’So spake they uttering a sweet voice, and my heart was fain to listen, and I bade my company unbind me, nodding at them with a frown, but they bent to their oars and rowed on.  Then straight uprose Perimedes and Eurylochus and bound me with more cords and straitened me yet the more.  Now when we had driven past them, nor heard we any longer the sound of the Sirens or their song, forthwith my dear company took away the wax wherewith I had anointed their ears and loosed me from my bonds.

’But so soon as we left that isle, thereafter presently I saw smoke and a great wave, and heard the sea roaring.  Then for very fear the oars flew from their hands, and down the stream they all splashed, and the ship was holden there, for my company no longer plied with their hands the tapering oars.  But I paced the ship and cheered on my men, as I stood by each one and spake smooth words: 

’"Friends, forasmuch as in sorrow we are not all unlearned, truly this is no greater woe that is upon us, {*} than when the Cyclops penned us by main might in his hollow cave; yet even thence we made escape by my manfulness, even by my counsel and my wit, and some day I think that this adventure too we shall remember.  Come now, therefore, let us all give ear to do according to my word.  Do ye smite the deep surf of the sea with your oars, as ye sit on the benches, if peradventure Zeus may grant us to escape from and shun this death.  And as for thee, helmsman, thus I charge thee, and ponder it in thine heart seeing that thou wieldest the helm of the hollow ship.  Keep the ship well away from this smoke and from the wave and hug the rocks, lest the ship, ere thou art aware, start from her course to the other side, and so thou hurl us into ruin.”

{* Reading [Greek], not [Greek] with La Roche.}

’So I spake, and quickly they hearkened to my words.  But of Scylla I told them nothing more, a bane none might deal with, lest haply my company should cease from rowing for fear, and hide them in the hold.  In that same hour I suffered myself to forget the hard behest of Circe, in that she bade me in nowise be armed; but I did on my glorious harness and caught up two long lances in my hands, and went on the decking of the prow, for thence methought that Scylla of the rock would first be seen, who was to bring woe on my company.  Yet could I not spy her anywhere, and my eyes waxed weary for gazing all about toward the darkness of the rock.

“Next we began to sail up the narrow strait lamenting.  For on the one hand lay Scylla, and on the other mighty Charybdis in terrible wise sucked down the salt sea water.  As often as she belched it forth, like a cauldron on a great fire she would seethe up through all her troubled deeps, and overhead the spray fell on the tops of either cliff.  But oft as she gulped down the salt sea water, within she was all plain to see through her troubled deeps, and the rock around roared horribly and beneath the