But fairest Aphrodite saw him from the highest Idalian peak, and she
pitied his youth and his beauty, and leapt up from her golden throne;
and like a falling star she cleft the sky, and left a trail of
glittering light, till she stooped to the Isle of the Sirens, and
snatched their prey from their claws. And she lifted Butes as he lay
sleeping, and wrapt him in a golden mist; and she bore him to the peak
of Lilybaeum; and he slept there many a pleasant year.
But when the Sirens saw that they were conquered, they shrieked for envy
and rage, and leapt from the beach into the sea, and were changed into
rocks until this day.
Then they came to the straits by Lilybaeum, and saw Sicily, the
three-cornered island, under which Enceladus the giant lies groaning day
and night, and when he turns the earth quakes, and his breath bursts out
in roaring flames from the highest cone of AEtna, above the chestnut
woods. And there Charybdis caught them in its fearful coils of wave, and
rolled mast-high about them, and spun them round and round; and they
could go neither back nor forward, while the whirlpool sucked them in.
And while they struggled they saw near them, on the other side of the
strait, a rock stand in the water, with a peak wrapt round in clouds; a
rock which no man could climb, though he had twenty hands and feet, for
the stone was smooth and slippery, as if polished by man's hand; and
half way up a misty cave looked out toward the west.
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