In fact, the sun had not yet
gone down when from a desert island there came out
against us about twenty men riding on huge dolphins,
who were pirates like the others. The dolphins
carried them securely and plunged and neighed like
horses. When they were close by, they separated
and threw at us from both sides with dry cuttle-fish
and crabs’ eyes. But when we let fly at them with
spears and arrows, they could not hold their ground,
but fled to the island, most of them wounded.

 
About midnight, while it was calm, we unexpectedly ran aground on an enormous kingfisher’s
nest; really, it was sixty furlongs in circumference.
The female was sailing on it, keeping her eggs
warm, and she was not much smaller than the
nest—in fact, as she started up she almost sunk the
ship with the wind of her wings. She flew off, however, uttering a plaintive cry. We landed when day
began to break, and observed that the nest was like
a great raft, built of huge trees. There were five
hundred eggs in it, every one of them bigger than a
Chian wine-jar, and the chicks were already visible
inside them and were chirping. We cut open one


 

of the eggs with axes and took from the shell a
featherless chick fatter than twenty vultures.

 

When we had sailed a distance of two hundred
furlongs from the nest, great and wonderful signs
manifested themselves to us. The gooseneck
 In ancient ships the gooseneck was an ornament on the
stem, or (as here) on the stern, Nowadays it is a device for
fastening a spar to a mast. 
suddenly grew feathers and started cackling, the sailing-master, Scintharus, who was already bald, became
the owner of long hair, and what was strangest of all,
the ship’s mast budded, branched, and bore fruit at
the summit! The fruit consisted of figs and black
raisin-grapes, which were not yet ripe.
 A parody on the experience of the Pirates who carried
off Dionysus (Hymn. Hom. 7, 38). 
On seeing
this, we were disturbed, as well we might be, and
offered a prayer to the gods on account of the
strangeness of the manifestation.

 

We had not
yet gone five hundred’ furlongs when we saw a very
large, thick forest of pines and cypresses. We
thought it was land, but in reality it was a
bottomless sea overgrown with rootless trees, in spite
of which the trees stood up motionless and straight,
as if they were floating. On drawing near and
forming an idea of the situation, we were in a
quandary what to do, for it was not possible to sail
between the trees, they being thick and close
together, nor did. it seem easy to turn back.
Climbing the tallest tree, I looked to see how things
were on the other side, and I saw that the forest
extended for fifty stades or a little more, and that
another ocean lay beyond. So we resolved to lift the




 

ship on to the tree-tops, which were thick, and cross
over, if we could, to the farther side; and that is what
we did. We made her fast:to a large rope, climbed
" the trees and pulled her up with much ado. Setting
her on the branches and spreading our canvas, we
sailed just as if we were at sea, carried along by the
force of the wind. At that juncture a line of the
poet Antimachus came into my head; he says somewhere or other:

 And unto them their forest cruise pursuing. 

 

We managed the wood in spite of everything
and reached the water. Lowering the ship again
in the same way we sailed through pure, clear
water, until we came to a great crevasse made by
the water dividing, like the cracks that one often
sees in the earth, made by earthquakes. Though
we got in the sails, the ship was slow to lose headway and so came near being engulfed. Peering over
the edge, we saw a precipice of fully a thousand
furlongs, most frightful and unnatural—the water
stood there as if cut apart! But as we looked about
us we saw on the right at no great distance a bridge
thrown across, which was of: water, joining the
surfaces of the two seas and flowing from one to the
other. Rowing up, therefore, we ran into the stream
and by great effort got across, though we thought
we should never do it.