BUT HIS FATHER ANCHISES DEEP IN A GRASSY valley was reviewing and looking over with approval the souls that were still confined, but destined to return to the light above. As it happened, he was checking the entire company of his own family and his own grandsons yet-to-be: their destinies, their opportunities, their characters and their deeds.
When he saw Aeneas striding towards him across the meadows he stretched out both arms eagerly. Tears streamed down his face, and this was the greeting he gave:
"Have you come at last, and has your love - which your father hoped you felt - been strong enough to blot out the horror of the journey? Am I allowed to look at your face, my son, - and enjoy that give-and-take of conversation we knew so well? I was in fact working it out in my mind, thinking of what was to come, counting off the days - and my calculation has not disappointed me. I welcome you - what lands and mighty seas you've travelled through! How frightened I was that you would come to grief in the African kingdom!"
Aeneas in turn replied:
"It was the picture I had of you, father, the sad picture constantly appearing before me that drove me on to pass these barriers. My ships are at anchor in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Let me take your hand, let me, father. Don't shrink from my embrace."
As he said this a flood of tears poured down his face: three times there he tried to throw his arms round his father's neck: three times the ghost slipped through his hands' futile grasp, like a puff of wind, or sleep which flies away.