He falls on Scylla, who Charybdis shuns.
The line has been ascribed to Ovid; it is not, however, in that or any
other classic poet, but has been derived from Philippe Gualtier, a
modern French writer of Latin verses. Charybdis is a whirlpool in the
straits of Messina, on the coast of Sicily, opposite to Scylla, a
dangerous rock on the coast of Italy. The danger to which mariners were
exposed by the whirlpool is thus described by Homer in Pope’s
translation:
Dire Scylla there a scene of horror forms,
And here Charybdis fills the deep with storms;
When the tide rushes from her rumbling caves,
The rough rock roars; tumultuous boil the waves:
They toss, they foam, a wild confusion raise,
Like waters bubbling o’er the fiery blaze:
Eternal mists obscure the aërial plain,
And high above the rock she spouts the main.
When in her gulfs the rushing sea subsides,
She drains the ocean with the refluent tides.
The rock rebellows with a thundering sound;
Deep, wondrous deep, below appears the ground.
Virgil imagines the origin of this terrific scene:
That realm of old, a ruin huge, was rent
In length of ages from the continent.
With force convulsive burst the isle away;
Through the dread opening broke the thund’ring sea:
At once the thund’ring sea Sicilia tore,
And sunder’d from the fair Hesperian shore;
And still the neighbouring coasts and towns divides
With scanty channels, and contracted tides.
Fierce to the right tremendous Scylla roars,
Charybdis on the left the flood devours.
_Pitt._
A great earthquake in the year 1783 diminished the perils of the
pass.[187] Thirteen years before this event, which renders the scene
less poetical, Brydone thus describes