The wind grew even more mournful and sad as they trod the meadows of asphodel and the grey lilies of the underworld towards the marge of Styx.
Then the god called out aloud to the ferryman. As his voice echoed over the water, the dusky night became full of the sound of wings, and dark shapes filled the air. The spirits of the dead flapped round them in continual movement.
The ghosts began to call and cry to the living hero. Some had little squeaky voices like bats, others made a louder and more hollow sound.
The howlings of the formless increased all round Ulysses.
The inarticulate found utterance in the indefinite.
The waves of weird and hopeless voices rose, fell, undulated, now loud and shrill, now sobbing into silence. Little eager whispers filled the hero’s ear.
And to the terror of these great murmurs were added the sight of superhuman outlines, which melted away in the gloom almost as they appeared. Alecto and Tisiphone, the Furies, circled round Ulysses, and Megeara flew through the dark to her sisters.
A cold hand seemed placed upon the hero’s soul. Cries from precipice to precipice, from air to water, went on unceasingly—the melancholy vociferations of the lost!
The loquacity of Hell!
And in deadly fear, but resolute still, Ulysses struggled on through this great twilight world, open on all sides. As he walked on, the flying outlaws of the tomb seemed to be swarming over him and pressing him to the ground. He struggled beneath the weight of lost souls, but his whirling arms struck nothing but the empty air.