threw down a pile of fire-wood, which he had been gathering against
supper-time, before the mouth of the cave, which occasioned the crash they
heard. The Grecians hid themselves in the remote parts of the cave at
sight of the uncouth monster. It was Polyphemus, the largest and savagest
of the Cyclops, who boasted himself to be the son of Neptune. He looked
more like a mountain crag than a man, and to his brutal body he had a
brutish mind answerable. He drove his flock, all that gave milk, to the
interior of the cave, but left the rams and the he-goats without. Then
taking up a stone so massy that twenty oxen could not have drawn it, he
placed it at the mouth of the cave, to defend the entrance, and sat him
down to milk his ewes and his goats; which done, he lastly kindled a fire,
and throwing his great eye round the cave (for the Cyclops have no more
than one eye, and that placed in the midst of their forehead), by the
glimmering light he discerned some of Ulysses's men.

"Ho! guests, what are you? Merchants or wandering thieves?" he bellowed
out in a voice which took from them all power of reply, it was so
astounding.

Only Ulysses summoned resolution to answer, that they came neither for
plunder nor traffic, but were Grecians who had lost their way, returning
from Troy; which famous city, under the conduct of Agamemnon, the renowned
son of Atreus, they had sacked, and laid level with the ground. Yet now
they prostrated themselves humbly before his feet, whom they acknowledged
to be mightier than they, and besought him that he would bestow the rites
of hospitality upon them, for that Jove was the avenger of wrongs done to
strangers, and would fiercely resent any injury which they might suffer.

"Fool!" said the Cyclop, "to come so far to preach to me the fear of the
gods. We Cyclops care not for your Jove, whom you fable to be nursed by a