We had crossed over the Styx. Charon quickly made fast to a wharf and prepared to disembark. As I landed I noticed on the dock a legend which read: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
At last I was in Hades!
SHADY SINNERS OF THE STYX.
CHAPTER II.
Shady Sinners of the Styx.
I WAS in the region of Outer Darkness to which the dead are banished to await the judgment. All about me was a misty blackness so oppressive that one felt as if wedged between mountains. My feet sank in the soft earth, composed of those good intentions with which I had helped to pave the road to Hell. Voices of other days seemed to sound in my ears; out of the shadowy mist forms of ghostly men and women emerged and then were lost to sight, swallowed up in the darkness. Perceiving a glimmering light in the distance I hastened toward it. A phantom house barred my path, but I flitted through it as though it were not. A pale twilight now made objects discernible and I breathed more freely, for I no longer stumbled over the good resolutions, which, being broken, blocked the pavement.
A troop of spectres surrounded me and tried to stop my progress. Shades though they were, their attentions were annoying and I tried to brush them aside. My hands passed through shadows and the phantoms laughed in derision.
“What’s the news?” they cried again and again.
I hadn’t come to Hades to be interviewed, and knowing from the inside some of its perils, I declined to relate what the upper world was doing. This enraged the shades, who gathered about me threateningly. Just then one of my companions on the Styx yachting trip came to my aid. His appearance seemed to inspire the spectres with terror, for they all fled. The newcomer was talkative.
“Did you recognize in the leader of that band our old friend, Diogenes?” he asked.
“No, I never met the gentleman. Up on earth when any one is looking for an honest man, he doesn’t come to a newspaper office: he goes to a detective agency.”