True History

This is an AI modernization of True History into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Lucian was born at Samosata, a town on the upper Euphrates in what is now southern Turkey, around AD 125. He grew up speaking Syriac, learned Greek, and made his living as a travelling public speaker before turning to satire. He wrote this one around AD 175, in two short books.

It begins with a promise. Other writers, he says, report marvels they never saw and expect to be believed; he is going to report marvels he never saw and tell you so up front. The one true statement in the book is that he is lying. He names the men he is mocking in the first page — Ctesias, who wrote up an India he had never visited, and Iambulus, and above all Homer's Odysseus, who sat at a royal dinner table and told his hosts about the bag of winds and the one-eyed giant and was believed.

Then he does it better. The ship sails west past the Pillars of Hercules, finds a river running with wine and women growing out of the ground as vines, and is picked up by a whirlwind and dropped on the moon, which turns out to be at war with the sun over who gets to colonise the Morning Star. The armies include cavalry mounted on three-headed vultures and fleas the size of elephants. Later the ship is swallowed whole by a whale with nations living inside it, and later still the narrator reaches the island where the famous dead live and gets Homer to settle, in person, which lines of his the critics have wrongly cut.

The joke is the deadpan. Everything is reported in the flat, careful voice of a historian filing a report — exact distances, exact troop counts, the full text of the peace treaty — and the numbers never wobble no matter what is being counted. That precision is kept here, because it is where the comedy lives. This is also the earliest surviving story of a voyage to the moon and of a war between worlds, which it became by accident: Lucian was making fun of travel writers, not inventing a genre. The still on the cover is from Georges Méliès' film of 1902.

One thing about this edition. It is not translated from Lucian's Greek. It is a modernisation of Francis Hickes' English version of 1634, whose sentences are magnificent and nearly impenetrable, and the work here was getting Lucian's speed back out of them. That is worth saying plainly rather than implying otherwise.

It is about sixteen thousand words. It ends by promising a sequel, which never came.

Contents

Book I

Book II

Book I

Athletes and wrestlers — anyone who trains the body for strength and speed — don't just worry about staying in shape and keeping up their daily routine. They also know when to rest, and they treat rest as a serious part of training. I think the same goes for scholars. After a long haul through heavy, serious books, you ought to give your mind a break, so it comes back fresher and stronger for the next stretch of study.

And the rest works best if you spend it on the right kind of reading: books that don't just entertain you with wit and good writing, but also give your mind something to chew on. I'd like to think these books of mine do exactly that. You won't enjoy them only for the novelty of the subject, or the charm of the plan, or the sheer number of outrageous lies I tell with a perfectly straight face. You'll also enjoy them because every single thing in here is a sly poke at one of the old poets, historians, and philosophers who filled their books with monstrous, shameless whoppers. I'd name names, but you'll recognize them yourself as you read.

Ctesias of Cnidus, son of Ctesiochus, wrote about India and its marvels — things he never saw and never heard from a single living soul. Iambulus wrote a pile of wonders about the great ocean; everyone knew he made it all up, but he made it up so pleasantly that people read him anyway. Plenty of others have taken the same line, publishing their so-called "travels," stuffed with enormous beasts, savage tribes, and bizarre ways of life. And the founding father of all this nonsense was Homer's Odysseus, who sat in the court of King Alcinous and spun his long yarn about winds held captive in a bag, one-eyed giants who ate men raw, many-headed monsters, and his crew turned into animals by a witch's potion — and the simple Phaeacians swallowed every word of it as solid fact.

Reading all this, I couldn't really blame ordinary people for lying, when even men with reputations as philosophers were doing it. What did amaze me was that they thought nobody would notice. So I got ambitious to leave a monument of my own behind, and I saw no reason to be the only man alive shut out from the freedom to tell tales. Since nothing worth recording has ever actually happened to me, I turned my pen to lies — but with a more honest heart than the others. For this one thing, at least, I confidently pronounce as a truth: that I lie. And I hope that confession excuses everything else, now that I've admitted up front what I'm guilty of. I am about to write of things I never saw, never experienced, and never heard about from anyone else — things that do not exist, and never possibly could. So whatever you do, don't believe a word of it.

I weighed anchor one day at the Pillars of Hercules — the Strait of Gibraltar — and with a fair wind behind me, struck out into the Western Ocean. The reason for the voyage? Simple curiosity. A hunger for new things, and a longing to find out where the ocean ends and what kind of people live on the far shore. With that in mind I laid in a generous stock of food and fresh water, recruited fifty companions who shared my itch for adventure, packed plenty of weapons, paid a handsome fee to an expert pilot to set our course, and refitted a tall, sturdy ship for a long and difficult passage.

We sailed a day and a night with a favorable wind, taking it easy as long as land stayed in sight. But at sunrise the next morning the wind rose hard, the waves swelled, and a darkness fell over us so thick we couldn't even see to take in the sails. We gave the ship up to the weather and let it carry us — and it carried us, tossing in that storm, for seventy-nine days straight. On the eightieth day the sun broke out all at once, and we sighted, not far off, an island, high and wooded, where the sea had calmed to a reasonable roar. We put in, went ashore, and threw ourselves flat on the ground, lying there a long time, completely wrecked by our ordeal at sea. At last we got up and split our company: thirty stayed to guard the ship, and I took the other twenty to explore the island. We hadn't gone half a mile through the woods when we came upon a pillar of bronze, engraved with Greek letters — worn faint and hard to read — saying: THIS FAR CAME HERCULES AND BACCHUS. Nearby, two footprints were stamped in the rock: one a full acre across, the other smaller. I figured the smaller for Bacchus and the giant one for Hercules. We paid our respects and pressed on.

We hadn't gone far before we reached a river — and the river ran wine. Rich wine, as fine as anything out of Chios, and broad enough in places to float a ship. Seeing such solid evidence of Bacchus's travels, I started taking that pillar a lot more seriously. We decided to follow the stream up and find its source, and when we reached the head of it, there was no spring at all. Instead: enormous grapevines, countless numbers of them, and from each root the pure wine came trickling out — that's what kept the whole river flowing. The stream was well stocked with fish, too, which tasted and even looked like wine; we caught a few, but everyone who ate them got drunk on the spot. When we cut them open, they were full of wine-dregs. Later we figured out the trick of mixing them with ordinary freshwater fish, which cut the strength of the wine to something manageable.

Then we crossed the river at a shallow place and came into a whole world of vines — vines of an unbelievable kind. The lower part, toward the ground, was a thick, healthy trunk. But from the hips up, they were women, perfectly formed in every detail — the way painters show Daphne at the moment she turned into a tree as Apollo grabbed her. From their fingertips grew branches loaded with grapes, and their hair was nothing but curling tendrils and leaves and clusters. When we came up, they greeted us and shook our hands, chatting away, some in Lydian, some in Indian, but most of them in Greek. They kissed us on the mouth, too — and every man they kissed went instantly drunk and staggered around for a good while after. They could not bear to have their fruit picked; if anyone tried, they roared and cried out in real pain. Some of them wanted to go further than kissing, and two of our company took them up on it — and could never be pried loose again. They fused with the women at the hip, grew into them, took root with them; their fingers were already sprouting branches and curling tendrils, as if they'd be bearing grapes of their own any day. We abandoned the two of them and fled to the ship, and when we got there we told the others everything — about our friends' entanglement, vines and all. Then we took some jars and filled them, a few with water and a few with wine straight from the river, spent the night on the beach nearby, and in the morning put out to sea with a gentle wind.

Around noon, with the island out of sight behind us, a whirlwind hit. It spun the ship around, hoisted it three thousand furlongs into the air — about three hundred and fifty miles — and never let us back down to the sea. We hung up there above the world, sails full, driven along by a mighty wind. For seven days and seven nights we sailed the sky, and on the eighth day we came in sight of a great country in the air, like an island — round, shining, and lit up with a tremendous light. We made for it, landed, and looked around: the country was inhabited, and farmed. By daylight we could see nothing else from there, but when night came, other islands appeared all around, some big, some small, all colored like fire — and below them another country, with cities and seas and rivers and forests and mountains, which we worked out to be our own Earth.

