When hapless Phaeton looked down upon the earth, now spreading in vast extent beneath him, he grew pale and his knees shook with terror.  In spite of the glare all around him, the sight of his eyes grew dim.  He wished he had never touched his father’s horses, never learned his parentage, never prevailed in his request.  He is borne along like a vessel that flies before a tempest, when the pilot can do no more and betakes himself to his prayers.  What shall he do?  Much of the heavenly road is left behind, but more remains before.  He turns his eyes from one direction to the other; now to the goal whence he began his course, now to the realms of sunset which he is not destined to reach.  He loses his self-command, and knows not what to do,—­whether to draw tight the reins or throw them loose; he forgets the names of the horses.  He sees with terror the monstrous forms scattered over the surface of heaven.  Here the Scorpion extended his two great arms, with his tail and crooked claws stretching over two signs of the zodiac.  When the boy beheld him, reeking with poison and menacing with his fangs, his courage failed, and the reins fell from his hands.  The horses, when they felt them loose on their backs, dashed headlong, and unrestrained went off into unknown regions of the sky, in among the stars, hurling the chariot over pathless places, now up in high heaven, now down almost to the earth.  The moon saw with astonishment her brother’s chariot running beneath her own.  The clouds begin to smoke, and the mountain tops take fire; the fields are parched with heat, the plants wither, the trees with their leafy branches burn, the harvest is ablaze!  But these are small things.  Great cities perished, with their walls and towers; whole nations with their people were consumed to ashes!  The forest-clad mountains burned, Athos and Taurus and Tmolus and OEte; Ida, once celebrated for fountains, but now all dry; the Muses’ mountain Helicon, and Haemus; Aetna, with fires within and without, and Parnassus, with his two peaks, and Rhodope, forced at last to part with his snowy crown.  Her cold climate was no protection to Scythia, Caucasus burned, and Ossa and Pindus, and, greater than both, Olympus; the Alps high in air, and the Apennines crowned with clouds.

Then Phaeton beheld the world on fire, and felt the heat intolerable.  The air he breathed was like the air of a furnace and full of burning ashes, and the smoke was of a pitchy darkness.  He dashed forward he knew not whither.  Then, it is believed, the people of Aethiopia became black by the blood being forced so suddenly to the surface, and the Libyan desert was dried up to the condition in which it remains to this day.  The Nymphs of the fountains, with dishevelled hair, mourned their waters, nor were the rivers safe beneath their banks:  Tanais smoked, and Caicus, Xanthus, and Meander; Babylonian Euphrates and Ganges, Tagus with golden sands, and Cayster where the swans resort.  Nile fled away and hid his