[115]
[ Then it had a shallow shelving bottom.]
[116]
[ Doubtless the road would pass the harbour in Odyssean times as it passes the salt works now; indeed, if there is to be a road at all there is no other level ground which it could take. See map above referred to.]
[117]
[ The rock at the end of the Northern harbour of Trapani, to which I suppose the writer of the “Odyssey” to be here referring, still bears the name Malconsiglio—“the rock of evil counsel.” There is a legend that it was a ship of Turkish pirates who were intending to attack Trapani, but the “Madonna di Trapani” crushed them under this rock just as they were coming into port. My friend Cavaliere Giannitrapani of Trapani told me that his father used to tell him when he was a boy that if he would drop exactly three drops of oil on to the water near the rock, he would see the ship still at the bottom. The legend is evidently a Christianised version of the Odyssean story, while the name supplies the additional detail that the disaster happened in consequence of an evil counsel.]
[118]
[ It would seem then that the ship had got all the way back from Ithaca in about a quarter of an hour.]
[119]
[ And may we not add “and also to prevent his recognising that he was only in the place where he had met Nausicaa two days earlier.”]