Then he came again to Atlas, and the garden of the Nymphs; and when
the giant heard him coming he groaned, and said, "Fulfil thy promise
to me." Then Perseus held up to him the Gorgon's head, and he had
rest from all his toil; for he became a crag of stone, which sleeps
forever far above the clouds.

Perseus thanked the Nymphs, and asked them, "By what road shall I go
homeward again, for I have wandered far in coming hither?"

And they wept and cried, "Go home no more, but stay and play with
us, the lonely maidens, who dwell for ever far away from gods and
men."

But he refused, and they told him his road. And he leapt down the
mountain, and went on, lessening and lessening like a sea gull, away
and out to sea.

So Perseus flitted onward to the northeast, over many a league of
sea, till he came to the rolling sand hills and the dreary Lybian
shore.

And he flitted on across the desert: over rock ledges, and banks of
shingle, and level wastes of sand, and shell drifts bleaching in the
sunshine, and the skeletons of great sea monsters, and dead bones of
ancient giants, strewn up and down upon the old sea floor. And as he
went the blood drops fell to the earth from the Gorgon's head, and
became poisonous asps and adders, which breed in the desert to this
day.