Pushing farther inland, we ran into a patrol and were arrested — by what the locals call the Hippogypi, the Vulture Cavalry. The Vulture Cavalry are men who ride enormous vultures the way we ride horses. The vultures there are tremendous, each with three heads; to give you the scale, every feather in their wings is bigger and longer than the mast of a tall ship. Their standing orders were to patrol the country and bring any strangers to the king — so naturally that was our fate, and they presented us to him. He took one look at our clothes and guessed. "Strangers," he said, "you wouldn't be Greeks, would you?" We said we were. "And how did you get here, with all that air to cross?"

So we told him the whole story of our adventures, and he told us his in return. He was a man too — Endymion by name — snatched up from the Earth long ago in his sleep and brought here, where they made him king of the country. This land, he said, was the very same one that appears to us down below as the Moon. He told us to cheer up and fear nothing; we'd want for nothing while we were his guests. "And if I win the war I've got on my hands against the Sun," he said, "you'll live with me here as happily as men can live."

We asked who his enemies were and what the quarrel was about. "Phaethon," he said, "king of the people of the Sun — for the Sun is inhabited, just like the Moon — has been making war on us for a long time. Here's why. Once, I gathered up all the poorest and neediest people in my kingdom, planning to plant a colony on the Morning Star — that's Venus — because it was empty desert with nobody living on it. Phaethon got jealous and blocked the whole project: he sent his Ant Cavalry to ambush us halfway there. We weren't equipped for a fight, so we were beaten and turned back. But now I mean to declare war again and plant my colony anyway. If you're willing to join the expedition, I'll furnish each of you with a vulture from my own stable and a full set of arms. We march tomorrow."

"With all our hearts," I said, "if it pleases you."

So we feasted and stayed with him that night, and at dawn we took our positions, because the scouts were signaling that the enemy was close. Our army numbered one hundred thousand, not counting porters, engineers, infantry, and foreign allies. Of those hundred thousand, eighty thousand were Vulture Cavalry, and twenty thousand rode the Lachanopters — the Salad-Wings — a breed of huge bird shagged all over with greens instead of plumage, their wing-feathers looking remarkably like lettuce leaves. Next to them were posted the Millet-Shooters and the Garlic-Fighters. Allies came in from the Big Bear, too: thirty thousand Flea-Archers and fifty thousand Wind-Runners. The Flea-Archers ride giant fleas — hence the name — each flea the size of a dozen elephants. The Wind-Runners are infantry, but they travel through the air without wings: each man wears a long cloak down to his feet, and the wind fills it like a sail and carries him along like a boat. Most of them fight as light troops with shields. There was talk of seventy thousand Sparrow-Acorns and five thousand Crane Cavalry expected from the stars over Cappadocia, but they never showed up, and I didn't see them myself — so I haven't dared describe them, because the reports going around were too wonderful and incredible to repeat.

The equipment was the same throughout the army: helmets of bean-shells (their beans grow huge and tough), breastplates of overlapping lupin-husks sewn into scales — the husk of a lupin there is impenetrable, hard as horn — and shields and swords of the Greek pattern. When the hour of battle came, the line of battle was drawn up as follows. The right wing was held by the Vulture Cavalry, the king in person among them with the pick of his soldiers — and we were posted there too. The Salad-Wings held the left, and the allies took the center, arranged as their luck fell out. The infantry came to about sixty million, and they were deployed by an ingenious arrangement: the spiders in those parts are enormous, every one of them bigger than one of the Cyclades islands, and they were ordered to spin a web across the air between the Moon and the Morning Star. The job was done in no time, and on that web a level plain was laid out, and the infantry was drawn up on it, under the command of Nycterion, son of Eudianax, with two other generals beside him.

On the enemy side, the left wing was the Ant Cavalry, with Phaethon himself among them. These are beasts of enormous size, winged, resembling our ants in everything but scale — the biggest of them measured two acres. The riders fought, and the ants themselves fought too, doing terrible damage with their feelers. They were reported at fifty thousand. On their right wing were posted the Sky-Gnats, also about fifty thousand, all of them archers mounted on giant gnats. Behind them came the Sky-Dancers, light-armed infantry but dangerous ones: they slung monstrous turnips from long range, and any man they hit did not last long — he died of the stench that rose from the wound. The story is that they smear their shot with mallow poison. Next to them stood the Stalk-Mushrooms, heavy troops and hard fighters at close quarters, fifty thousand strong. They are called Stalk-Mushrooms because their shields are mushrooms and their spears are stalks of asparagus. Near them were the Dog-Acorns, sent by the Dog Star to help him: dog-faced men riding winged acorns. But two of Phaethon's allies came too late — the slingers he had summoned from the Milky Way, and the Cloud-Centaurs. The battle was over before they arrived, so they were no use at all; and the slingers never came whatsoever, which is why, they say, Phaethon later burned over their country in his fury.

That was the force Phaethon brought into the field. The armies met; the signal was given; the asses on each side brayed — they use asses for trumpeters — and the battle began. The left wing of the Sunites broke at once. They never even stood to receive the charge of the Vulture Cavalry, but turned tail immediately, and we cut them down as they ran. But their right wing was too strong for our left, and drove it back all the way to our infantry. The infantry came to the rescue, and with their weight added, the enemy there broke and fled too, especially once they realized their left wing had already been smashed. It became a total rout. Great numbers were taken prisoner, great numbers killed, and the blood spilled everywhere — some of it fell on the clouds, dyeing them red, the way they look to us down here around sunset, and some dripped all the way to the Earth. That made me wonder whether something of the kind happened ages ago, and Homer simply assumed it was Zeus raining blood over the death of his son Sarpedon.

When we came back from the chase, we set up two trophies: one for the infantry battle, planted on the spider-web, and one for the air battle, set up on the clouds. We had hardly finished when the scouts brought word that the Cloud-Centaurs were coming — the allies who should have reached Phaethon before the battle. As they came on, they were a sight worth staring at: monsters compounded of winged horse and man. The human part, from the waist up, was as tall as the Colossus of Rhodes; the horse part was the size of a big cargo ship. As for how many there were — I won't write the number down. It was so large you'd take it for a lie. Their leader was the Archer out of the Zodiac. When they learned their friends had been beaten, they sent word to Phaethon to come back and renew the fight, and then they formed up and charged. The Moonites were in complete disorder — scattered everywhere, chasing fugitives and looting the field — and the Cloud-Centaurs put the whole army to flight, chased the king himself back into his city, killed the greater part of his birds, tore down the trophies we had raised, and overran the entire plain the spiders had woven. Myself and two of my companions were taken alive.

By now Phaethon had come up, and the enemy set up trophies of their own. That same day we were carried off as prisoners into the Sun, our hands tied behind our backs with a length of cobweb. The enemy decided not to lay siege to the city. Instead, on their way back, they built a wall across the middle of the air, so that the Sun's light could no longer reach the Moon at all. It was a double wall, made entirely of cloud — and the result was a total, permanent eclipse of the Moon, with the whole country locked in unbroken night. Endymion was crushed by this. He sent ambassadors begging Phaethon to pull the wall down and not leave his people to live in darkness, promising to pay tribute, to be his ally and friend, and never to make war on him again. Phaethon's council met twice over the offer. At the first session they would not soften their anger one inch; at the second, they came around, and the peace was drawn up in these terms:

"The Sunites and their allies have made peace with the Moonites and their allies, on these conditions: that the Sunites shall demolish the wall, and shall return their prisoners at a fixed ransom per head; that the Moonites shall leave the other stars their independence, and shall not raise arms against the Sunites, but each shall aid and defend the other if either is attacked; that the king of the Moonites shall pay to the king of the Sunites a yearly tribute of ten thousand jars of dew, and shall hand over ten thousand of his people as hostages for his good faith; that the colony on the Morning Star shall be planted jointly by both parties, and any other nation that wishes may take part in it; and that these articles of peace shall be engraved on a pillar of amber, to be set up in the middle of the air on the border between the two countries. Sworn, for the Sunites: Pyronides, Therites, and Phlogius. For the Moonites: Nyctor, Menius, and Polylampes."

So peace was concluded. The wall came down at once, and we prisoners were handed back. When we returned to the Moon, our friends came out to meet us — Endymion himself with all his court — and embraced us with tears in their eyes. He begged us to stay, to join the new colony, and even promised me his own son in marriage (there are no women there at all). I wouldn't be persuaded; I asked him, as the greatest favor he could do me, to send us back down to the sea. When he saw there was no changing my mind, he entertained us for seven days of feasting and then let us go.

