Charybdis

“ Thrice a day she drinks her pits dry, and thrice a day again she belches them all up: but when she is drinking, come not nigh, for being once caught, the force of Neptune cannot redeem you from her swallow. Better trust to Scylla, for she will but have for her six necks six men: Charybdis in her insatiate draught will ask all."
Then Ulysses enquired, in case he should escape Charybdis, whether he might not assail that other monster with his sword: to which she replied that he must not think that he had an enemy subject to death, or wounds, to contend with: for Scylla could never die. ”

“ But it must be borne in mind that, if there is a Scylla before me, there is also a Charybdis—and that, in my fear of being read as a jest, I may incur the darker destiny of not being read at all. ”

“ Dire Scylla there a scene of horror forms, And here Charybdis fills the deep with storms. When the tide rushes from her rumbling caves, The rough rock roars, tumultuous boil the waves; They toss, they foam, a wild confusion raise, Like waters bubbling o’er the fiery blaze; Eternal mists obscure the aërial plain, And high above the rock she spouts the main; When in her gulfs the rushing sea subsides, She drains the ocean with the refluent tides; The rock re-bellows with a thundering sound; Deep, wondrous deep, below appears the ground. ”

“ We therefore escaped without adding our bones to those on the isle of the Sirens, and came next to Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is a frightful whirlpool. The sailor who steers too far away in his anxiety to escape it, is seized by the six arms of the monster Scylla and lifted to her cavern to be devoured. We avoided Charybdis; but as we looked down into the abyss, pale with fear, six of my comrades were seized by Scylla and snatched up to her cave.
"As we neared the Island of the Sun I told my comrades again of the warning of Tiresias, and begged them to sail past without stopping. ”

“ They are reported to be excellent songsters, that play on the Sicilian coasts, and tempt passengers on shore, where they sing them asleep and kill them. Scylla and Charybdis are two other sea monsters. Scylla is the daughter of Phorcys, and beloved by Glaucus, whom therefore the witch Circe by her enchantments turned into a rock, with dogs around her. Charybdis is a very ravenous woman, who stole Hercules's oxen, for which crime Jupiter struck her dead with a thunder-bolt, and then turned her into a gulf or whirlpool in the Sicilian Sea. ”

“ Mayst thou not be near when she sucks the water down, for then nothing could save thee. Keep nearer to Scylla's than to Charybdis's rock. It is better to lose six of your company than to lose thy ship and all thy company. Keep near Scylla's rock and drive right on."'
'"If thou shouldst win past the deadly rocks guarded by Scylla and Charybdis thou wilt come to the Island of Thrinacia. There the Cattle of the Sun graze with immortal nymphs to guard them. If them comest to that Island, do no hurt to those herds. ”

“ Scylla appears as a beautiful maiden beloved by the sea-god Glaucus and other deities, and changed by the jealous Circe (or other rival) into a sea-monster; afterwards she was transformed into a rock shunned by fishermen. According to a late legend (Servius on Aeneid, iii. 420) , Charybdis was a voracious woman who robbed Heracles of his cattle and was therefore cast into the sea by Zeus, where she retained her old voracious nature. In later poetry and art Scylla was conceived of as a maiden above, with dogs' or wolves' heads growing out of her body, and the tail of a fish. ”

“ We may therefore suppose that the ancients meant by Charybdis these casual whirlpools near the port of Messina, and by Scylla those of Point Pezzo. Between these two points the currents are extremely rapid and strong and variable besides. Under such circumstances an inexperienced sailor might therefore have difficulty in passing the strait of Messina without falling from Charybdis into Scylla. The danger is really serious for sailing vessels, which were the best the ancients knew of. ”

“ The petitioner's problem is to avoid Scylla without being drawn into Charybdis. ”

