“SHE has twelve dangling feet, and six long necks and on each neck a fearful head with three rows of deadly grinning teeth. She is sunk in the cavern up to her waist, but she stretches out her heads round the cliff fishing for dolphins and sea-dogs* and all the monsters of the ever-moaning sea. No crew can boast that they have escaped unhurt, for she darts out whenever a ship passes by and seizes a man in every mouth.
“But across the strait you will see another rock, lower than the first. A great branching fig-tree grows above it and underneath is Charybdis in her dark and roaring pool. Thrice a day she belches out the water and thrice a day she sucks it down again. Heaven send you are not within her reach when she sucks the water down! Poseidon himself could not save you then. So you must keep close to Scylla’s rock and row past that way, for it is better to lose six of your crew than to perish with them all.”*
freely translated
* ‘Sea-dog’ is used not in the Treasure Island sense of ‘experienced sailor’, but in the sense of a dog-fish, a small sand-coloured shark favouring the sea-floor along European coasts.
* Scylla and Charybdis have thus come to symbolise a choice between bad and worse. All fell out just as Circe foretold. Odysseus gave Charybdis a wide berth and saved his ship, but the price was high. “Suddenly Scylla darted out” recalled Odysseus later “and snatched six of my crew, and I only turned in time to see their heads and feet in the air and to hear them call my name for the last time in their agony. Scylla drew them to the rock, gasping, as a fisherman draws in the fish at the end of his line, and she devoured them at the very mouth of her den, while they cried to us and stretched out their hands in that awful struggle of death. That was the saddest sight I ever saw in all my wanderings over the sea.”