But first, let me tell you about the strange things I observed during my stay on the Moon — all the novelties worth noting.

To begin with: they are not born of women, but of men. Marriage there is between males only, and the very word "woman" is unknown. Up to the age of twenty-five, each man is the wife; after that, he becomes the husband. They carry their children not in the belly but in the calf of the leg. Once a child is conceived, the leg begins to swell; when the time comes, they cut it open and deliver the baby — dead. Then they lay it out with its mouth open to the wind, and the wind brings it to life. I suspect that's where we Greeks got our phrase "the belly of the leg," since on the Moon the leg, not the belly, does the childbearing.

But here is something stranger still. There is a race among them called the Dendritae, the Tree-Men, who come into the world like this: they cut off a man's right testicle and plant it in the ground. From it grows a great tree of flesh, with branches and leaves, bearing fruit like acorns — but a foot and a half long. When the fruit is ripe, they harvest it and shell the men out of it. Their private parts are detachable, fitted on and taken off as the occasion requires. Rich men have them made of ivory, poor men of wood, and with these they do their begetting and keep company with their spouses.

When a man there reaches the end of his full age, he doesn't die. He dissolves, like smoke, and turns into air.

They all eat the same food. They kindle a fire and broil frogs over the coals — frogs are everywhere there, infinite numbers of them, flying through the air — and while the frogs are broiling, the diners sit around the fire as if around a table, lap up the smoke that rises, and feast on that. That is the whole of their eating. For drink, they pound air in a mortar until it yields a kind of moisture, very like dew.

They pass no waste of any kind, neither urine nor dung; in fact they have no opening for that purpose where we have one. Their boys take partners not the way ours do, but in the hollow of the leg, just above the calf — that's where they are open.

A bald head is considered a great mark of beauty on the Moon; hairy people disgust them. On the comet stars it's just the opposite — there, long hair is admired — I have this from travelers who had visited those coasts. Such beards as they do have grow a little above the knee. They have no toenails, since the whole foot is a single toe. Above the rump each of them grows a long cabbage, in place of a tail — always green and flourishing, and it does not break even when a man falls flat on his back.

The drippings of their noses are sweeter than honey. When they work or exercise, they rub themselves down with milk — and if a drop of that nose-honey happens to fall in, it turns the milk to cheese. They press a rich oil from their beans, as fragrant as any fine perfume.

They have plenty of vines in those parts, but the vines yield water, because the grapes hanging in the clusters are like our hailstones. My own theory is that when a strong wind shakes the vines up there, those berries break loose and come down on us as a hailstorm.

Their bellies serve them as satchels. They can open and shut them at will and stow their necessities inside, for they have no liver or entrails of any kind — only a rough, hairy lining, so that when their young children are cold, they can be tucked in there to keep warm.

The rich wear garments of glass, very soft and delicate; the poorer sort wear woven brass, which they have in great supply, working it with water to make it fit for the loom, the way we treat our wool.

As for their eyes — if I wrote down what kind of eyes they have, I'm afraid I'd be taken for a liar, the thing is so incredible. But I can't leave it out. Their eyes are removable. A man can take them out whenever he pleases and put them away until he has a use for them; then he pops them back in and sees again. Many who have lost their own eyes borrow other people's, and the rich keep several pairs lying around spare. Their ears are made of plane-tree leaves — except for the acorn-born men, whose ears alone are made of wood.

I saw one more wonder in the king's palace: a great mirror lying over a shallow well. Climb down into the well, and you can hear everything said on the Earth. Look into the mirror, and you can see every city and every nation as plainly as if you were standing among them. I had a look at my own friends and the whole country around home — whether they saw me too, I can't say. Anyone who doesn't believe this can take the trouble to go there himself; he'll find out my words are true.

Then we said our goodbyes to the king and his court, boarded our ship, and set off. At parting, Endymion gave me gifts: two of their glass mantles, five of brass, and a complete suit of lupin-shell armor — all of which I later left behind in the whale. And he sent a thousand of his Vulture Cavalry to escort us the first five hundred furlongs of the way.

On our course we coasted along many other countries, and at last put in at the Morning Star, newly colonized, where we landed and took on fresh water. From there we entered the Zodiac and passed the Sun, leaving it on our right hand, hugging the shore but never landing — though my crew badly wanted to — because the wind wouldn't allow it. We could see it was a flourishing country, rich, well watered, and full of every good thing. The Cloud-Centaurs, who serve Phaethon as mercenaries, spotted us and came at our ship at top speed, but on finding we were covered by the treaty they let us go without another word. Our Vulture Cavalry escort had already turned back.

We sailed on all that night and the next day, and around evening, still holding our course downward, we came to a city called Lychnopolis — Lamp-Town. It hangs in the air between the Pleiades and the Hyades, somewhat below the Zodiac. When we landed, there was not a man to be found — only lamps, great numbers of them, hurrying back and forth, some busy in the marketplace, some down at the harbor. Many were small and, frankly, poor things; a few were great and mighty, gloriously bright. There were lodgings built for each of them, every lamp had its own name like a person, and we heard them speak. They did us no harm at all — in fact they invited us to dinner — but we were so unnerved that we didn't dare eat or sleep the whole time we were there.

Their courthouse stands in the middle of the city, where the governor sits all night long calling each lamp by name, and any lamp that fails to answer is condemned to death for deserting its post. Their death is to be put out. We stood by, watched the proceedings, and heard the lamps plead their own cases and give their reasons for burning late. There I recognized our own house lamp. I spoke to it and asked how matters stood at home, and it told me all the news.

We spent that night there, and the next morning returned to the ship and set sail near the clouds. There we got a sight of the city of Nephelococcygia — Cloud-Cuckoo-Land — and marveled at it, though the wind was against us and we couldn't enter. Its king was Coronus, son of Cottyphion — Crow, son of Blackbird. And I couldn't help thinking of the poet Aristophanes: what a wise man he was, what a truthful reporter, and how little reason anyone has ever had to doubt a word he wrote.

Two days later the ocean came plainly into view, though we could see no land except the countries in the air, and those now looked fiery and glittering. On the fourth day, about noon, the wind eased gently and set us down fair and softly onto the sea.

The moment we felt water under us, we were beside ourselves — our joy was past expressing. We celebrated with everything we had on board, and we jumped over the side and swam around for the fun of it, for the sea was calm.

But it often happens that a change for the better is just the start of greater evils. We had sailed only two days on the water when, at sunrise on the third, we suddenly saw a great many monstrous fishes and whales — and one above the rest, fifteen hundred furlongs in length, which came at us with its mouth gaping, churning the sea for miles around, beating up froth and foam on every side, flashing teeth far taller than the tallest beech trees back home, all sharp as needles and white as ivory. We took what we assumed were our last leaves of one another, embraced, and waited for the end. The monster was on us at once, and it swallowed us down, ship and all. By sheer luck its jaws didn't catch us when they crashed shut — the ship slipped through the gaps between the teeth and on down into the deep of him.

Inside, we sat in darkness a good while and could see nothing, until the whale opened his mouth — and then we saw what we were in: a monstrous cavern, so broad and so high that a city of ten thousand people could fit inside it with room to spare. Scattered everywhere lay small fish and other sea creatures chopped to pieces, ships' masts and anchors, the bones of men, and cargo. In the middle of him there was land — actual earth, with hills — built up, I concluded, from the settling of all the mud that came down his throat. Forests had grown on it, trees of every kind, and herbs of every sort, and the whole thing looked farmed. The coastline of that land measured two hundred and forty furlongs around. Sea birds of all kinds — gulls, kingfishers, and others — had built their nests in the trees.

At first we wept, and wept freely. But at last I got my company on their feet, and we shored up the ship and struck fire. We made supper out of what lay to hand — there was fish of every sort piled around us — and we still had water left from the Morning Star.

The next morning we got up to watch for the whale's gaping, and looking out through it we could see, at different moments, mountains, then nothing but sky, then many times islands — for we could tell the beast was carrying himself at tremendous speed to every part of the sea. When we tired of that, I took seven of my company and went into the wood to see what I could find. We hadn't gone five furlongs when we came on a temple of Poseidon, as the inscription showed, and not far off a number of graves with pillars set on them, and close by a spring of clear water. Then we heard a dog barking and saw smoke rising in the distance, and judged there must be some dwelling out there.

