Achilles glowed with pride and delight; and as he joined the illustrious shades of the warriors about him, Ulysses sought the side of Ajax, whom he perceived standing apart in gloom and sullenness. His lost honors perpetually stung his mind, though the fight had been fair and Ulysses had been judged the victor by the Trojans. Ulysses seeing him stand thus mournfully aloof, addressed him with tender sorrow. "Still burns thy rage? Can brave souls bear malice e'en after death?" he asked him sadly. But for all his appeals the resentful shade turned from him with disdain, and silently stalked away. Touched to the depths of a generous heart Ulysses started in pursuit through the black and winding ways of Death, to find and force him to reply to his earnest questioning, but on the way such strange and awful scenes met his astonished eyes as caused him to pause and turn aside.
There was huge Orion, whirling aloft his ponderous mace of brass to crush his savage prey.
There was Tityus, the son of Earth, who for offering violence to the goddess Latona was shot dead by her children, and lay for ever in Hell in fetters while vultures gnawed at his liver.
Again he looked, and beheld Tantalus, whose awful groans echoed through the roofless caverns. When to the stream that rippled past him he applied his parched lips, it fled before he could taste of it. Fruit of all kinds hung round him—pomegranates, figs, and ripening apples; but if he strove to seize the fruit, the baffling wind would toss the branch high out of his reach.
When in horror at the sight of these torments, Ulysses turned aside, he saw a laboring figure, Sisyphus, who with weary steps up a high hill was heaving a huge round stone. When, with infinite straining, he reached at length the summit, the boulder, poising but an instant, bounded down the steep again with a wild impetuous rush, and dragged with it Sisyphus into the depths of an awful cavern. Thence once again, with sweat and agony, he must renew his toil and creep with painful labor up the slope, thrusting the rock before him. This the punishment for a life of avaricious greed, devoted to a pitiless unassuageable lust for gold and power.
And farther on great Hercules was seen, a towering specter of gigantic form. Gloomy as night he stood, in act to shoot an arrow from his monstrous bow. With grim visage and terrible look he lamented his wrongs and woes, and then abruptly turning, strode away.
When Ulysses, curious to view the kings of ancient days and all the endless ranks of the mighty dead, would have stood strong in this resolve to watch them, a great swarm of specters rose from deepest Hell. With hideous yells they flew at him; they gaped at him and gibbered in such menacing tones that his blood froze in his veins. In fear lest the Gorgon, rising from the depths of the infernal lake, with her crown of hissing snakes about her brow, should transfix him to stone, he turned and fled.
He climbed the steep ascent and joined his waiting shipmates. They set sail with all haste to leave the dread Cimmerian shore, and a fair wind sped them on their backward way.