"But the cruel wretch said,
‘Then I will eat all Noman's comrades before Noman himself,
and will keep Noman for the last. This is the present that I will
make him.’
As he spoke he reeled, and fell
sprawling face upwards on the ground. His great neck hung heavily
backwards and a deep sleep took hold upon him. Presently he turned
sick, and threw up both wine and the gobbets of human flesh on which
he had been gorging, for he was very drunk. Then I thrust the beam of
wood far into the embers to heat it, and encouraged my men lest any
of them should turn faint-hearted. When the wood, green though it
was, was about to blaze, I drew it out of the fire glowing with heat,
and my men gathered round me, for a daimôn had filled
their hearts with courage. We drove the sharp end of the beam into
the monster's eye, and bearing upon it with all my weight I kept
turning it round and round as though I were boring a hole in a
ship's plank with an auger, which two men with a wheel and strap
can keep on turning as long as they choose. Even thus did we bore the
red hot beam into his eye, till the boiling blood bubbled all over it
as we worked it round and round, so that the steam from the burning
eyeball scalded his eyelids and eyebrows, and the roots of the eye
sputtered in the fire. As a blacksmith plunges an axe or hatchet into
cold water to temper it - for it is this that gives strength to the
iron - and it makes a great hiss as he does so, even thus did the
Cyclops’ eye hiss round the beam of olive wood, and his hideous
yells made the cave ring again. We ran away in a fright, but he
plucked the beam all besmirched with gore from his eye, and hurled it
from him in a frenzy of rage and pain, shouting as he did so to the
other Cyclopes who lived on the bleak headlands near him; so they
gathered from all quarters round his cave when they heard him crying,
and asked what was the matter with him.
"‘What ails you,
Polyphemus,’ said they, ‘that you make such a noise,
breaking the stillness of the night, and preventing us from being
able to sleep? Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? Surely no
man is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force
[biê]?
"But Polyphemus shouted to them
from inside the cave, ‘Noman is killing me by fraud! Noman is
killing me by force [biê]!’
Homer. The Odyssey. Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original. Samuel Butler. Based on public domain edition, revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy. A. C. Fifield, London. 1900 (?).
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