METAMORPHOSES BOOK VI She spoke, and the taut bowstring twanged, which terrified all save Niobe alone; misery made her bold The sisters were standing about their brothers' biers, with loosened hair and robed in black. One of these, while drawing out the shaft fixed in a brother's vitals, sank down with her face upon him, fainting and dying. A second, attempting to console her grieving mother, ceased suddenly, and was bent in agony by an unseen wound. She closed her lips till her dying breath had passed. One fell while trying in vain to flee. Another died upon her sister; one hid, and one stood trembling in full view. And now six had suffered various wounds and died; the last remained. The mother, covering her with her crouching body and her sheltering robes, cried out: " Oh, leave me one, the littlest! Of all my many children, the littlest I beg you spare-just one! And even while she prayed, she for whom she raved fell dead. Now does the childless mother sit down amid the lifeless bodies of her sons, her daughters, and her husband, in stony grief. Her hair stirs not in the breeze; her face is pale and bloodless, and her eyes are fixed and staring in her sad face. There is nothing alive in the picture. Her very tongue is silent, frozen to her mouth's roof, and her veins can move no longer; her neck cannot bend nor her arms move nor her feet go. Within also her vitals are stone. But still she weeps; and, caught up in a strong, whirling wind, she is rapt away to her own native land. There, set on a mountain's peak, she weeps; and even to this day tears trickle from the marble. Then truly do all men and women fear the wrath of the goddess so openly displayed; and all more zealously than ever worship the dread divinity of 309
