the road, and pluck your sword from his scabbard—now is the hour for courage, Æneas, now for a stout heart." No more she said, but flung herself wildly into the cavern's mouth; and he, with no faltering step, keeps pace with his guide. 5
Ye gods, whose empire is the shades—spirits of silence, Chaos and Phlegethon, stretching wide in the stillness of night, suffer me to tell what has reached my ears; grant me your aid to reveal things buried underground, deep and dark. 10
On they went, darkling in solitary night, far into the gloom, through Pluto's void halls and ghostly realms—like a journey in a wood under the niggard beams of a doubtful moon, when Jupiter has shrouded heaven in shadow, and black Night has stolen the colour from 15 Nature's face. There before the threshold, in the very mouth of Hell, Agony and the fiends of Remorse have made their lair: there dwell wan Diseases, and woful Age, and Terror, and Hunger that prompts to Sin, and loathly Want—shapes of hideous view—and Death, and Suffering; 20 then comes Sleep, Death's blood-brother, and the soul's guilty joys, and deadly War couched in the gate, and the Furies' iron chambers, and frantic Strife, with bloody fillets wreathed in her snaky hair.
In the midst there stands, with boughs and aged arms 25 outspread, a massive elm, of broad shade, the chosen seat, so Rumour tells, of bodiless dreams, which cling close to its every leaf. There, too, are a hundred monstrous shapes of wild beasts of divers kinds, Centaurs stalled in the entrance and two-formed Scyllas, and 30 Briareus,[o] the hundred-handed, and the portent of Lerna,[o] hissing fearfully, and Chimæra[o] in her panoply of flames, Gorgons,[o] and Harpies, and the semblance of the three-bodied spectre. At once Æneas grasps his sword, in the haste of sudden alarm, and meets their advance with its 35 drawn blade; and did not his companion warn him, of her own knowledge, that they are but thin unbodied spirits flitting in a hollow mask of substance, he would
