Page:The Odyssey of Homer, with the Hymns, Epigrams, and Battle of the Frogs and Mice (Buckley 1853).djvu/109

253—288. finished it with long decks. And he made a mast in it, and a sail-yard fitted to it; and he made a rudder besides that he might guide it. And he dammed it all round with willow wicker-work, to be a defence against the wave; and he heaped much ballast upon it. But in the mean time Calypso, divine one of goddesses, brought linen for making sails; and he contrived these also well: and he bound in it upper ropes, cables, and sheets. And then he drew it into the divine sea with levers. It was the fourth day, and all things were finished for him; on the fifth then divine Calypso sent him from the island, having clad him in perfumed garments, and having washed him. And the goddess placed in it for him one skin of black wine, and another large one of water; and provisions in a wallet, and in it many strength-recruiting dainties: and she sent a harmless and favourable wind forward. And divine Ulysses gladly spread his sails to the prosperous gale; but sitting down he guided it skilfully with the rudder; nor did sleep fall upon his eye-brows, as he contemplated both the Pleiads, and setting Bootes, and the Bear, which they also call by name the Wain, which turns itself in the same place, and observes Orion; but it alone does not share in the washing of the ocean. For Calypso, divine one of goddesses, had commanded him to pass over the sea, keeping to the left hand. Seventeen days indeed he sailed, passing over the sea, but in the eighteenth the shadowy mountains of the land of the Phæacians appeared, where it was nearest for him; but it appeared as a shield in the dark sea.

The powerful Shaker of the earth, as he was returning from the Ethiopians, beheld him from a distance from the mountains of the Solymi; for he was seen by him sailing over the sea; but he was very wrathful in his heart; and moving his head he spoke [thus] to his own mind:

"O gods, certainly indeed the deities have now consulted differently about Ulysses, when I was amongst the Ethiopians; and now he is near the land of the Phæacians, where