nd my crew went round the
shores, fishing with hook and line. Now in that isle lives a goddess,
the daughter of Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. She advised me that if
I could but catch her father when he came out of the sea to sleep on the
shore he would tell me everything that I needed to know. At noonday he
was used to come out, with all his flock of seals round him, and to
sleep among them on the sands. If I could seize him, she said, he would
turn into all manner of shapes in my hands: beasts, and serpents, and
burning fire; but at last he would appear in his own shape, and answer
all my questions.

'So the goddess spoke, and she dug hiding places in the sands for me and
three of my men, and covered us with the skins of seals. At noonday the
Old Man came out with his seals, and counted them, beginning with us,
and then he lay down and fell asleep. Then we leaped up and rushed at
him and gripped him fast. He turned into the shapes of a lion, and of a
leopard, of a snake, and a huge boar; then he was running water, and
next he was a tall, blossoming tree. But we held him firmly, and at last
he took his own shape, and told me that I should never have a fair wind
till I had sailed back into the river Aegyptus and sacrificed there to
the gods in heaven. Then I asked him for news about my brother,
Agamemnon, and he told me how my brother was slain in his own hall, and
how Aias was drowned in the sea. Lastly, he told me about Ulysses: how
he was kept on a lonely island by the fairy Calypso, and was unhappy,
and had no ship and no crew to escape and win home.'

This was all that Menelaus could tell Telemachus, who stayed with
Menelaus for a month. All that time the wooers lay in wait for him, with
a ship, in a narrow strait which they thought he must sail through on
his way back to Ithaca. In that strait they meant to catch him and kill
him.

V

HOW ULYSSES ESCAPED FROM THE ISLAND OF CALYPSO

Now the day after Menelaus told Telemachus that Ulysses was still a
living man, the Gods sent Hermes to Calypso. So Hermes bound on his feet
his fair golden sandals, that wax not old, and bear him, alike over wet
sea and dry land, as swift as the wind. Along the crests of the waves he
flew, like the cormorant that chases fishes through the sea deeps, with
his plumage wet in the sea brine. He reached the island, and went up to
the cave of Calypso, wherein dwelt the nymph of the braided tresses,
and he found her within. An