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 broad channels, all without a stream. The same mischance dries up the Thracian rivers, Hebrus and Strymon; also the rivers of the west, the Rhine, Rhone, Po, and the Tiber, to whom had been promised the mastery of the world. Great cracks yawn everywhere, and the light, penetrating to the lower world, strikes terror into the infernal king and his consort. Even the sea shrinks up, and what was but now a great, watery expanse is a dry plain of sand. The mountains, which the deep sea had covered before, spring forth, and increase the numbers of the scattered Cyclades. The fish dive to the lowest depths, and the dolphins no longer dare to leap curving above the surface of the sea into their wonted air. The dead bodies of sea-calves float, with upturned belly, on the water's top. They say that Nereus himself and Doris and her daughters were hot as they lay hid in their caves. Thrice Neptune essayed to lift his arms and august face from out the water; thrice did he desist, unable to bear the fiery atmosphere.

Not so all-fostering Earth, who, encircled as she was by sea, amid the waters of the deep, amid her fast-contracting streams which had crowded into her dark bowels and hidden there, though parched by heat, heaved up her smothered face. Raising her shielding hand to her brow and causing all things to shake with her mighty trembling, she sank back a little lower than her wonted place, and then in awful tones she spoke: "If this is thy will, and I have deserved all this, why, O king of all the gods, are thy lightnings idle? If I must die by fire, oh, let me perish by thy fire and lighten my suffering by thought of him who sent it. I scarce can open my lips to speak these words"—the hot smoke was choking her—"See my 79