Watching Haitian families bed peacefully down each night in the street outside the house where I was staying, babies next to them, in convivial family groups, the great murmur of voices and, after some time, children's unknowing laughter, too, enlivening the night.
And there was great murmuring among the elders.
Together, they send a great murmuring into the hilly village, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer and the chanting of Vedas from a Hindu temple on a nearby ridge.
"That is great!" he murmured.
The priest, who is called a Great Master, murmurs sacred formulas, makes hidden finger gestures in the sleeves of his robe and signs in the air with incense smoke, and breathes in and out facing the different directions.
"Human indifference is surely the oceans' greatest threat," murmurs Pierce Brosnan's excruciatingly bland narration while images of the garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre float on screen.
"Great," Ms. Leary murmurs to his retreating figure.
There was a great deal of murmuring... then two voices were heard, "Lord, get Stanley Hansen".
We are nearing the end of the season of the Great Mentioning, with murmurs of a vice presidential pick by Mitt Romney in the next few weeks, and possibly sooner.
"It is understandable that from this place, high up in the keep at Marvão Castle, visitors may respectfully murmur, 'How great is the world.' " The majority of visitors who slip through that entrance are day-trippers from Lisbon, the Algarve coast and western Spain.
Later, Almendárez heard from Brenda González, the young woman whose sister had been murdered, and, after a great deal of sympathetic murmuring — "Because the paths of God aren't straight, they wind among rocks and thorns" — he again introduced the mysterious Señora Ahumada.
