. She passed
a hook beneath the jaw of the selected one, and, fastening it to a cord,
dragged him along over rocks and stones, till she reached a cave,
overhung by a projecting ridge. A gloomy fissure in the ground was
there, of a depth almost reaching to the infernal gods, where the
yew-tree spread thick its horizontal branches, at all times excluding
the light of the sun. Fearful and withering shade was there, and noisome
slime cherished by the livelong night. The air was heavy and flagging as
that of the Taenarian promontory; and hither the god of hell permits his
ghosts to extend their wanderings. It is doubtful whether the sorceress
called up the dead to attend her here, or herself descended to the
abodes of Pluto. She put on a fearful and variegated robe; she covered
her face with her dishevelled hair, and bound her brow with a wreath of
vipers.

Meanwhile she observed Sextus afraid, with his eyes fixed on the ground,
and his companions trembling; and thus she reproached them. "Lay aside,"
she said, "your vainly-conceived terrors! You shall behold only a living
and a human figure, whose accents you may listen to with perfect
security. If this alarms you, what would you say if you should have seen
the Stygian lakes, and the shores burning with sulphur unconsumed, if
the Furies stood before you, and Cerberus with his mane of vipers, and
the Giants chained in eternal adamant? Yet all these you might have
witnessed unharmed; for all these would quail at the terror of my brow."

She spoke, and next plied the dead body with her arts. She supples his
wounds, and infuses fresh blood into his veins: she frees his scars from
the clotted gore, and penetrates them with froth from the moon. She
mixes whatever nature has engendered in its most fearful caprices, foam
from the jaws of a mad dog, the entrails of the lynx, the backbone of
the hyena, and the marrow of a stag that had dieted on serpents, the
sinews of the remora, and the eyes of a dragon, the eggs of the eagle,
the flying serpent of Arabia, the viper that guards the pearl in the Red
Sea, the slough of the hooded snake, and the ashes that remain when the
phoenix has been consumed. To these she adds all venom that has a
name, the foliage of herbs over which she has sung her charms, and on
which she had voided her rheum as they grew.

At length she chants her incantation to the Stygian Gods, in a voice
compounded of all discords, and altogether alien to human organs.