The path now led them to a place where the three infernal rivers, Acheron, Cocytus, and Styx, met in one deep, black, and boiling flood.  Here there kept guard the grim ferryman Charon, an infernal deity of fearful aspect.  A long gray beard fell all tangled and neglected from his chin; his filthy and ragged garments were knotted over his shoulders; his eyes glittered with baleful light.  He sat on a great black barge, which he pushed to and fro across the river with a pole.  An immense crowd of shades was incessantly pouring to the banks,—­young and old, matrons and virgins, warriors who had endured the toils of a long life and tender boys who had died while yet under the care of their parents.  All were eager to cross the stream, and stretched their hands in earnest entreaty to Charon to admit them into his boat.  But the sullen ferryman only consented to receive some; others he drove back with his pole, and would on no account permit them to cross.

AEneas was amazed at this scene, and asked the Sibyl to explain to him its meaning.  “You see before you,” she replied, “the deep pools of Cocytus, and the Stygian lake, by which the Gods are accustomed to swear when they take an oath which they dare not violate.  All that crowd which Charon will not ferry across is composed of persons who after death received not the rites of burial; those only are permitted to enter the boat who have been interred with proper ceremonies.  As for the others, they wander unquiet about these shores for a hundred years before they are allowed to cross to the regions beyond.”

When AEneas heard this he was filled with sadness, for among the spectres of the unburied who crowded on the bank he saw many of his own comrades who had perished during the storms he had had to encounter during his long voyages.  As he looked, there advanced, slow and mournful, the pilot Palinurus, who had been thrown overboard by Somnus during the recent voyage from Sicily.  The hero accosted him, and asked him what god had torn him from his post and overwhelmed him in the midst of the ocean.  The oracle of Apollo, he said, had assured him that Palinurus would be safe on the sea, and would arrive on the Italian coast; and yet it would seem that the oracle had been falsified.  The shade of Palinurus, knowing nothing of the enchantment which had been wrought on him by Somnus, replied that no god had destroyed him, and that the oracle had spoken truly.  He had fallen into the sea through being overcome by slumber, and having kept afloat for three days and nights, had on the fourth day reached the Italian shore alive, but had been cruelly murdered by the savage people while clambering up the cliffs.  Now his body was tossing on the waves, sometimes thrown on the shore and then washed off again.  But he passionately entreated AEneas either to find his corpse and inter it with proper solemnities, or else to contrive some means of taking him as his companion across the black waters of Styx, unburied as he was, that at