Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/128

 Then at last, maddened by her destiny, poor Dido prays for death: heaven's vault is a weariness to look on. To confirm her in pursuing her intent, and closing her eyes on the sun, she saw, as she was laying her offerings on the incense-steaming altars—horrible to tell—the sacred     5 liquor turn black, and the streams of wine curdle into loathly gore. This appearance she told to none, not even to her sister. Moreover, there was in her palace a marble chapel to her former husband, to which she used to pay singular honours, wreathing it with snowy fillets and festal     10 boughs; from it she thought she heard a voice, the accents of the dead man calling her, when the darkness of night was shrouding the earth: and on the roof a lonely owl in funereal tones kept complaining again and again, and drawing out wailingly its protracted notes; and a thousand     15 predictions of seers of other days come back on her, terrifying her with their awful warnings. When she dreams, there is Æneas himself driving her in furious chase: she seems always being left alone to herself, always pacing companionless on a never-ending road, and looking for her     20 Tyrians in a realm without inhabitants—like Pentheus,[o] when in frenzy he sees troops of Furies, and two suns, and a double Thebes rising around him; or Agamemnon's[o] Orestes rushing over the stage, as he flies from his mother, who is armed with torches and deadly snakes, while the     25 avenging fiends sit crouched on the threshold.

So when, spent with agony, she gave conception to the demon, and resolved on death, she settled with herself time and means, and thus bespoke her grieving sister, her face disguising her intent, and hope smiling on her brow:—-     30

"Dearest, I have found a way—wish me joy, as a sister should—to bring him back to me, or to loose me from the love which binds me to him. Hard by the bound of ocean and the setting sun lies the extreme Ethiopian clime, where mighty Atlas turns round on his shoulders the pole, studded     35 with burning stars. From that clime, I have heard of a priestess of the Massylian race, once guardian of the temple of the Hesperides, who used to give the dragon his