The sleeping giant

Maja, one of the Pleiades, had a son with the god Zeus. His name was Ermes, and he was a giant. During the battle between the giants and the gods, Ermes was badly wounded, so his mother took him and they escaped from Greece on a raft, as the oracle she consulted said they should head towards the Italic shores in order to be safe. After surviving a shipwreck, the two landed on Italic shores and Maja went towards the forests of Abruzzo mountains, carrying Ermes in her arms. She wanted to look for  a prodigious herb that could cure his beloved son, and grew at the sides of that white mountain. But the mountain, which had plenty of medical herbs, was then covered in snow, and she did not manage to collect anything. Thus, her son died. Shocked with pain, she buried him on Gran Sasso mountain, the highest peak of the Appennini chain. Nowadays, if you look at the mountain chain from East, you can recognise in there the shape of a “sleeping giant”.

The woman, grief-stricken, wandered around the forests for long, and eventually died as well, on the mountain which now brings her name, Majella. Shepherds still hear her crying on windy days, when the woods and the valleys reproduce the lamentation of a weeping mother. 

Tags: mountain; giant; mother; desperation.