Sensel could reply only by pressing the hands held out to him. Then, with moistening eyes, both watched, as did the three beside them.
On they pressed into a strait; and toward a point on the African Coast, the ancient Abyla and the Ape’s Hill of the moderns. Nine miles across lay the great rock, afterward named Alube by the Phœnicians, and Calpe by the Greeks. It is the Gibraltar of to-day.
These two points, the Rock of Gibraltar and Ape’s Hill, constituted the ancient Pillars of Hercules. Not that the Greek hero had any part in their naming. Rather they were named for the Tyrian deity whose worship the Phœnicians introduced into all their settlements. Long after the sinking of Atlantis, in a forgetting, perhaps unbelieving age of maritime sloth, these Pillars, the guards of the Mediterranean, came to be considered the ends of the earth. Thus sank the glories of the island into fable!
When well off Abyla, the vessels steered northward toward the famous Rock, the rock that was raising its mammoth proportions high—that rock that has since been called “a mountain of histories”—the rock that was overshadowing the waiting ones!
Eyes hopeful yet fearing, eyes sad to desperation, were fixed upon it—every heart throbbed wild—as the vessels crossed the waters of the strait to the green and gray coast from which the Great Rock jutted invitingly in its virgin stillness, even then exerting its strange fascination: a fascination that would impel to itself the Saracen Tarik, thousands of years later; a fascination that would cause Moor and Christian to engage in warfare, as the years went on; a fascination that would bring contention between Christian Spain and Christian England in the Middle Ages; a fascination that would draw upon itself, in modern times, that memorable, terrible siege of four years when French and Spanish exhausted their resources but to prove its latent magnetism—in that it continued to hold, against all odds, the English garrison that had so long nestled in its rugged bosom!
On their right, spread the beauteous Mediterranean; on the left, was a small bay toward which lay the Rock’s only sloping side. Erelong, all eyes began to ask of Deucalion which course should they take, this Deucalion who was standing so motionless with rapt face. Before them was the south end of the Great Rock, steep, precipitous, inaccessible; and upon its grim height they began to look in fear. Should they go to its left or its right?
But, when the moment came, Deucalion was ready to give the order. “Behold, the point on the right. That will we round. There left we the vessels. Æole, Hellen, then shall we sight them!”
So extreme was his agitation, that they forgot their fears in desiring to calm him. Bravely Æole spoke:
“Yea, Father, mother is there—as thou didst say.”
“Yea, mother is there,” echoed Hellen.