Both the youth and the old man had been seized with terror, but the latter was the first to regain his self-control, and his keen eye, trained to watch the stars, speedily discovered that it was not a single giant form emerging from the city of the dead upon the plain, but a multitude of moving shapes that seemed to be swaying hither and thither over the meadow lands.

The bellowing and bleating, too, did not proceed from one special place, but came now nearer and now farther away.

Sometimes it seemed to issue from the bowels of the earth, and at others to float from some airy height.
Fresh horror seized upon the old man.

Grasping his grandson's right hand in his, he pointed with his left to the necropolis, exclaiming in tremulous tones: "The dead are too great a multitude.

The under-world is overflowing, as the river does when its bed is not wide enough for the waters from the south.