_The tempest.--The sea-bird's gift.--The escape by swimming.--The
sleep in the woods._
At the stern of his solitary ship Ulysses sat, and steered right
artfully. No sleep could seize his eye-lids. 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 Waggoner. Seventeen days he held his
course, and on the eighteenth the coast of Phæacia 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 Æthiopians, 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 sail-yards 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 bulk, insulting over death, which he
had escaped, and the salt waves which he gave the sea 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 dropt 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 Phæacians, 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
further 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 past; 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
clinged 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 cheek
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.