Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/171

 be rushing among them, and slashing shadows asunder with the steel's unavailing blows.

Hence runs the road that leads to the waters of Tartarean Acheron, whose gulfy stream, churning mud in its monstrous depths, is all aglow, and disgorges into Cocytus      5 the whole of its sand. These waters are guarded by a grisly ferryman, frightful and foul—Charon; his chin an uncleared forest of hoary hair; his eyes a mass of flame; while his uncleanly garb hangs from his shoulders, gathered into a knot. With his own hand he pushes on the craft          10 with a pole, and trims the sails, and moves the dead heavily along in his boat of iron-gray, himself already in years; but a god's old age is green and vigorous. Towards him the whole crowd was pouring to the bank: matrons and warriors, and bodies of mighty heroes discharged of         15 life, boys and unwedded maidens, and youths laid on the pile of death in their parents' eyes—many as are the leaves that drop and fall in the woods in autumn's early cold, or many as are the birds that flock massed together from the deep to the land, when the wintry year drives          20 them over sea to tenant a sunnier clime. There they stood, each praying that he might be the first to cross, with hands yearningly outstretched towards the further shore; but the grim boatman takes on board now these, now those, while others he drives away, and bars them           25 from the river's brink. Æneas cries as a man perplexed and startled by the tumult: "Tell me, dread maiden, what means this concourse to the stream? Of what are these spirits in quest? What choice decides that these shall retire from the shore, while those are rowing through     30 that leaden pool?" To him in brief returned the aged priestess: "Son of Anchises, Heaven's undoubted offspring, before you are Cocytus' depths and the marshy flood of Styx, that power by whose name the gods fear to swear in vain. The whole multitude you see here is           35 helpless and tombless; Charon is the ferryman; those who ride the wave are the buried. He may not ferry them from the dreadful banks across that noisy current