This text is part of:
"I was told all this by Calypso,
who said she had heard it from the mouth of Hermes.
"As soon as I got down to my ship
and to the sea shore I rebuked each one of the men separately, but we
could see no way out of it, for the cows were dead already. And
indeed the gods began at once to show signs and wonders among us, for
the hides of the cattle crawled about, and the joints upon the spits
began to low like cows, and the meat, whether cooked or raw, kept on
making a noise just as cows do.
"For six days my men kept driving
in the best cows and feasting upon them, but when Zeus the son of
Kronos had added a seventh day, the fury of the gale abated; we
therefore went on board, raised our masts, spread sail, and put out
to sea. As soon as we were well away from the island, and could see
nothing but sky and sea, the son of Kronos raised a black cloud over
our ship, and the sea grew dark beneath it. We did not get on much
further, for in another moment we were caught by a terrific squall
from the West that snapped the forestays of the mast so that it fell
aft, while all the ship's gear tumbled about at the bottom of
the vessel. The mast fell upon the head of the helmsman in the
ship's stern, so that the bones of his head were crushed to
pieces, and he fell overboard as though he were diving, with no more
life left in him.
"Then Zeus let fly with his
thunderbolts, and the ship went round and round, and was filled with
fire and brimstone as the lightning struck it. The men all fell into
the sea; they were carried about in the water round the ship, looking
like so many sea-gulls, but the god presently deprived them of all
chance of getting home again [nostos].
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.