Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/129

 food, and so preserve the sacred boughs on the tree, sprinkling for him moist honey and drowsy poppy-seed. She, by her spells, undertakes to release souls at her pleasure, while into others she shoots cruel pangs; she stops the water in the river-bed, and turns back the stars in their     5 courses, and calls ghosts from realms of night. You will see the earth bellowing under you, and the ashes coming down from the mountain-top. By the gods I swear, dearest sister, by you and your dear life, that unwillingly I gird on the weapons of magic. Do you, in the privacy     10 of the inner court, build a pile to the open sky; lay on it the arms which that godless man left hanging in the chamber, and all his doffed apparel, and the nuptial bed which was my undoing. To destroy every memorial of the hateful wretch is my pleasure, and the priestess' bidding."     15 This said, she is silent—paleness overspreads her face. Yet Anna does not dream that these strange rites are a veil to hide her sister's death: she cannot grasp frenzy like that; she fears no darker day than that of their mourning for Sychæus, and so she does her bidding.      20

But the queen, when the pile had been built in the heart of the palace to the open sky, a giant mass of pine-wood and hewn oak, spans the place with garlands, and crowns it with funeral boughs. High above it on the couch she sets the doffed apparel, and the sword that had been left, and     25 the image of the false lover, knowing too well what was to come. Altars rise here and there; the priestess, with hair dishevelled, thunders out the roll of three hundred gods, Erebus and Chaos, and Hecate[o] with her triple form—the three faces borne by maiden Dian. See! she has     30 sprinkled water, brought, so she feigns, from Avernus' spring, and she is getting green downy herbs, cropped by moonlight with brazen shears, whose sap is the milk of deadly poison, and the love-charm, torn from the brow of the new-born foal, ere the mother could snatch it. 35 Dido herself, with salted cake and pure hands at the altars, one foot unshod, her vest ungirdled, makes her dying appeal to the gods and to the stars who share Fate's