Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/205

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smiting on her arms with her flat hands, calls for help and summons the rough country folk. They—for the fell fiend is lurking in the silence of the forest—are at her side ere she looks for them, armed one with a seared brand, one with a heavy knotted stock: what each first finds as he 5 gropes about, anger makes do weapon's service. Tyrrheus musters the company, just as the news found him, splitting an oak in four with convergent wedges, catching up an axe and breathing savage rage. But the cruel goddess, seizing from her watch-tower the moment of mischief, 10 makes for the stall's lofty roof, and from its summit shrills forth the shepherd's clarion, pitching high on the wreathen horn her Tartarean note; at the sound the whole line of forest was convulsed, and the woods echoed to their depths: it was heard far off by Trivia's[o] lake, 15 heard by river Nar[o] with his whitening sulphurous waters, and by the springs of the Veline[o]: and terror-stricken mothers clasped their children to their breasts.

At once running to the sound with which the dread clarion gave the signal, the untamed rustics snatch up 20 their weapons and gather from all sides; while the forces of Troy, on their part, pour through the camp's open gates their succour for Ascanius. It is no longer a woodman's quarrel waged with heavy clubs or seared stakes; they try the issue with two-edged steel; a dark harvest of drawn 25 swords bristles over the field; the brass shines responsive to the sun's challenge, and flings its radiance skyward; as when the wave has begun to whiten under the rising wind, the ocean gradually upheaves itself, and raises its billows higher and higher, till at last, from its lowest depths, it 30 mounts up to heaven. See! as the arrow whizzes, a young warrior in the first rank, once Tyrrheus' eldest born, Almo, is laid low in death; for the wound has lodged in his throat, and has cut off, with the rush of blood, the passage of the liquid voice and the vital breath. Round him lie 35 many gallant frames, and among them old Galæsus, while throwing himself between the armies and pleading for peace; none so just as he, none so wealthy before to-day in