n
the night-time to break their sleeps? if his fright proceeded from any
mortal? if strength or craft had given him his death's blow? He made
answer from within that Noman had hurt him, Noman had killed him,
Noman was with him in the cave. They replied, "If no man has hurt
thee, and no man is with thee, then thou art alone, and the evil that
afflicts thee is from the hand of heaven, which none can resist or
help." So they left him and went their way, thinking that some disease
troubled him. He, blind and ready to split with the anguish of the
pain, went groaning up and down in the dark, to find the door-way,
which when he found, he removed the stone, and sat in the threshold,
feeling if he could lay hold on any man going out with the sheep,
which (the day now breaking) were beginning to issue forth to their
accustomed pastures. But Ulysses, whose first artifice in giving
himself that ambiguous name, had succeeded so well with the Cyclop,
was not of a wit so gross to be caught by that palpable device. But
casting about in his mind all the ways which he could contrive for
escape (no less than all their lives depending on the success), at
last he thought of this expedient. He made knots of the osier twigs
upon which the Cyclop commonly slept, with which he tied the fattest
and fleeciest of the rams together, three in a rank, and under the
belly of the middle ram he tied a man, and himself last, wrapping
himself fast with both his hands in the rich wool of one, the fairest
of the flock.

And now the sheep began to issue forth very fast, the males went
first, the females unmilked stood by, bleating and requiring the hand
of their shepherd in vain to milk them, their full bags sore with
being unemptied, but he much sorer with the loss of sight. Still as
the males passed, he felt the backs of those fleecy fools, never
dreaming, that they carried his enemies under their bellies: so they
passed on till the last ram came loaded with his wool and Ulysses
together. He stopped that ram and felt him, and had his hand once in
the hair of Ulysses, yet knew it not, and he chid the ram for being
last, and spoke to it as if it understood him, and asked it whether it
did not wish that its master had his eye again, which that abominable
Noman with his execrable rout had put out, when they had got him down
with wine; and he willed the ram to tell him whereabouts in the cave
his enemy lurked, that he might dash his brains and strew them abou