So we hurried on, and came upon an old man and a youth hard at work in a garden plot, channeling water to it from the spring. We stopped short, caught between joy and fear, and they did exactly the same; for a long while nobody said a word. At last the old man spoke. "What are you, strangers? Spirits of the sea? Or unlucky men like us? For we are men — born and raised on land — yet now we're sea-dwellers, swimming around inside this continent of a whale, and we hardly know what to call ourselves anymore. By all reason we're dead, and yet we believe we're alive."

I answered him. "We're men too, father — new arrivals, swallowed up yesterday, ship and all. And just now we came walking into this wood, so vast and thick — some good spirit, I think, was guiding us, so we could meet you and learn we're not the only men shut up inside this monster. So tell us your story, we beg you: who you are, and how you got in here."

But he answered, "You won't hear one word from me, or get to ask another question, until you've taken some share of what hospitality we can offer." With that he brought us into his house — a sufficient one for his needs, with sleeping-couches made up and everything in order — and set before us greens and nuts and fish, and poured out his own wine for us. When we had eaten our fill, he asked what fortunes we had endured, and I told him everything in order: the storm, the doings on the island, our voyage through the air, the war, and all the rest, right down to our dive into the whale.

He marveled greatly at all this, and then told his own story in return. "By birth, strangers, I am from the island of Cyprus. I was traveling from my own country as a merchant, with this boy you see here — my son — and many friends besides, on a voyage to Italy in a great ship full of cargo. You may have seen her wreckage in the whale's mouth. We sailed in fair weather as far as Sicily, but there a storm caught us, so violent that by the third day it had driven us out into the ocean — where we had the luck to meet this whale, and were swallowed up, all of us. We two alone survived. The rest perished; we buried them here and built a temple to Poseidon over them.

"Ever since, this has been our life: we plant vegetables and live on fish and nuts. There's wood enough, as you see, and plenty of vines that yield a most delicate wine. There's a well of excellent cool water — maybe you saw it. We make our beds of leaves, we burn all the firewood we want, we snare the birds that fly around us, and we go out onto the monster's gills to catch live fish. We bathe there too, when we feel like it, for there's a saltwater lake not far off, about twenty furlongs around, full of all sorts of fish; we swim in it, and sail on it in a little boat of my own building. This is the twenty-seventh year of our shipwreck.

"And we could be content enough with all this, if it weren't for our neighbors. The borderers around us are spiteful and troublesome — completely unsociable, and savage."

"Do you mean," I said, "there are others inside the whale besides yourselves?"

"Many," he said, "and all hostile to strangers, and all of monstrous, misshapen builds. The western country, toward the tail-end of the wood, is held by the Salt-Fish Men — the Tarychanians — who look like eels with the faces of lobsters: a warlike, fierce people, eaters of raw flesh. On the right side live the Tritonomendetans, men in their upper parts and cats below; they are less offensive than the rest. The left side belongs to the Crab-Hands — the Carcinochirians — and the Tuna-Heads — the Thinnocephalians — who are in league with one another. The middle country is held by the Crab-Folk — the Paguridians — and by the Flounder-Feet — the Psettopodians — a warlike nation and swift of foot. The east, toward the mouth, is mostly desert, being washed over by the sea; even so, I make my home there, and pay the Flounder-Feet a tribute for it of five hundred oysters a year.

"That is the country, and those are its nations. So we had better work out between us either how to fight them or how to live among them."

"How many do they come to, all together?" I asked.

"More than a thousand," he said.

"And what weapons do they carry?"

"None at all," he said, "except the bones of fishes."

"Then our best course," I said, "is to fight them — armed as we are against people with no weapons. If we beat them once, we live free of fear afterward."

That was settled, so we went back to the ship and equipped ourselves. The cause of war we supplied by withholding the tribute, which had just come due. The Flounder-Feet sent their messengers to demand it; Scintharus — for that was the old man's name — gave them a harsh and scornful answer and sent them packing with it. The Flounder-Feet and the Crab-Folk, furious at Scintharus, came against us first, with a tremendous racket.

We had suspected they would, so we stood ready and waiting. I had posted twenty-five men in ambush, with orders to rise up once the enemy had passed by and take them in the rear — which is exactly what they did. The rest of us, twenty-five strong as well (for Scintharus and his son took their places in our ranks), advanced to meet them head-on and closed with great courage and strength. In the end we broke them, ran them down, and chased them all the way to their dens. The enemy dead came to one hundred and seventy. On our side we lost one man: Trigles, our pilot, run through the back with a fish's rib.

That day and the night after, we camped on the field, and set up the dry backbone of a dolphin on end, as a trophy.

By the next morning the rest of the peoples of the whale had heard what happened, and came out against us. The Salt-Fish Men were drawn up on the right wing under their captain Pelamus; the Tuna-Heads held the left; the Crab-Hands formed the center. The Tritonomendetans never stirred — they chose to join neither side. We met them by the temple of Poseidon and fell on with a great shout, which echoed around the inside of the whale like a cave. They were naked, unarmored people; we broke them quickly, chased them into the wood, and from that hour were masters of the country.

Soon after, they sent ambassadors to recover their dead and to discuss terms of peace. We had no intention of keeping friendship with them. The next day we marched on them and put them all to the sword — all but the Tritonomendetans, who, seeing how it had gone for the rest, fled out through the gills of the fish and threw themselves into the sea.

Then we walked the whole country, empty now, and settled there without an enemy left to fear. We passed the time exercising, hunting, planting vineyards, and gathering fruit from the trees — living like men of leisure with the world at their feet, inside a spacious and inescapable prison.

We led this life for a year and eight months. But on the fifth day of the ninth month, around the second opening of the mouth — the whale gaped once every hour, which is how we told time — around that second opening, I say, we suddenly heard a great commotion: shouting, like sailors' calls, and the stir of oars. Shaken, we crept all the way up to the very mouth of the fish, and standing inside his teeth we saw the strangest sight my eyes have ever looked at: giant men, half a furlong tall, sailing on great islands as if on shipboard. I know this is going to smell like a lie, but you'll get it anyway.

The islands were long but not high, each about a hundred furlongs in circumference, and each carried twenty-eight of those men. Some sat along either side of the island and rowed, using great cypress trees — branches, leaves, and all — for oars. Astern, if I can call it that, stood the helmsman on a high hill, holding a bronze rudder a furlong long. On the bow stood forty of them armed for battle, like men in every respect except their hair, which was pure fire and burned bright — so they needed no helmets. Instead of sails, the forest growing on each island did the work: the wind blew against it and drove the island forward like a ship, wherever the helmsman steered, with pilots to direct them — and under oars they were as nimble as a longboat.

At first we saw only two or three of them; later, no fewer than six hundred appeared. They divided into two fleets and went to battle. Many crashed bow-on into one another and were broken to pieces; many were rolled over and sank. The ones that grappled fought hard and would not easily let go — the soldiers stationed forward showed tremendous courage, boarding one another's islands and killing everyone they could, for no prisoners were taken. Instead of iron grappling-hooks, they threw enormous octopuses tied to lines: once an octopus gripped the trees, the island was held fast. For missiles they hurled oysters big enough to fill a wagon, and sponges the size of an acre.

The leader of one fleet was Aeolocentaurus — Wind-Centaur — and of the other, Thalassopotes — Sea-Drinker. The quarrel, it seems, was over plunder: the word was that Thalassopotes had driven off many herds of dolphins belonging to Aeolocentaurus. We could hear it in the way they shouted at one another and yelled out their kings' names.

Aeolocentaurus had the better of the day. He sank one hundred and fifty of the enemy's islands and took three more, crews and all. The rest backed off and fled. He pursued, but not far, since evening was coming on; then he returned to the wrecks, recovered the better part of them, and took up his own — for on his side, too, no fewer than eighty islands had gone down. As a monument of the island-fight they raised a trophy: one of the enemy's islands, staked up on the head of our whale. That night they camped beside the beast, made their cables fast around him, and rode at anchor close by — their anchors are made of glass, huge and remarkably strong. The next day they offered sacrifice on top of the whale, buried their dead there, and sailed away in high triumph, singing songs of victory.

And that was the manner of the battle of the islands.

