them.
"My son is lying on the stones, and I could not rest there, too! Oh! my son, on these stones."
"Get up, Riccangela. Come!"
She rose. She gazed once more and with terrible intensity on the livid face of the corpse. She called once more, with all the force of her lungs:
"My son! My son! My son!"
Then, with her own hands, she re-covered her heavy loss with the cloth.
And the women surrounded her, drew her a little farther away under the shade of a rock, forced her to sit down, lamented with her.
Gradually the spectators disbanded, dispersed. There remained only a few consolers, and also the man clothed in linen, the impassive guardian who waited for the Authorities. The canicular sun beat down on the beach, and imparted to the funereal cloth a dazzling whiteness. The promontory, perpendicular above the jagged rocks, towered up in the conflagration with its desolate aridity. The sea, immense and green, breathed always evenly. And it seemed that the slow hour would never end.
In the shade of the rock, before the white cloth raised by the rigid form of the corpse, the mother continued her monody in the rhythm rendered sacred by so many sorrows, ancient and recent, of her race. And it seemed as if her lamentation would never cease.