“ The bark moved of itself without the help of any oar, and soon brought him out of the regions of death into the cheerful quarters of the living, and to the island of Aeaea, whence he had set forth.
CHAPTER THREE The Song of the Sirens.—Scylla and Charybdis.—The Oxen of the Sun.—The
Judgment.—The Crew Killed by Lightning.
"Unhappy man, who at thy birth wast appointed twice to die! others shall die once; but thou, besides that death that remains for thee, common to all men, hast in thy lifetime visited the shades of death. Thee Scylla, thee Charybdis, expect. ”

“ On every ship that passes her den she levies a tribute of six of her crew.
"On the other side of the strait thou wilt see a second rock, lying flat and low, about a bowshot from the first. There stands a great fig-tree, thick with leaves, and under it sits Charybdis, sucking down the water, and belching it up again three times a day. Beware that thou approach not when she sucks down the water, for then none could save thee from destruction, no, not Poseidon himself. ”

“ With its tentacles streaming gracefully behind, an actively swimming Charybdea presents a fanciful resemblance to a [8] comet or meteor. When an attempt is made to capture one, it will often escape by going down into deeper water—as indeed do other jelly-fish. Escape from observation is all the more easy by reason of the entire absence of pigment excepting for the small amount in the sensory clubs. The yellowish or brownish color usually stated as common in the Cubomedusæ is nowhere present in C. Xaymacana. ”

“ Finally, as judged by the results in this paper, Charybdea seems to occupy, physiologically, a position intermediate between the Hydromedusæ and the Scyphomedusæ. In its great activity as a swimmer, in its response to light, and in its reflexes it is Hydromedusan, while in the paralysis and recovery following the removal of its marginal bodies, as also in its response with several pulsations instead of one, when a deganglionated bell is stimulated, it is Scyphomedusan. ”

“ Down comes fate upon the thoughtless reveller; a turn of the wrist with the right, and a swift upward motion of the left arm, and anything there may chance to be busying itself at the baited end of the stick is my own. What do I see? A big crawfish? It is indeed a big crawfish, and with it a second and yet a third, true Sairki monsters, all three of them, seething and glistening in their dark brown armour at the bottom of the net, and laying hold angrily of each other wherever they can fasten a claw, as though each were chastising his companions for having brought him into this mess. ”

“ At any rate the gelatinous lobes in the case of Chirodropus on the one hand, and on the other hand the sinuous outline of the margin still mapped out by the lamella in Chirodropus, Chiropsalmus and Tripedalia, are certainly very suggestive of an ancestral Cubomedusa in which there was no velarium, but sixteen free marginal lobes instead. Two more indications favor slightly the same view. In both Charybdea and Tripedalia a small notch is seen in the edge of the velarium in the perradius (Fig. 44) . Its constancy suggests that it may not be a chance or meaningless feature. ”

“ On the Assyrian tablets Auriga was the "Chariot," and in accordance with this in Græco-Babylonian times the constellation "Rukubi," the Chariot, lay here nearly coincident with our Charioteer.
Seen rising in the north-east, it needs but little imagination to trace in the stars of Auriga a resemblance to an ancient Roman chariot, so that the title "Chariot" seems more appropriate than "Charioteer."
Ideler thinks that the original figure was made up of the five stars α, β, ε, ζ, η. The driver (represented by the star Capella) is imagined as standing on an antique sloping chariot, marked by β. ”

“ When the crayfish is hatched (fig. 60) it differs from the adult in many ways—not only is the cephalothorax more convex and larger in proportion to the abdomen; but the rostrum is short and bent down between the eyes. The sterna of the thorax are wider relatively, and hence there is a greater interval between the bases of the legs than in the adult. The proportion of the limbs to one another and to the body are nearly the same as in the adult, but the chelæ of the forceps are more slender. ”

“ And Crowdie—with his woman’s eyes, his soft, clear voice, his delicate white hands, his repellent pallor, and wound-like lips—Katharine thought of neither man nor beast. Even in the midst of her dream of wild animals, he was Crowdie still, with a mysterious, indescribable, poisonous something in all his being which made it a suffering for her to touch his hand. To this something, whatever it might be, she preferred her father’s cruel avarice, her mother’s envy, heartless as it had been while it lasted. To it she would have preferred a drunkard’s trembling hand and lip. ”