Book II

By now we were thoroughly sick of living inside the whale. The endless waiting wore on us, so we put our heads together to find some way out of our captivity.

Our first idea was to dig a tunnel through his right side and escape that way. We set to work with a will, but after we'd dug five furlongs deep and gotten nowhere, we gave it up. Then we decided to set the forest on fire. That would kill him for certain, we reasoned, and once he was dead, getting out would be easy. So we put the plan into action, starting at the tail end. The fire burned for seven days and seven nights before he felt our handiwork at all. On the eighth and ninth days we could tell he was getting sick: he gaped more sluggishly than usual, and shut his mouth again sooner. By the tenth and eleventh days he was rotting through and starting to stink. On the twelfth day it occurred to us — almost too late — that unless we propped his jaws open the next time he gaped, we'd be sealed inside his dead carcass forever, and die miserably in there.

So we wedged long beams of timber upright inside his mouth to keep it from shutting, then got our ship ready, stocking her with plenty of fresh water and everything else we'd need. Scintharus agreed to serve as our pilot. The next morning, the whale died.

We hauled the ship through the gaps between his teeth, made cables fast to the teeth themselves, and little by little lowered her down into the sea. Then we climbed up onto the whale's back, sacrificed to Poseidon, and camped beside our trophy for three days, since there was no wind at all. On the fourth day we put to sea.

We kept running into the dead bodies of those who'd perished in the great sea-battle. Our ship bumped against them, and we measured the corpses with no small amazement. For a few days we sailed on in mild weather. But then the north wind blew so bitterly cold that a great frost set in, and the whole sea froze solid — not just a skin of ice on the surface, but frozen four hundred fathoms deep — so we had to abandon ship and walk out onto the ice.

The wind sat stubbornly in that quarter, and we couldn't endure the cold, so we tried a scheme that Scintharus invented: with pickaxes and other tools we dug an enormous cave down into the frozen water, and sheltered in it for forty days straight. We kept a fire going inside and lived on fish, which we found in plenty as we dug. When our supplies finally ran low, we came back out, set our frozen ship upright, spread her sails, and glided forward over the ice as smoothly as if we'd been on water — easy, gentle sledding. On the fifth day the weather warmed, the frost broke, and everything turned back to water again.

We hadn't sailed three hundred furlongs more before we reached a small deserted island, where we took on fresh water (which was running low again) and shot two wild bulls before moving on. These bulls have their horns growing not on their heads but under their eyes — which is where Momus, the god of fault-finding, always said they belonged.

Next we entered a sea made not of water but of milk, and in it appeared a white island covered with vines. The island was actually one enormous, well-pressed cheese — as we discovered later when we ate some of it — about twenty-five furlongs across. The vines were loaded with clusters of grapes, but when we squeezed them, out came not wine but milk. In the middle of the island stood a temple dedicated, according to its inscription, to Galatea the sea-nymph, one of the daughters of Nereus — her name means "milk-white." The whole time we stayed there, the soil itself supplied our food, and our drink was the milk from the grapes. The ruler of these parts, they say, is Tyro, daughter of Salmoneus — "tyro" means "cheese" — who received this reward from Poseidon after her death.

We rested on that island five days, and on the sixth put to sea again with a gentle breeze behind us and the water calm and smooth. By the eighth day we were no longer sailing in milk but in salty blue water, and we saw great numbers of men running across the surface of the sea. They were like us in every way, in both shape and size, except for their feet, which were made of cork — which is why, I assume, they're called the Cork-Feet (Phellopodes).

We were amazed to see that they didn't sink, but stayed right on top of the waves and traveled over them without a care. They came up to us, greeted us in Greek, and said they were headed for Phello, their own country. For a while they jogged along beside the ship, then turned off their own way and left us, wishing us a safe and prosperous voyage.

Soon many islands came into view. Close by on our left was Phello, where those men were headed: a city built on a huge, round cork. Farther off to the right we saw five large, mountainous islands with great fires burning on them. But straight ahead lay a broad, flat island, no more than five hundred furlongs off. As we drew near it, a wonderful fragrance drifted out over us, sweet and delicate — the kind of scent Herodotus the historian claims rises off Arabia the Blessed — a blend of roses, daffodils, gillyflowers, lilies, violets, myrtle, bay, and vine blossoms. That was the perfume that came wafting out to meet us.

Delighted by the smell, and hoping for better luck after all our hard labors, we drew close to the island. We found it ringed with harbors on every side — sheltered from rough water, yet roomy — and rivers of clear water flowing gently into the sea, with meadows and flowers and songbirds, some singing on the shore and many in the branches of the trees, while a soft, still air lay over the whole country. Whenever pleasant breezes stirred the woods, the swaying branches made a continuous, delightful melody, like the sound of pan-pipes in a lonely place. Mixed in with it you could hear a kind of murmur — not rowdy or unpleasant, but like the noise of a banquet, where some are playing flutes, some are praising the music, and some are clapping along with the pipe or the harp.

Charmed by all this, we sailed boldly into the harbor, moored the ship, and went ashore, leaving Scintharus and two of our companions aboard. As we walked through a sweet-smelling meadow, we met the guards who patrol the island. They took us prisoner and bound us with garlands of roses — the strongest restraints they have — to bring us before their governor. From them we learned along the way that this was the island called the Isle of the Blessed, and that its governor was Rhadamanthus, the judge of the dead. We were brought before him and put fourth in line among the cases waiting to be judged.

The first trial concerned Ajax, son of Telamon: whether he was fit to be admitted to the company of the Heroes or not. The charges against him were his madness and his suicide. After long arguments on both sides, Rhadamanthus delivered this sentence: that for the present he should be committed to the care of Hippocrates, the physician of Cos, to be purged with hellebore, and upon the recovery of his wits he should be granted admission.

The second was a lovers' dispute: Theseus and Menelaus both claiming the better right to Helen. Rhadamanthus ruled in favor of Menelaus, on the grounds of all the labors and dangers he had undergone for that marriage's sake — whereas Theseus had plenty of other wives to live with, including the Amazon queen and the daughters of Minos.

The third was a question of precedence between Alexander, son of Philip, and Hannibal the Carthaginian. Alexander won, and his throne was placed next to that of the elder Cyrus the Persian.

We came up fourth. He demanded to know what business we, living men, had setting foot in that sacred country, and we told him all our adventures, in order, exactly as they'd happened. He ordered us to stand aside, deliberated for a long while, and then referred the matter to his bench of assessors — there were many of them, including Aristides the Just, the Athenian. When he had settled on a verdict, he ruled that for our meddling curiosity and our needless wandering we should answer after our deaths; but that for the present we should be granted a fixed term of residence, during which we might feast with the Heroes, and then depart. The limit he set on our stay was seven months, and not a day more.

At that, our rose-garlands fell off by themselves, and we were set free and led into the city to feast with the blessed.

The city is built entirely of gold, and the wall around it of emerald. It has seven gates, each one carved from a single plank of cinnamon wood. The pavement of the city, and all the ground inside the walls, is ivory. The temples of all the gods are built of beryl, with great altars in them, each cut from a single amethyst, on which they offer their sacrifices. Around the city runs a river of the finest perfumed oil, a hundred royal cubits wide and deep enough to swim in comfortably. For baths they have great houses of glass, heated by burning cinnamon — and instead of water, the tubs are filled with warm dew.

Their only clothing is purple cobwebs. And they have no bodies at all: they're intangible and fleshless, pure shape and outline. Yet bodiless as they are, they stand, they move, they think, they speak. Each one is a naked soul, it seems, walking around wearing the likeness of a body — so long as you don't touch one, you'd never know it wasn't solid. They're like shadows standing upright, only not dark.

Nobody there grows any older: whatever age you arrive at, that's the age you stay. There's no night there, and no real daylight either, but a glow like the gray of dawn just before sunrise — that's the light they live in. They know only one season of the year, spring, and only one wind ever blows there, the soft west wind Zephyrus. The country blooms with every kind of flower and with every pleasant shade plant. Their vines bear fruit twelve times a year — once a month — and their pomegranates, apples, and other fruit trees, they say, bear thirteen times, because in the month they call Minous they bear twice. Instead of grain, the wheat-stalks there sprout loaves of bread, ready-baked, at their tips, like mushrooms. Around the city there are three hundred and sixty-five wells of water, just as many of honey, and five hundred of perfumed oil — though those, to be fair, are smaller. They have seven rivers of milk and eight of wine.

