They had lighted their candles, strapped their breeches above their knees and looked like utterly disreputable butchers, prepared for the shambles.
We were ill-at-ease about the adventure, but, dissembling this for the sake of appearances, before the brace of desperadoes who had remained outside,—it would seem to watch us—strolled to the edge of the water and sat down in the shade. The lake is a cup, two hundred feet in depth, less than two miles in circumference, with a rich setting of wooded hills. It was joined to Lacrinus in the reign of Augustus by canals, and Roman fleets lay here in a sheltered harbor, Monte Nuovo cut off this communication, traces of which can be seen in both lakes. At the upper end of Avernus are the fine ruins of a Temple of Apollo. We knew the ancient stories of noxious exhalations that killed birds while flying over it, and of other manifest horrors of the location; of gullies, infested by Cimmerian shades; of the Styx, draining its slow waters in their sevenfold circuit of hell, by an underground current from the bottom of this reservoir; of the ghostly boatman, the splash of whose oars could be heard in the breathless solitude of these accursed shores. Upon the hillsides, in the noisome depths of forests polluted by the effluvia of the waters, smoked sacrifices to Hecate.
We saw a placid sheet, mirroring the skies as purely as do Como and Windermere. The ravines were cloaked by chestnuts and laurels, and the hills upon the thither side were clothed with vineyards. A lonely place it is, with a brooding hush upon it that was not wholly imaginary. It is assuredly not unlovely, nor in the slightest degree forbidding. The only uncanny object we found was a vine at the entrance of the grotto. It had a twisting, tough stem, and leaves in shape somewhat resembling the ivy, although larger and more succulent, each marked in white with the distinct impression of a serpent. Upon no two was the image exactly the same in form or position, but the snake was there in all, partly coiled, partly trailing over the dark-green surface, clearly visible even to the scales, the head and, in some, the forked tongue. We remembered the pampered viper of the witch of Vesuvius, and wondered if the Sibylline spell had perpetuated in the leaving of this vine, the image of a favorite familiar, or cursed a hated plant with this brand. We gathered and pressed a handful of the mystic leaves from which the sinuous lines faded with the verdure into a dull brown, after some weeks.