They sat down at the table. Although quite calm, now, Giovanna ate nothing. Once or twice Porredda tried to mention some neutral subject. She asked if the baby had got its first teeth yet, observing that perhaps it would be bad for him to travel in the heat. Then she asked if there had been a good barley crop in the Eras’ home village.

As soon as they had finished eating, the two women harnessed their horse, packed their saddlebags, and said goodbye. Paolo promised to see their lawyer about the appeal. As soon as they were out of sight he started to play with his niece, pretending to be mad. He laughed wildly, shaking all over. Suddenly he stopped and grew sad, his eyes staring, then he burst out laughing again.

The girls too began to laugh madly until the sun-baked courtyard and the whole peaceful house, freed from the tragic presence of the grieving guests, echoed with merriment in the peace of the afternoon.

III

The women rode beneath the hot July sun. Their way lay down to the valley, along its floor, and up again to the purple mountains that barred the horizon, their wild peaks vanishing in the ashen glow of the summer haze. It was a melancholy journey. The two women rode together on one docile, dejected-looking horse. Their travelling companions made their way in straggling groups, some in front, some behind, all oppressed by the heat, the stillness, and their own painful emotions. They grieved for Costantino almost as keenly as the women themselves and so, out of respect for Giovanna’s dumb misery, they either kept silent or, if they ventured to speak, did so in undertones that failed to break the vast silence of the hour and the countryside.

On and on they went. The valley dropped to a dry river bed where the path, though not steep, became rugged and at times hard to follow as it wound up barren slopes, between rocky outcrops, dusty scrub, and yellow stubble. Strange trees, wild and solitary as hermits, rose up at long intervals, dumb and lifeless against a background of desolate brightness. Their shadow fell across the ground like that of a solitary cloud, confused and terrified by the vast expanse of light broken by its presence alone. Sometimes the shrill cry of a bird rose from this shadow, only to die away, defeated by the silence it had interrupted.

Big purple thistles, pink-belled bindweed, and lilac-tinted mallows challenged the sun, increasing the valley’s desolation. Endless low stone walls covered with moss, scorched dry and yellow, meandered up and down. Ripening fields of wheat, whose ears looked like a mass of thorns, ringed in the silent horizon.