The Cruise of the Branwen

THE CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN harbour is a well of bright water issuing from a cave, and round it are poplars. Thither we sailed, and some god guided us ; a mist lying deep about the ship." The modern island of Nisida is a crescent of land with the opening seawards on the other side of the Bay of Baiae, forming a harbour like the eye on a peacock's feather, and now called Porto Pavone. Above it lies that region of extinct volcanoes whose craters, like dried-up sockets, gave it the ancient name of the Land of Eyes, KvKAw7rla, the haunt of the Cyclops. The goats that fed on Nisida in Odysseus's days gave their name later to Capri, farther south, which we were soon to pass, and Pliny mentions the excellent vegetables of which it boasted. There is now a prison on it, and not much more; but the spring of Homer's mariners is still there, protected by a wall. The morning after his companions had rested, Odysseus, you will remember, rowed his boat round the harbour point towards that volcanic mainland whose sulphurous fumes had laid deep mist about his ships. Two obelisks of rock, one east and one westward, are at either end of the island. You will pass one of them to-day if you make the passage that Odysseus made some nine-and-twenty centuries ago. They are the rocks the Cyclops hurled; one was "the stone he cast before," the other that which fell " behind " the ship of the adventurer. Arrived at the mainland and walking up the torrent bed of S. Basilio, the modern traveller 40