As he thought these melancholy thoughts, a huge wave took him and washed
him overboard, ship and all upset amidst the billows, he struggling afar
off, clinging to her stern broken off which he yet held, her mast cracking
in two with the fury of that gust of mixed winds that struck it, sails and
sailyards fell into the deep, and he himself was long drowned under water,
nor could get his head above, wave so met with wave, as if they strove
which should depress him most; and the gorgeous garments given him by
Calypso clung about him, and hindered his swimming; yet neither for this,
nor for the overthrow of his ship, nor his own perilous condition, would
he give up his drenched vessel; but, wrestling with Neptune, got at length
hold of her again, and then sat in her hull, insulting over death, which
he had escaped, and the salt waves which he gave the seas again to give to
other men; his ship, striving to live, floated at random, cuffed from wave
to wave, hurled to and fro by all the winds: now Boreas tossed it to
Notus, Notus passed it to Eurus, and Eurus to the West Wind, who kept up
the horrid tennis.
Them in their mad sport Ino Leucothea beheld--Ino Leucothea, now a sea-
goddess, but once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus; she with pity
beheld Ulysses the mark of their fierce contention, and rising from the
waves alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called
a cormorant; and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea-
weeds, which grow at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropped at his
feet; and the bird spake to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any
more to that fatal vessel against which god Neptune had levelled his
furious wrath, nor to those ill-befriending garments which Calypso had
given him, but to quit both it and them, and trust for his safety to
swimming.
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