“They would climb the mountain to meet every night, right in those very bushes, but as their respective weddings approached, their families became suspicious. Finally, the night before the wedding, the girl broke off her engagement, unable to face life without her one true love. The scandal was incredible. She was ostracized from her family, driven out of town for her disobedience, and left to survive on her own in the woods. The boy, seeing his lover’s punishment, quickly married the girl to whom he had been promised. They say his lover, thusly spurned”—(ibid.)—“stood alone at the top of the mountain, waiting for him in their old meeting place, sobbing uncontrollably until her tears grew so large and numerous that they carved those two tracks in the stone. Even then she kept crying, harder and harder, hoping he would come to her, and after some time her body twisted and spread, her unmoving feet grew into the ground and her untouched, unloved skin crusted over and she became an enormous tree. You can see her from here, girls: the weeping willow that still hangs over the cliff ’s edge.”

“Look at the way it’s positioned,” Harriet said, off to my right. “Someday soon, that willow’s going to fall.”

“But will it make a sound?” Nisha asked.

“Is it just me,” Janet said, “or does it seem like an inordinate number of the world’s geological features were supposedly created by crying women?”

“Crying women, dying women,” Laurel said. “I’d have eaten that treacherous little bastard alive.”

In Māori legend, a woman’s tears, shed over a lover’s death, once froze into a giant glacier. You can, if so inclined, hike it today. They say the Weeping Rock at the peak of Turkey’s Mount Sipylus was once a woman named Niobe, who bragged about her virile husband and her many children in front of the wrong infertile goddess, and woke to find them all murdered, her legendary pride quashed under the weight of their bloody bodies. That’ll teach her not to be so full of herself, the townswomen said. She cried for so long that the gods took pity on her and turned her into an unfeeling stone. But soon, even the cold stone began to leak, and it sits to this day atop the mountain, crying rainwater over its dead men for all eternity. There is of course Daphne, who may or may not have been crying but was certainly on the verge of being grabbed and raped and perhaps murdered along the way, these things happen (What was she wearing? they’ll all want to know), when she was transformed into a tree, and so ask yourself. Or ask the Egyptians why the Nile overflows each year. (Or ask me: it’s because Isis cried so hard over Osiris that her tears made the great river rise.) They call it the Night of the Drop.