At the stern of his solitary ship Ulysses sat, and steered right artfully.
No sleep could seize his eyelids. He beheld the Pleiads, the Bear, which
is by some called the Wain, that moves round about Orion, and keeps still
above the ocean, and the slow-setting sign Bootes, which some name the
Wagoner. Seventeen days he held his course, and on the eighteenth the
coast of Phaeacia was in sight. The figure of the land, as seen from the
sea, was pretty and circular, and looked something like a shield.
Neptune, returning from visiting his favourite Aethiopians, from the
mountains of the Solymi, descried Ulysses ploughing the waves, his domain.
The sight of the man he so much hated for Polyphemus's sake, his son,
whose eye Ulysses had put out, set the god's heart on fire; and snatching
into his hand his horrid sea-sceptre, the trident of his power, he smote
the air and the sea, and conjured up all his black storms, calling down
night from the cope of heaven, and taking the earth into the sea, as it
seemed, with clouds, through the darkness and indistinctness which
prevailed; the billows rolling up before the fury of all the winds, that
contended together in their mighty sport.
Then the knees of Ulysses bent with fear, and then all his spirit was
spent, and he wished that he had been among the number of his countrymen
who fell before Troy, and had their funerals celebrated by all the Greeks,
rather than to perish thus, where no man could mourn him or know him.
As he thought these melancholy thoughts, a huge wave took him and washed
him overboard, ship and all upset amidst the billows, he struggling afar
off, clinging to her stern broken off which he yet held, her mast cracking
in two with the fury of that gust of mixed winds that struck it, sails and
sailyards fell into the deep, and he himself was long drowned under water,
nor could get his head above, wave so met with wave, as if they strove
which should depress him most; and the gorgeous garments given him by
Calypso clung about him, and hindered his swimming; yet neither for this,
nor for the overthrow of his ship, nor his own perilous condition, would
he give up his drenched vessel; but, wrestling with Neptune, got at length
hold of her again, and then sat in her hull, insulting over death, which
he had escaped, and the salt waves which he gave the seas again to give to
other men; his ship, striving to live, floated at random, cuffed from wave
to wave, hurled to and fro by all the winds: now Boreas tossed it to
Notus, Notus passed it to Eurus, and Eurus to the West Wind, who kept up
the horrid tennis.
Them in their mad sport Ino Leucothea beheld--Ino Leucothea, now a sea-
goddess, but once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus; she with pity
beheld Ulysses the mark of their fierce contention, and rising from the
waves alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called
a cormorant; and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea-
weeds, which grow at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropped at his
feet; and the bird spake to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any
more to that fatal vessel against which god Neptune had levelled his
furious wrath, nor to those ill-befriending garments which Calypso had
given him, but to quit both it and them, and trust for his safety to
swimming. "And here," said the seeming bird, "take this girdle and tie
about your middle, which has virtue to protect the wearer at sea, and you
shall safely reach the shore; but when you have landed, cast it far from
you back into the sea." He did as the sea-bird instructed him; he stripped
himself naked, and, fastening the wondrous girdle about his middle, cast
himself into the seas to swim. The bird dived past his sight into the
fathomless abyss of the ocean.
Two days and two nights he spent in struggling with the waves, though sore
buffeted, and almost spent, never giving up himself for lost, such
confidence he had in that charm which he wore about his middle, and in the
words of that divine bird. But the third morning the winds grew calm and
all the heavens were clear. Then he saw himself nigh land, which he knew
to be the coast of the Phaeacians, a people good to strangers and
abounding in ships, by whose favour he doubted not that he should soon
obtain a passage to his own country. And such joy he conceived in his
heart as good sons have that esteem their father's life dear, when long
sickness has held him down to his bed and wasted his body, and they see at
length health return to the old man, with restored strength and spirits,
in reward of their many prayers to the gods for his safety: so precious
was the prospect of home-return to Ulysses, that he might restore health
to his country (his better parent), that had long languished as full of
distempers in his absence. And then for his own safety's sake he had joy
to see the shores, the woods, so nigh and within his grasp as they seemed,
and he laboured with all the might of hands and feet to reach with
swimming that nigh-seeming land.
But when he approached near, a horrid sound of a huge sea beating against
rocks informed him that here was no place for landing, nor any harbour for
man's resort, but through the weeds and the foam which the sea belched up
against the land he could dimly discover the rugged shore all bristled
with flints, and all that part of the coast one impending rock that seemed
impossible to climb, and the water all about so deep that not a sand was
there for any tired foot to rest upon, and every moment he feared lest
some wave more cruel than the rest should crush him against a cliff,
rendering worse than vain all his landing; and should he swim to seek a
more commodious haven farther on, he was fearful lest, weak and spent as
he was, the winds would force him back a long way off into the main, where
the terrible god Neptune, for wrath that he had so nearly escaped his
power, having gotten him again into his domain, would send out some great
whale (of which those seas breed a horrid number) to swallow him up alive;
with such malignity he still pursued him.