They hold their feasts outside the city in a field called Elysium — a beautiful meadow ringed by woods of every kind, so thick they shade all the guests, who recline on couches of flowers. The winds wait on them and bring them everything they need — everything except the pouring of the wine, which nobody has to do, because around the banqueting ground grow great trees of clear, pure glass, and the fruit of those trees is drinking-cups and goblets of every shape and size you could want. Each guest arriving at the feast picks one or two of these cups and sets them at his place, where they fill with wine all by themselves. That's how they drink. Instead of wearing garlands, they have nightingales and other songbirds pluck flowers with their beaks from the meadows nearby and fly overhead, singing, scattering blossoms down on them like snow.

As for perfume, this is how they're anointed: thick clouds draw the scented oil up out of the fountains and rivers, settle over the heads of the banqueters, and at the least breath of wind release it in a fine mist, like dew.

After dinner they pass the time with music and singing. Their favorite songs are Homer's verses — and Homer himself is there in person, feasting among them, with his couch just above Odysseus'. Their choirs are made up of boys and girls, led and accompanied by Eunomus the Locrian, Arion of Lesbos, Anacreon, and Stesichorus — who has had a place there ever since he made his peace with Helen. When these finish, a second choir takes over: swans, swallows, and nightingales. And when they've ended, the whole forest rings like a wind orchestra as the breeze stirs through it.

But the thing that does most for their merriment is a pair of springs beside the banqueting ground: one of laughter, the other of pleasure. Everyone drinks from both at the start of the feast, and so they spend the whole evening laughing and enjoying themselves.

Now I'll tell you which famous men I saw in that company. All the demigods were there, and everyone who fought at Troy except Ajax the Locrian — he alone, they told me, was being punished in the land of the wicked. Of the barbarians there were the two Cyruses, elder and younger; Anacharsis the Scythian; Zamolxis the Thracian; and Numa the Italian. There were also Lycurgus the Spartan, Phocion and Tellus the Athenians, and all the Wise Men except Periander.

I also saw Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, chatting away with Nestor and Palamedes. Clustered around him were Hyacinthus the Spartan, the gorgeous Narcissus, Hylas, and other beautiful young men. As far as I could tell, he was deeply in love with Hyacinthus — at any rate, he talked to him more than to all the rest put together. They said Rhadamanthus was annoyed with him for it, and had threatened more than once to throw him off the island if he kept playing the fool and wouldn't drop his endless ironic act at their banquets. Plato was the only one missing: they said he lived in a city of his own design, run under the very constitution and laws he'd written for it.

Aristippus and Epicurus rank highest in their esteem, because they're the most cheerful, agreeable, and best company at a party. Diogenes of Sinope had changed so completely from the man he used to be that he'd married Lais the courtesan, and would often get so drunk that he'd jump up and dance around the room like a man out of his mind. Aesop the Phrygian serves them as their jester. Not a single Stoic was in the company — they were all said to be still climbing the steep hill of Virtue. As for Chrysippus, we heard that he's not permitted to set foot on the island until he has purged himself with hellebore a fourth time. The Academics, they say, were perfectly willing to come, but are still holding back, suspending judgment — they can't establish for certain whether such an island even exists. Though personally I think they were just afraid of being judged by Rhadamanthus, since they themselves abolished all standards of judgment. They say many of them did start out, following after travelers bound for the island, but being too sluggish to keep up — and unable to comprehend the destination anyway — they gave up and turned back halfway.

Those were the most notable men there. The one held in highest honor among them all is Achilles, and after him Theseus.

As for sex and lovemaking, here is how things stand: they couple openly, in full view of everyone, with women and men alike, and nobody thinks the worse of anyone for it. Socrates was the lone exception — he swore up and down that his relations with the young men were purely innocent, and everybody therefore wrote him off as a perjurer; Hyacinthus and Narcissus both testified otherwise, whatever he claimed.

The women there are held in common, and no man objects — in this respect they are the most perfect Platonists in the world — and the boys, likewise, yield to whoever desires them, without any argument.

After I'd spent two or three days like this, I went to talk with Homer the poet, since we both had time on our hands. Among other things, I asked him where he was from — a question we still argue about endlessly — and he said he honestly couldn't be sure himself, since some claimed Chios, some Smyrna, and many Colophon. But in fact, he said, he was a Babylonian, and among his own people his name wasn't Homer but Tigranes; he only got the name later, when he lived as a hostage among the Greeks — "homeros" being Greek for hostage. Then I asked him about the disputed lines in his poems, the ones the critics reject as not his work: were they his or not? He said every one of them was his own, and had some harsh words for the grammarians Zenodotus and Aristarchus and their feeble judgment.

When he'd satisfied me on that, I asked him next why he opened his poem with the word "wrath," of all things. He said it just came out that way — no planning behind it whatsoever. I also wanted to know whether he wrote the Odyssey before the Iliad, as many people maintain. He said no. As for the blindness everyone attributes to him, I didn't even need to ask: I could see perfectly well that there was nothing to it.

I made a habit of this for many days afterward — whenever I found him at leisure, I'd go over and pepper him with questions, and he answered everything freely. He was especially talkative after his court case, which he won: Thersites had filed a complaint against him for the insults and mockery in the poem, and Homer was acquitted, with Odysseus arguing his defense.

Around the same time, Pythagoras of Samos arrived among us, having now changed shape seven times, lived seven lives, and completed the full cycle of his soul's migrations. The entire right half of his body was solid gold. They all agreed he should have a place among them, but couldn't settle on what to call him: Pythagoras, or Euphorbus. Empedocles showed up too, scorched from head to foot, his whole body looking broiled on the coals — but for all his begging, he was not admitted.

As time went on, the day of their athletic games came around — the Games of the Dead, which they call the Thanatusia. The presidents of the games were Achilles, serving his fifth term, and Theseus, his seventh. A full account would take too long, so I'll just give the main results. In wrestling, Carus, a descendant of Hercules, won the garland from Odysseus. The boxing match between Arius the Egyptian, who's buried at Corinth, and Epius ended in a draw. No prize was offered for the all-in fighting, and I can't remember who won the footrace. In poetry, Homer was unquestionably the best of them all — but the prize went to Hesiod. The prizes were all the same: garlands woven of peacock feathers.

Just as the games ended, news arrived that the damned souls in the prison of the wicked had broken their chains, overpowered their jailers, and were marching to attack the island, led by Phalaris of Agrigentum, Busiris the Egyptian, Diomedes the Thracian, and Sciron and Pityocamptes, the highway robbers. The moment Rhadamanthus heard it, he drew the Heroes up in battle order along the shore, commanded by Theseus, Achilles, and Ajax, son of Telamon — who by now had recovered his senses. The two sides met and fought, and the Heroes won the day, with Achilles performing most nobly of all. Socrates, posted on the right wing, also distinguished himself as a brave soldier — far braver than he'd been at the battle of Delium in his lifetime — for when the enemy charged, he neither ran nor even changed expression. For his valor he was later awarded a special prize: a beautiful, spacious garden on the outskirts of the city, where he gathered companions and held his discussions. He named the place the Necracademia — the Academy of the Dead.

Then we rounded up the defeated, bound them, and shipped them back to be punished worse than before.

Homer wrote an account of this battle too, and when I left he gave me the book to show my friends — but I lost it later, along with so much else. I do remember the opening line, though. It went: "Tell me now, Muse, how the dead Heroes fought."

When they win a battle, it's their custom to celebrate with a feast of boiled beans, banqueting together in honor of the victory. Only Pythagoras took no part: he sat far off by himself and went without dinner, because he cannot abide beans.

Six months had now passed, and we were halfway through the seventh, when trouble broke out among us. Cinyras, the son of Scintharus — a fine, tall young man — had long been in love with Helen, and it was plain to see she doted on him just as foolishly. They were forever winking and toasting each other at the feasts, slipping off alone together, and wandering through the woods. Love kept growing, and seeing no other way forward, Cinyras hit on a plan: to steal Helen away and escape with her to one of the nearby islands — Phello, or Tyroessa, the cheese island. He found her perfectly willing to run off with him. He'd already recruited three of the boldest men in my crew as fellow conspirators, but he never breathed a word to his father, knowing he'd put a stop to it.

