e? I will of my own self do all as you have bidden
me. Draw closer to me, let us once more throw our arms around one
another, and find sad comfort in the sharing of our sorrows."

He opened his arms towards him as he spoke and would have clasped him
in them, but there was nothing, and the spirit vanished as a vapour,
gibbering and whining into the earth. Achilles sprang to his feet,
smote his two hands, and made lamentation saying, "Of a truth even in
the house of Hades there are ghosts and phantoms that have no life in
them; all night long the sad spirit of Patroclus has hovered over head
making piteous moan, telling me what I am to do for him, and looking
wondrously like himself."

Thus did he speak and his words set them all weeping and mourning about
the poor dumb dead, till rosy-fingered morn appeared. Then King
Agamemnon sent men and mules from all parts of the camp, to bring wood,
and Meriones, squire to Idomeneus, was in charge over them. They went
out with woodmen's axes and strong ropes in their hands, and before
them went the mules. Up hill and down dale did they go, by straight
ways and crooked, and when they reached the heights of many-fountained
Ida, they laid their axes to the roots of many a tall branching oak
that came thundering down as they felled it. They split the trees and
bound them behind the mules, which then wended their way as they best
could through the thick brushwood on to the plain. All who had been
cutting wood bore logs, for so Meriones squire to Idomeneus had bidden
them, and they threw them down in a line upon the seashore at the place
where Achilles would make a mighty monument for Patroclus and for
himself.

When they had thrown down their great logs of wood over the whole
ground, they stayed all of them where they were, but Achilles ordered
his brave Myrmidons to gird on their armour, and to yoke each man his
horses; they therefore rose, girded on their armour and mounted each
his chariot--they and their charioteers with them. The chariots went
before, and they that were on foot followed as a cloud in their tens of
thousands after. In the midst of them his comrades bore Patroclus and
covered him with the locks of their hair which they cut off and threw
upon his body. Last came Achilles with his head bowed for sorrow, so
noble a comrade was he taking to the house of Hades.

When they came to the place of which Achilles had told them they laid
the body down and built up the wood.