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The stranger gesticulated, pleaded, swore, implored, summoned all inventions between the starry spheres and the mud of Cocytus to judge of the affair; but Fulke d'Arnaye was resolute. "Behold, mademoiselle," he said, at length, "how my poor Olivier excites himself over a little matter. Olivier is my brother, most beautiful lady, but he speaks no English, so that I cannot present him to you.
Wherefore it is neither the dog Cerberus nor the river Cocytus that has made our fear of death boundless; but the threatened danger of not being, representing it as impossible for such as are once extinct to shift back again into being. For we cannot be born twice, and our not being must last forever; as Epicurus speaks.
So does a child's balloon divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch, and slide off again from every obstacle. So must have ineffectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus. There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions.
Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names describe the world below Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them.
We now came to the banks of the great river Cocytus, where we quitted our vehicle, and passed the water in a boat, after which we were obliged to travel on foot the rest of our journey; and now we met, for the first time, several passengers traveling to the world we had left, who informed us they were souls going into the flesh.
On either side of a throne of sulphur, from which issued the four infernal rivers of Lethe, Phlegethon, Cocytus, and Acheron, were ranged the Eumenides and Parcæ. Lachesis and her sisters turned up their noses when they observed Proserpine; but the Eumenides could not stifle their fury, in spite of the hints of their more subdued but not less malignant companions.
Then we replace the slide in the shield, draw this out of the camera, and carry it back into the shadowy realm where Cocytus flows in black nitrate of silver and Acheron stagnates in the pool of hyposulphite, and invisible ghosts, trooping down from the world of day, cross a Styx of dissolved sulphate of iron, and appear before the Rhadamanthus of that lurid Hades.
Neither does the water of this river mingle with any other; but it, too, having gone round in a circle, discharges itself into Tartarus, opposite to Pyriphlegethon. Its name, as the poets say, is Cocytus."
His realm is encompassed by vast rivers, whose very names inspire awe: Cocytus, Pyriphlegethon, and the like. Most formidable of all, and first to arrest the progress of the new-comer, is Acheron, that lake which none may pass save by the ferryman's boat; it is too deep to be waded, too broad for the swimmer, and even defies the flight of birds deceased.
In all the more celebrated nations of the ancient world, we find established those twin elements of belief by which religion harmonizes and directs the social relations of life, viz., a faith in a future state, and in the providence of superior powers, who, surveying as judges the affairs of earth, punish the wicked and reward the good . It has been plausibly conjectured that the fables of Elysium, the slow Cocytus, and the gloomy Hades, were either invented or allegorized from the names of Egyptian places.
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