The plan settled, they waited for their moment. When night came and I was out of the way — I'd fallen asleep at the feast — they slipped past everyone unnoticed, hurried Helen aboard, and put to sea as fast as they could. Around midnight, Menelaus woke up, found his bed empty and his wife gone, and raised an outcry. He collected his brother and went straight to the court of Rhadamanthus.

At first light, the lookouts reported a ship in sight, already far out to sea. So Rhadamanthus launched a vessel carved from a single timber of asphodel wood, manned by fifty of the Heroes, with orders to give chase. They rowed with such a will that by noon they had caught the runaways just as they entered the milky ocean near Tyroessa — that's how close they came to escaping. We took their ship in tow with a chain of roses and hauled it back again.

Rhadamanthus questioned Cinyras and his accomplices first, asking whether anyone else had been in on the plot. They swore no one had. So sentence was passed: they were to be flogged with rods of mallow, then tied up by the genitals and shipped off to the place of the wicked, to be tormented there. Helen, meanwhile, was all in tears, so ashamed of herself that she wouldn't show her face.

The judges also decreed that we had to leave the country — our allotted time was up — and that we could stay no later than the next day. That hit me hard. I wept bitterly at having to leave so good a place and become a wanderer again, with no idea where I was going. But they comforted me: before many years had passed, they said, I'd be back with them again — and they even showed me my chair and my couch, already prepared for the time to come, right beside the very best company.

Then I went to Rhadamanthus and begged him to tell me my future and point me on my course. He said that after long travels and many dangers I would reach my own country at last, though he refused to name the day of my return. Pointing out the neighboring islands — five of them, with a sixth a little farther off — he said: "Those nearest are the islands of the ungodly, the ones you see burning in open fire. The sixth is the Isle of Dreams, and beyond that lies Calypso's island, which you can't see from here. Once past these, you'll come to the great continent opposite your own country, where you'll suffer many hardships, pass through many nations, and meet men of inhuman habits — and at length you'll reach the other continent."

Then he pulled a mallow root out of the ground and handed it to me, with instructions to pray to it in my worst dangers. He gave me some further advice too: never stir the fire with my knife, never eat lupins, and never go near a boy once he's past eighteen. If I kept all that in mind, he said, I had good hopes of coming back to the island.

So we made ready for the voyage and feasted with them at the usual hour. The next day I went to Homer and asked him to do me the favor of composing a two-line epigram for me. He did, and I set up a pillar of beryl stone near the harbor and engraved the lines on it. The epigram ran:

    Lucian, the gods' beloved, did attain
    to see all this, then travel home again.

We stayed out that day, and the next we put to sea, with the Heroes there to see us off. As we were leaving, Odysseus slipped over to me — quietly, so Penelope wouldn't notice — and pressed a letter into my hand, to be delivered to Calypso on the island of Ogygia. Rhadamanthus also sent Nauplius the ferryman along with us, so that if we happened to put in at those islands, no one would lay hands on us, since we were traveling on other business.

The moment we sailed beyond the reach of that sweet fragrance, a horrible stench hit us, like pitch and brimstone burning — an unbearable reek, as if men were broiling over hot coals. The air was dark and thick, and a pitchy sort of dew dripped out of it. We could hear the crack of whips and the screams of the tormented.

We didn't visit all the islands. The one we landed on was like this: ringed entirely by steep, sharp, jagged cliffs, without a tree or a drop of water anywhere. We managed to scramble up among the rocks and pushed forward along a path choked with briars and thorns, through hideous, ghastly country, until we came at last to the prison and place of torment. There we marveled at the soil itself, which grew no flowers — only swords and daggers. Around the place ran rivers in rings: the first of mud, the second of blood, and the innermost of burning fire. That last one was very broad and impossible to cross; it flowed like water and rolled like the waves of the sea, and it was full of fish — some the size of burning torches, others smaller, like live coals. They call these Lychnisci — lamp-fish.

There was only one narrow entrance, with Timon of Athens, the famous hater of mankind, posted as doorkeeper. But with Nauplius's help we got in, and we saw the tormented: kings and common men alike, great numbers of them, including some I recognized. There hung Cinyras, strung up by the genitals in the smoke.

But the greatest torments of all are reserved for those who told lies in their lifetime and wrote untrue histories — Ctesias of Cnidus was there, and Herodotus, and many others. Seeing them, I felt very hopeful about my own prospects, since to my knowledge I have never told a lie in my life.

We hurried back to the ship — we couldn't stand the sight any longer — said our goodbyes to Nauplius, and sent him home.

A little later the Isle of Dreams appeared close by: a dim country, hard for the eye to fix on, with the same quality dreams themselves have. For as we approached, it kept receding and slipping away from us, until it seemed farther off than when we started. But we caught it in the end, and sailed into the harbor called Hypnus — Sleep Harbor — close by the ivory gate, where the temple of Alectryon, the Rooster, stands. We landed late in the evening.

Going in through the gate, we saw dreams of every kind and fashion. But first let me tell you something about the city itself, since no one else has ever written a description of it. Even Homer only touches on it, and to small purpose.

The whole city is surrounded by a wood, whose trees are towering poppies and mandrakes, with an infinite number of owls nesting in them — the only birds to be seen on the island. Nearby runs a river they call Nyctiporus, the Night-Stream, and at the gates are two wells, one named Negretus — Sound-Sleep — and the other Pannychia — All-Night-Long.

The city wall is high and shifts color like a rainbow. It has four gates, though Homer mentions only two. Two of them face the Plain of Sloth — one made of iron, the other of potter's clay — and through those pass the dreams of fear, blood, and cruelty. The other two face the harbor and the sea: one of horn, and one of ivory, which is the one we entered by.

As you come into the city, on the right stands the temple of Night — for of all the gods they reverence Night and Alectryon above the rest, and Alectryon has a temple of his own built near the harbor. On the left stands the palace of Sleep, for he is sovereign king over them all, and he governs through two great princes serving under him: Taraxion son of Matogenes — Trouble, son of Delusion — and Plutocles son of Phantasion — Riches, son of Fantasy.

In the middle of the marketplace is a well they call Careotis — Deep-Drowse — and beside it two temples, one of Falsehood and one of Truth. Each has its own inner shrine reserved for the priests, and its own oracle. The chief prophet there is Antiphon, the interpreter of dreams, appointed to that office of honor by Sleep himself.

The dreams themselves are not all alike, in nature or in shape. Some are long, beautiful, and pleasing; others are short and ugly. Some appear to be made of gold; others are cheap and shabby. Some have wings and monstrous forms; others come decked out as if for a parade, dressed up as kings, gods, and other grand persons.

Many of them we actually knew, having seen them before back home — and these came up and greeted us like old friends, gathered us in, lulled us to sleep, and entertained us nobly and courteously. On top of all the rest of their hospitality, which was lavish and costly, they promised to make us kings and princes. Some of them even carried us home to our own country, showed us our friends there, and brought us back again the next morning.

Thirty days and thirty nights we spent among them, sleeping and feasting the whole time — until a sudden clap of thunder woke us all. We started up, stocked the ship with provisions, and put to sea, and on the third day we landed at Ogygia. But on the way I opened the letter I was carrying and read it. It said:

"Odysseus to Calypso: greetings. Know that after I sailed away from you on the raft I built in such haste, I suffered shipwreck, and barely escaped with the help of Leucothea into the country of the Phaeacians, who sent me to my own home. There I found a crowd of suitors courting my wife and riotously eating up my estate. I killed them all, and was afterward killed myself by Telegonus, the son I fathered with Circe; and now I am on the Isle of the Blessed, where I repent daily that I refused to live with you and turned down the immortality you offered me. If I can spy a convenient moment, I will give them all the slip and come to you."

That was the gist of the letter — along with a line about us, asking that we be given hospitality.

I hadn't gone far from the sea when I found the cave, exactly as Homer describes it, and Calypso herself busy working at her wool. She took the letter and brought us inside, and first she wept and carried on grievously; but afterward she called us to dinner and treated us royally, asking question after question about Odysseus — and about Penelope: was she really as beautiful and as modest as Odysseus had so often bragged?

We gave her the answers we figured would please her best. Then we went back to the ship and slept near the shore.