While these thoughts distracted him with diversity of dangers, one bigger
wave drove against a sharp rock his naked body, which it gashed and tore,
and wanted little of breaking all his bones, so rude was the shock. But in
this extremity she prompted him that never failed him at need. Minerva
(who is wisdom itself) put it into his thoughts no longer to keep swimming
off and on, as one dallying with danger, but boldly to force the shore
that threatened him, and to hug the rock that had torn him so rudely;
which with both hands he clasped, wrestling with extremity, till the rage
of that billow which had driven him upon it was passed; but then again the
rock drove back that wave so furiously that it reft him of his hold,
sucking him with it in its return; and the sharp rock, his cruel friend,
to which he clung for succour, rent the flesh so sore from his hands in
parting that he fell off, and could sustain no longer; quite under water
he fell, and, past the help of fate, there had the hapless Ulysses lost
all portion that he had in this life, if Minerva had not prompted his
wisdom in that peril to essay another course, and to explore some other
shelter, ceasing to attempt that landing-place.
She guided his wearied and nigh-exhausted limbs to the mouth of the fair
river Callicoe, which not far from thence disbursed its watery tribute to
the ocean. Here the shores were easy and accessible, and the rocks, which
rather adorned than defended its banks, so smooth that they seemed
polished of purpose to invite the landing of our sea-wanderer, and to
atone for the uncourteous treatment which those less hospitable cliffs had
afforded him. And the god of the river, as if in pity, stayed his current,
and smoothed his waters, to make his landing more easy; for sacred to the
ever-living deities of the fresh waters, be they mountain-stream, river,
or lake, is the cry of erring mortals that seek their aid, by reason that,
being inland-bred, they partake more of the gentle humanities of our
nature than those marine deities whom Neptune trains up in tempests in the
unpitying recesses of his salt abyss.
So by the favour of the river's god Ulysses crept to land half-drowned;
both his knees faltering, his strong hands falling down through weakness
from the excessive toils he had endured, his cheeks and nostrils flowing
with froth of the sea-brine, much of which he had swallowed in that
conflict, voice and breath spent, down he sank as in death. Dead weary he
was. It seemed that the sea had soaked through his heart, and the pains he
felt in all his veins were little less than those which one feels that has
endured the torture of the rack. But when his spirits came a little to
themselves, and his recollection by degrees began to return, he rose up,
and unloosing from his waist the girdle or charm which that divine bird
had given him, and remembering the charge which he had received with it,
he flung it far from him into the river. Back it swam with the course of
the ebbing stream till it reached the sea, where the fair hands of Ino
Leucothea received it to keep it as a pledge of safety to any future
shipwrecked mariner that, like Ulysses, should wander in those perilous
waves.
Then he kissed the humble earth in token of safety, and on he went by the
side of that pleasant river, till he came where a thicker shade of rushes
that grew on its banks seemed to point out the place where he might rest
his sea-wearied limbs. And here a fresh perplexity divided his mind,
whether he should pass the night, which was coming on, in that place,
where, though he feared no other enemies, the damps and frosts of the
chill sea-air in that exposed situation might be death to him in his weak
state; or whether he had better climb the next hill, and pierce the depth
of some shady wood, in which he might find a warm and sheltered though
insecure repose, subject to the approach of any wild beast that roamed
that way. Best did this last course appear to him, though with some
danger, as that which was more honourable and savoured more of strife and
self-exertion than to perish without a struggle the passive victim of cold
and the elements.
So he bent his course to the nearest woods, where, entering in, he found a
thicket, mostly of wild olives and such low trees, yet growing so
intertwined and knit together that the moist wind had not leave to play
through their branches, nor the sun's scorching beams to pierce their
recesses, nor any shower to beat through, they grew so thick, and as it
were folded each in the other; here creeping in, he made his bed of the
leaves which were beginning to fall, of which was such abundance that two
or three men might have spread them ample coverings, such as might shield
them from the winter's rage, though the air breathed steel and blew as it
would burst. Here creeping in, he heaped up store of leaves all about him,
as a man would billets upon a winter fire, and lay down in the midst. Rich
seed of virtue lying hid in poor leaves! Here Minerva soon gave him sound
sleep; and here all his long toils past seemed to be concluded and shut up
within the little sphere of his refreshed and closed eyelids.
Read next: CHAPTER SIX - The Princess Nausicaa--The Washing--The Game with the Ball--The Court of Phaeacia and King Alcinous.
Read previous: CHAPTER FOUR - The Island of Calypso--Immortality Refused.
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