Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/83

 Thus from this monster Nature produced the first snakes, which bred and multiplied on the desert until the region was infested with the miserable creatures.

The great dark splash which the sea had caught when first he rose in the air after beheading the Gorgon, had formed the silvery winged Pegasus, the world's first horse. This splendid animal, however, did not stay with Perseus, but spread its beautiful feathered wings in the air and flew directly to Greece, where it was presented to the Muses on Mount Helicon and afterwards given a constellation.

Flying over mountains and deserts and the narrow green valley of the Nile, Perseus came to the shore of Palestine, the home of the Ethiopians, which he found inundated with floods and strewn with the wreckage of towns and villages. Traveling slowly above the sea-coast of this unfortunate country, he spied something white at the water's edge, and coming closer saw that it was a maiden chained by her wrists and ankles to a rock, while not far distant and ever approaching closer, was the most terrifying monster that he had ever seen. On the star maps this creature is labeled a "whale." It may have been a whale, and it may not, who knows? Sixty or seventy feet of whale lashing a tail big enough to destroy a large boat would certainly seem a terrible sea-monster to people who had never seen a whale. How could they know that its fifteen or sixteen feet of gaping mouth had never tasted anything but tiny crustaceans and acalephæ strained from sea-water! Hero indeed was Perseus, for he skimmed swiftly down to a nearby wave, and poising upon its frothy peak, thrust the monster deep below the jaw. A brave, brave deed was this, and the people shouted their vast amazement and delight. As the great sea-creature leaped and lunged and fell, Perseus again snatched the blood-freezing head of the Medusa from his wallet—and the cliffs trembled as the monster hit the bottom of the sea!