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Circe warns Odysseus about Scylla and Charybdis, set between two cliffs:
"But of the two rocks, one reaches up into the wide heaven
with a pointed peak, and a dark cloud stands always around it,
and never at any time draws away from it, nor does the sunlight
ever hold that peak, either in the early or the late summer,
nor could any man who was mortal climb there, or stand mounted
on the summit, not if he had twenty hands and twenty
feet, for the rock goes sheerly up, as if it were polished.
Halfway up the cliff there is a cave, misty-looking
and turned toward Erebos and the dark, the very direction
from which, O shining Odysseus, you and your men will be steering
your hollow ship; and from the hollow ship no vigorous
young man with a bow could shoot to the hole in the cliffside.
In that cavern Scylla lives, whose howling is terror.
Her voice indeed is only as loud as a new-born puppy
could make, but she herself is an evil monster. No one
not even a god encountering her, could be glad at that sight.
She has twelve feet, and all of them wave in the air. She has six
necks upon her, grown to great length, and upon each neck
there is a horrible head, with teeth in it, set in three rows
close together and stiff, full of black death. Her body
from the waist down is holed up inside the hollow cavern,
but she holds her heads poked out and away from the terrible hollow,
and there she fishes, peering all over the cliffside, looking
for dolphins or dogfish to catch or anything bigger,
some sea monster, of whom Amphitrite keeps so many;
never can sailors boast aloud that their ship has passed her
without any loss of men, for with each of her heads she snatches
one man away and carries him off from the dark-prowed vessel.
The other cliff is lower; you will see, Odysseus,
for they lie close together, you could even cast with an arrow
across. There is a great fig tree grows there, dense with foliage,
and under this shining Charybdis sucks down the black water.
For three times a day she flows it up, and three times she sucks it
terribly down; may you not be there when she sucks down water,
for not even the Earthshaker could rescue you out of that evil.
But sailing your ship swiftly drive her past and avoid her
and make for Scylla's rock instead, since it is far better
to mourn six friends lost out of your ship than the whole company." |
