I never saw anything so heavenly. By a person unconscious that this young girl had enjoyed the light, she might have been taken for a statue of Sleeping Virginity.
"The monk did not cease praying all night. I sat in silence at the end of my Atala's funeral couch. How often, during her sleep, I had held that charming head upon my knees! How many times I had leaned over her to hear her breathe, and to inhale her breath! But at present no sound issued from that motionless breast, and it was in vain that I looked for the awakening of my love!
"The moon lent her pale light to this funereal watching; she rose in the middle of the night, like a white vestal come to weep over the coffin of a companion. From time to time the monk dipped a flowering branch into the holy water, and shaking its moistened leaves, perfumed the night air with heavenly balms. Occasionally also he repeated, to an ancient tune, these verses by an old poet named Job:
"'I have passed away like a flower; I have withered like the grass of the fields.
"'Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?'
"Thus sang the old man. His deep and irregular voice went rolling through the silence of the desert. The name of God and of the tomb issued from all the echoes, from all the torrents, and from all the forests, and the Groves of Death seemed to be murmuring a distant chorus of the departed in reply to the hermit's sacred chant.
"Nevertheless, a bar of gold was forming in the east. The sparrow-hawks were crying upon the rocks, and the martins creeping back into the hollows of the elm-trees: these were so many signs that the time had come for Atala's interment. I took the body on my shoulders; the hermit walked in front of me, carrying a spade in his hand. We commenced the descent from rock to rock; old age and death combined equally to slacken our pace. At the sight of the dog which had found us in the forest, and which now, jumping with joy, led us by another route, I melted into tears. Atala's long hair, the plaything of the morning breezes, frequently threw its golden veil over my eyes, and, bending beneath the burden, I was obliged to lay it down often upon the moss, and sit awhile, to recover my strength. At length we arrived at the spot selected by my grief, and we entered beneath the arch of the bridge. O my son, you should have seen the youthful savage and the old hermit, on their knees in front of each other, in the desert, digging with their hands a grave for the poor girl whose body lay stretched out close at hand, in the dried-up bed of a torrent!