—Lucan's Pharsalia.
There, amid the rocks, lay the Medusa asleep, with half of the snakes awake and squirming restlessly. With his eyes on the reflection in the shield, the son of Danae swooped quickly downward, cut off the monster's head and grasped its clammy, lifeless locks in his hand.
Winging his way over northern Africa, Perseus came to the mountain on which the Titan Atlas sat, hunched up on a peak with his shoulders sagging under the weight of the heavens. Somewhat weary after his long flight, the youth landed in the Garden of the Hesperides, which lay at the foot of the mountain, and watched the maidens, daughters of Hesperus, the silver Evening Star, as they danced around a shining tree of golden apples. But he dared not touch or even go near the apples, for around the trunk was coiled old Laden, a monstrous dragon whose watchful eyes were never closed. He then climbed up to the top of the mountain to talk to Atlas, but Atlas did not receive him hospitably for an oracle had declared that the day would come when a son of Jupiter would take his golden fruit, and he had therefore forbidden strangers to come into his land. Perseus begged for just one night of rest, but Atlas roared in anger and would not even listen to him. "Have a rest yourself, then!" shouted our hero, and held up the Gorgon's head. The great giant gave one startled look, which was plenty, for the features of his face grew stiff as weather-beaten ledges, his bones congealed like a mass of Tock, and his beard stuck out like a forest of naked trees! Perseus hurriedly swung the head behind him and, a trifle panic-stricken perhaps, flew away over the African desert with the blood falling drip, drip, drip on the hot, gray sands.
"The gory drops distilled, as swift he flew,
And from each drop envenomed serpents grew."
Thus from this monster Nature produced the first snakes, which bred and multiplied on the desert until the region was infested with the miserable creatures.
The great dark splash which the sea had caught when first he rose in the air after beheading the Gorgon, had formed the silvery winged Pegasus, the world's first horse. This splendid animal, however, did not stay with Perseus, but spread its beautiful feathered wings in the air and flew directly to Greece, where it was presented to the Muses on Mount Helicon and afterwards given a constellation.
Flying over mountains and deserts and the narrow green valley of the Nile, Perseus came to the shore of Palestine, the home of the Ethiopians, which he found inundated with floods and strewn with the wreckage of towns and villages. Traveling slowly above the sea-coast of this unfortunate country, he spied something white at the water's edge, and coming closer saw that it was a maiden chained by her wrists and ankles to a rock, while not far distant and ever approaching closer, was the most terrifying monster that he had ever seen. On the star maps this creature is labeled a "whale." It may have been a whale, and it may not, who knows? Sixty or seventy feet of whale lashing a tail big enough to destroy a large boat would certainly seem a terrible sea-monster to people who had never seen a whale. How could they know that its fifteen or sixteen feet of gaping mouth had never tasted anything but tiny crustaceans and acalephæ strained from sea-water! Hero indeed was Perseus, for he skimmed swiftly down to a nearby wave, and poising upon its frothy peak, thrust the monster deep below the jaw. A brave, brave deed was this, and the people shouted their vast amazement and delight. As the great sea-creature leaped and lunged and fell, Perseus again snatched the blood-freezing head of the Medusa from his wallet—and the cliffs trembled as the monster hit the bottom of the sea!
THE STORY OF ANDROMEDA IMMORTALIZED IN STARS.