Book 3
Yea, even when thy fleet has crossed the main,
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and from new altars built along the shore
thy vows to Heaven are paid, throw o'er thy head
a purple mantle, veiling well thy brows,
lest, while the sacrificial fire ascends
in offering to the gods, thine eye behold
some face of foe, and every omen fail.
Let all thy people keep this custom due,
and thou thyself be faithful; let thy seed
forever thus th' immaculate rite maintain.
After departing hence, thou shalt be blown
toward Sicily, and strait Pelorus' bounds
will open wide. Then take the leftward way:
those leftward waters in long circuit sweep,
far from that billowy coast, the opposing side.
These regions, so they tell, in ages gone
by huge and violent convulsion riven
(Such mutability is wrought by time),
sprang wide asunder; where the doubled strand
sole and continuous lay, the sea's vast power
burst in between, and bade its waves divide
Hesperia's bosom from fair Sicily,
while with a straitened firth it interflowed
their fields and cities sundered shore from shore.
The right side Scylla keeps; the left is given
to pitiless Charybdis, who draws down
to the wild whirling of her steep abyss
the monster waves, and ever and anon
flings them at heaven, to lash the tranquil stars.
But Scylla, prisoned in her eyeless cave,
thrusts forth her face, and pulls upon the rocks
ship after ship; the parts that first be seen
are human; a fair-breasted virgin she,
down to the womb; but all that lurks below
is a huge-membered fish, where strangely join
the flukes of dolphins and the paunch of wolves.
Better by far to round the distant goal
of the Trinacrian headlands, veering wide
from thy true course, than ever thou shouldst see
that shapeless Scylla in her vaulted cave,