In the morning we put to sea, and a violent storm caught us and tossed us for two days together. On the third we fell among the Pumpkin-Pirates (Colocynthopirates). These are a savage people from the neighboring islands who prey on passing travelers. For ships they use enormous gourds, six cubits long: when the gourds are ripe they hollow them out, scrape them clean, and sail in the rinds, rigging masts of reed and sails of gourd leaf.

They attacked us with two fully crewed ships and wounded many of us, firing gourd seeds at us instead of stones. The fight stayed even until about noon, when, behind the Pumpkin-Pirates, we spotted the Nut-Sailors (Caryonauts) coming on. The two were enemies, as it turned out: the moment the pirates saw them approaching, they forgot all about us and turned to fight them — and in the meantime we hoisted sail and got away, leaving them at each other's throats. No doubt the Nut-Sailors won the day, since they had the greater numbers — five well-equipped ships — and the stronger vessels, their hulls being nutshells split in half and scooped clean, each half fifteen fathoms long.

Once we were out of sight, we tended to our wounded, and from then on we went armed at all times, in constant fear of sudden attack. And with good cause. Before sunset, some twenty men or so — pirates also — came at us riding monstrous great dolphins, which carried them steadily and would neigh like horses when their riders mounted. When they drew near, they split up, some on one side and some on the other, and pelted us with dried cuttlefish and the eyes of sea-crabs. But when we shot back and wounded them, they wouldn't stand their ground; they fled to the island, most of them hurt.

Around midnight, with the sea calm, we ran before we knew it onto an enormous halcyon's nest — a kingfisher's nest — a good sixty furlongs around. The halcyon herself was sailing on it, hatching her eggs, and she was very nearly as big as the nest: when she took wing, the blast from her feathers nearly capsized our ship, and she flew off making a mournful cry.

At daybreak we climbed onto it and found it really was a nest, built like a giant barge out of trees plaited and woven together. In it were five hundred eggs, every one bigger than a wine cask from Chios, and so near hatching that the chicks could already be seen inside and were beginning to cry. We took an axe, chopped one of the eggs open, and cut out an unfledged chick — which was still bigger than twenty of our vultures.

When we had gone some two hundred furlongs from the nest, fearful prodigies and strange signs appeared to us. The carved goose that stood as an ornament on our ship's stern suddenly sprouted feathers and began to honk. Scintharus, our pilot, who was bald, was covered with hair in an instant. And strangest of all, the ship's mast budded, put out branches, and bore fruit at the top — figs, and great clusters of grapes, though not yet ripe. At the sight of all this we had good reason to be troubled, and we prayed to the gods to turn aside whatever evil the omens foretold.

We hadn't gone a full five hundred furlongs more when we came in view of a vast forest of pines and cypresses. We took it for land — but it was in fact a sea of infinite depth, planted with rootless trees that floated firm and upright on the water. When we reached it and saw how things stood, we had no idea what to do with ourselves. To go forward through the trees was altogether impossible — they grew so thick and close together — and to turn back safely looked just as unlikely.

So I climbed to the top of the tallest tree to find out, if I could, what lay beyond. The forest, I found, was fifty furlongs wide or thereabouts, and beyond it another ocean waited to receive us. We decided our best chance was to hoist the ship up onto the leaves of the trees, which grew dense, and try to pass over them, if it could be done, to the other ocean.

And so we did. We fastened a strong cable to the ship, wound it around the treetops, and with great effort hauled her up to that height, set her on the branches, and spread the sails — and we were carried along as if on the sea, dragging the ship after us with the help of the wind that pushed it forward. Right then a verse of the poet Antimachus came to my mind — the one where he speaks of sailing over the tops of trees.

When we had crossed the forest and come to the sea again, we lowered the ship the same way we had raised her. Then we sailed on through pure, clear water until we came to an enormous gulf, a trench in the sea, made by the dividing of the waters — the way great clefts open in the ground on land, from earthquakes and other causes. We struck sail and the ship stopped all at once, right at the pit's brim, on the very point of tumbling in. Leaning over to look down, we judged it to be no less than a thousand furlongs deep — fearful and monstrous to behold, for the water simply stood there, divided into two walls. But looking far off to our right, we noticed a bridge of water that, as well as we could tell, joined the two seas and ran across from one to the other. So we labored at the oars to reach it, crossed over it, and with great effort got to the far side — beyond anything we had hoped.

After that a calm sea received us, and on it we found an island, not very large, and inhabited by unsociable people. Living there were wild men called the Ox-Heads (Bucephalians), who have horns on their heads, like pictures of the Minotaur. We went ashore to look for fresh water and provisions, since ours had run out entirely. Water we found soon enough, but nothing else was in sight — though we heard a great bellowing and roaring a little way off. Thinking it was some herd of cattle, we walked toward the sound and ran straight into those men. The moment they spotted us, they came after us, and they seized three of my companions; the rest of us fled toward the sea.

Then we all armed ourselves — we had no intention of leaving our friends unavenged — and fell on the Ox-Heads while they were dividing up the flesh of the men they had slaughtered. We put the whole crowd to flight and chased them, killing fifty and taking two alive, and so came back with our prisoners. Food, though, we still couldn't find.

The whole crew urged me to kill the prisoners, but I didn't like that plan. I thought it better to keep them in chains until ambassadors came from the Ox-Heads to ransom them. And come they did — and I understood exactly what their business was from the nodding of their heads and their mournful, pleading lowing.

The ransom we agreed on was this: a quantity of cheeses, dried fish, and onions, plus four deer with three legs apiece — two behind and one in front. On those terms we handed over our prisoners, and after staying just one more day, we departed.

By now fish were beginning to show themselves in the sea, birds flew over our heads, and all the other signs of approaching land appeared. A little later we saw men traveling across the sea by a newfound method of navigation, in which each man serves as both ship and sailor — and I'll tell you how. They lie on their backs in the water with their members standing upright — these being of a large size, and well suited to the purpose — fasten a sail to them, and hold the lines in their hands; and when the wind fills the sail, off they go, wherever they please.

After these came others riding on corks: they yoke two dolphins together and drive them on, playing the coachman themselves, and the dolphins pull the cork along behind. These people never offered us any violence, and never once avoided us, but traveled along in our company, peaceable and unafraid, marveling at the size of our ship and looking it over from every side.

At evening we reached a small island, inhabited, as far as we could tell, only by women — women who spoke Greek. They came to us, took our hands, and welcomed us, every one of them dressed like a courtesan: beautiful, young, in long gowns trailing to the foot. The island was called Cabbalusa, and the city Hydramardia. The women received us, and each one picked out one of us for herself and made him her guest.

But I hung back a moment — my heart misgave me — and looking carefully around, I saw the bones of many men, and skulls heaped together in a corner. I thought it best not to raise an alarm, or call my crew together, or reach for my weapons. Instead I took my mallow root in hand and prayed to it earnestly to bring me out of these present dangers.

A little while later, when my strange hostess came to wait on me, I saw that she didn't have the legs of a woman, but the hooves of a donkey. At that I drew my sword, grabbed hold of her, tied her up, and questioned her on every point. Unwillingly, she confessed: they were women of the sea, called the Donkey-Legs (Onosceleans), and they fed on the strangers who traveled that way. "When we've made them drunk," she said, "we go to bed with them, and finish them off in their sleep."

When I heard that, I left her tied up where she was, climbed to the roof of the house, and raised a cry to call my crew together. When they had gathered, I told them everything, showed them the bones, and brought them in to see the woman I'd bound — who suddenly turned into water and could no longer be seen. Even so, I thrust my sword into the water to see what would come of it. It turned to blood.

Then we made all the haste we could to the ship and got away. As soon as it was fully day, we sighted the mainland, which we judged to be the continent lying opposite our own. We bowed down in worship, said our prayers, and took counsel about what to do next. Some thought it best just to set foot on shore and turn back again; others wanted to leave the ship there and march inland, to see what the inhabitants would do. But while we were still deliberating, a violent storm fell on us, drove the ship against the shore, and burst it all to pieces. With great difficulty we all swam to land, every man clutching his weapons and whatever else he could lay hands on.

These, then, are all the things I can tell you of up to the time of our landing: on the sea, on our voyage among the islands, in the air, then inside the whale, and after we got out, among the Heroes and among the dreams, and lastly among the Ox-Heads and the Donkey-Legs. What happened on land, the next books shall deliver.