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[237] ἦ τοι ὅτ᾽, ‘now whenever she vomited it forth, like a cauldron on a big fire, she seethed up swirling from her inmost depth (πᾶσα), and the spray fell aloft on the tops of the two cliffs,’ (i. e. the rock of Scylla, and the rock of Charybdis), ‘but when she sucked back the salt sea water, she showed all down, within her swirling eddy, while around her the rock bellowed fearfully: and at the bottom the ground showed dark with sand.’ When this Maelstrom was discharging its waters, they seemed to come boiling and bursting up from below, with a roar like thunder and amid clouds of spray. But when the sea was being sucked in, one might look down into the whirling gulf as into a monstrous funnel; and between its liquid sides, far below, the sea-floor was visible, cp. Tibull. 4. 1. 73

‘Nec violenta suo consumpsit more Charybdis;

Vel si sublimis fluctu consurgeret imo,

Vel si interrupto nudaret gurgite pontum.

Homer's Odyssey. W. Walter Merry. James Riddell. D. B. Monro. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1886-1901.

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