Wonder Stories: The Best Myths for Boys and Girls

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

Surely Glaucus was setting out on a mad errand when he decided to go to Circe. But he persisted and landed on her island. He told her how Scylla had looked upon him with terror, and he begged to have a charm by means of which he might make Scylla love the sea as the herb had made him a subject of Neptune.

"Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean and sea weed on the mountain peaks than I will cease to love Scylla and her alone," Glaucus told Circe.

The enchantress looked on Glaucus and she began to admire him as much as Scylla had been frightened by him. He was really quite a distinguished looking personage, for he had the power to take on human form when he wished, and his trailing robes of green seaweed looked almost kingly.

"I will brew a potion as you wish with my own hands and carry it to Scylla," Circe told Glaucus, but she had decided to work harm on the innocent nymph in order to keep Glaucus forever on her island.

Circe's potion was mixed of the most poisonous plants which grew on her island. She blended them with deadly skill and then took her way to the coast of Sicily where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the coast where Scylla loved to come in the middle of the day when the sun was high to bathe in the cool waters. Circe poured her poison into the clear blue bay and muttered incantations of mighty power over it. Then she returned to her island.

Scylla came that day as usual when the sun was high and plunged into the waters up to her waist. What was her horror to discover that she was sinking to her shoulders and then to her head. The waters covered her before anyone heard her frightened calls for help and where she had stepped so happily into the waters which she loved, there were only a few ripples on the surface of the bay and soon even they were gone. Circe's charm had taken effect and the lovable Scylla had been carried down to Neptune's kingdom, but not as Glaucus had desired, for she was without motion or sight or speech.

Glaucus, meanwhile, forgot Scylla in the enchantment of Circe's island and remained in the waters near there, taking human form when he wished and enjoying the luxuries of her palace. Perhaps he might never have remembered that he was a subject of Neptune if his attention had not been attracted one day to the wild beasts which prowled about the island. They were speaking to each other with the voices of men and bewailing the fate by which they had been led there from their ships and brought into Circe's power.

Glaucus, hearing them, understood what might be in store for him. He began to hate the powers of the wicked enchantress and the memory came to him of Scylla as she had appeared to him on the rock, her hands full of bright shells. He plunged into the water and was soon a long distance from the fatal island.

Glaucus began then to search for Scylla through the many leagues of the ocean but he could not find her. That was because Scylla, through the design of Circe, had gone down as mortals do and been drowned. The sea was full of such, and as Glaucus wandered about among the gardens of sea anemones and along the shell strewn roads of Neptune's kingdom, he felt a new desire in his heart. He knew how those mortals felt whose loved ones had been taken away from them by the sea, and he began using his power to restore the drowned to life again. For a thousand years Glaucus went up and down through the sea restoring mortals who had loved to each other again. And in all his following of the tides he was searching for Scylla.

After a thousand years had passed and it seemed to the gods that Glaucus had expiated the wrong he had done in appealing to Circe, he found Scylla in the green depths. And the nymphs say that the two lived always happily together in a coral palace with a sea garden of anemones and green water plants all about it.