He
perhaps has reduced you to this plight. However, since your wanderings
have brought you so near to our city, it lies in our duty to supply your
wants. Clothes and what else a human hand should give to one so suppliant,
and so tamed with calamity, you shall not want. We will show you our city
and tell you the name of our people. This is the land of the Phaeacians,
of which my father, Alcinous, is king."
Then calling her attendants, who had dispersed on the first sight of
Ulysses, she rebuked them for their fear, and said: "This man is no
Cyclop, nor monster of sea or land, that you should fear him; but he seems
manly, staid, and discreet, and though decayed in his outward appearance,
yet he has the mind's riches, wit and fortitude, in abundance. Show him
the cisterns, where he may wash him from the sea-weeds and foam that hang
about him, and let him have garments that fit him out of those which we
have brought with us to the cisterns."
Ulysses, retiring a little out of sight, cleansed him in the cisterns from
the soil and impurities with which the rocks and waves had covered all his
body, and clothing himself with befitting raiment, which the princess's
attendants had given him, he presented himself in more worthy shape to
Nausicaa. She admired to see what a comely personage he was, now he was
dressed in all parts; she thought him some king or hero: and secretly
wished that the gods would be pleased to give her such a husband.
Then causing her attendants to yoke her mules, and lay up the vestments,
which the sun's heat had sufficiently dried, in the coach, she ascended
with her maids and drove off to the palace, bidding Ulysses, as she
departed, keep an eye upon the coach, and to follow it on foot at some
distance: which she did, because if she had suffered him to have rode in
the coach with her, it might have subjected her to some misconstructions
of the common people, who are always ready to vilify and censure their
betters, and to suspect that charity is not always pure charity, but that
love or some sinister intention lies hid under its disguise.
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