hey heard the shrieking of the
blasts; while the palace rocked and all the city, and great stones were
torn from the crags, and the forest pines were hurled eastward, north
and south and east and west, and the Bosphorus boiled white with foam,
and the clouds were dashed against the cliffs.
But at last the battle ended, and the Harpies fled screaming toward the
south, and the sons of the North wind rushed after them, and brought
clear sunshine where they passed. For many a league they followed them,
over all the isles of the Cyclades, and away to the southwest across
Hellas, till they came to the Ionian Sea, and there they fell upon the
Echinades, at the mouth of the Achelous; and those isles were called the
Whirlwind Isles for many a hundred years. But what became of Zetes and
Calais I know not; for the heroes never saw them again; and some say
that Heracles met them, and quarrelled with them, and slew them with his
arrows; and some say that they fell down from weariness and the heat of
the summer sun, and that the Sun god buried them among the Cyclades, in
the pleasant Isle of Tenos; and for many hundred years their grave was
shown there, and over it a pillar, which turned to every wind. But those
dark storms and whirlwinds haunt the Bosphorus until this day.
But the Argonauts went eastward, and out into the open sea, which we now
call the Black Sea, but it was called the Euxine then. No Hellen had
ever crossed it, and all feared that dreadful sea, and its rocks, and
shoals, and fogs, and bitter freezing storms; and they told strange
stories of it, some false and some half true, how it stretched northward
to the ends of the earth, and the sluggish Putrid Sea, and the
everlasting night, and the regions of the dead. So the heroes trembled,
for all their courage, as they came into that wild Black Sea, and saw it
stretching out before them, without a shore, as far as eye could see.
And first Orpheus spoke, and warned them: "We shall come now to the
wandering blue rocks; my mother warned me of them, Calliope, the
immortal muse."
And soon they saw the blue rocks shining, like spires and castles of
gray glass, while an ice-cold wind blew from them, and chilled all the
heroes' hearts. And as they neared, they could see them heaving, as they
rolled upon the long sea waves, crashing and grinding together, till the
roar went up to heaven. The sea sprang up in spouts between them, and
swept round them in white sheets of foa
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