“ In general appearance they are not very unlike the adults. They grow very rapidly at this stage. As the animal is enclosed in a hard shell, growth can only take place during the period just following the molt, for the crayfish casts its skin periodically, and it is while the new shell is forming that the animal does its growing. The crayfish when it molts casts not only the exoskeleton, but also the lining of part of the alimentary canal. After the females have hatched their young many die in the shallow pools, in which places the dried-up skeletons are noticeable during the summer months. ”

“ And likewise, if a ship be in peril to fall into Scilla, the fear of falling into Charibdis on the other side shall never hinder any wise master thereof from drawing himself from Scilla toward Charibdis first, in all that ever he can. But when he hath himself once so far away from Scilla that he seeth himself safe out of that danger, then will he begin to take good heed to keep himself well from the other. ”

“ To put the matter in its most general shape, the body of the crayfish is a sort of focus to which certain material particles converge, in which they move for a time, and from which they are afterwards expelled in new combinations. The parallel between a whirlpool in a stream and a living being, which has often been drawn, is as just as it is striking. ”

“ He must not only be up in time to eat his breakfast, but he must get it himself. "Help" is very scarce in Crawfish land. Everybody helps himself to everything he can lay his claws on, whether others have been helped or not. "Finders are keepers," says Mr. Crawfish.
In looking over Mr. Crawfish's seven-jointed legs, we found that some of these legs had shrivelled up into little hairs, fringing his tail and other parts of his body. These hairs are really fingers to him— like those big, long feelers in front; for he feels things with them. ”

“ Beside these internal structures, the most noticeable are the large masses of flesh, or muscle, in the thorax and abdomen, and in the pincers; which, instead of being red, as in most of the higher animals, is white. It will further be observed that the blood, which flows readily when a crayfish is wounded, is a clear fluid, and is either almost colourless, or of a very pale reddish or neutral tint. Hence the older Naturalists thought that the crayfish was devoid of blood, and had merely a sort of ichor in place of it. But the fluid in question is true blood ”

“ The female crayfish carries her eggs beneath her tail, and, when they have hatched out, the young find this sheltering member a safe and cosey dwelling-place until they have grown strong enough to enter life's struggle. At such times, the mother crayfish is quite brave, and will do battle with any foe. With her eyestalks protruded to their utmost extent, she vigilantly watches her enemy. Her eyes follow his movements, and her sharp nipper is held in readiness for immediate use.
Actual experimentation has taught that these animals can descry a man at the distance of twenty or twenty-five feet. ”

“ They are no longer called Astacus, but Cambarus (fig. 63) .
All the individual crayfish referred to thus far, therefore, have been sorted out, first into the groups termed species; and then these species have been further sorted into two divisions, termed genera. Each genus is an abstraction, formed by summing up the common characters of the species which it includes, just as each species is an abstraction, composed of the common characters of the individuals which belong to it; and the one has no more existence in nature than the other. ”

“ They are small dwindled things, as though on the way to extinction, and [Pg 122] are the mere vestiges of what were once well-grown gill-plumes, and still are so in the rock lobster and some prawns. In the red-footed crayfish of the Continent (Astacus fluviatilis) yet another minute vestige of a gill-plume is found, farther in front, on the body-wall above the fifth leg on each side of the animal. This furnishes a definite mark or character by which we can distinguish the red-footed crayfish from the common English pale-footed one. ”

“ These compartments extend upwards in the four interradii like inverted funnels, whence their name. In the series of cross-sections they can be traced [12] upwards with constantly diminishing area from the level of the suspensoria, Fig. 10 (if) , to Fig. 6, which is taken very near the top of the bell. Homologous structures exist in all the Scyphomedusæ, and in some of the Lucernaridæ they are continued up even into the stalk of the attached jelly-fish.
(d) The Velarium. Charybdea, like most of the Cubomedusæ, possesses a velum-like structure around the opening of the bell cavity (Fig. 3, v) . ”