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 Sleeping—not women, but a Gorgon brood, And worse than Gorgons, or the ravenous crew That filched the feast of Phineus (such I've seen In painted terror); but these are wingless, black, Incarnate horrors."[B]