Whether from the heat of the water by volcanic springs, the steam of Vulcanella, the incessant hot injections from Stromboli, or all of them added to the general temperature, it is certain that there are more frequent changes in this group than in the neighbourhood (The Mediterranean, Parkers, 1854, p. 250).
Speaking, again, of the Straits of Messina, he says:—
Precautions should also be taken against the heavy gusts, which at times, from the mountainous nature of the coasts, rush down the Fuimare, and are dangerous to small vessels. I have twice, with grief, seen the neglect of them prove fatal (Sicily and its Islands, Murray, 1824, p. 111).
The reason why the poetess found herself in such difficulties about the Wandering Cliffs, is because the story, as Buttmann has said, does not refer to any two islands in particular, but is derived from traveller's tales about the difficulties of navigating the Lipari islands as a whole. "They close in upon you," it was said, "so quickly one after another that a bird can hardly get through them." The "hurricanes of fire," moreover (xii. 68), suggest an allusion to the volcanic nature of the Æolian islands generally. Still more so does the dark cloud that never leaves the top of Scylla's rock (xii. 74) neither in summer nor winter.
The terrors of Scylla and Charybdis are exaggerated in the same poetic vein as the Sirens and the Wandering Cliffs. Instead of its being possible to shoot an arrow from the one to the other, they are about eight miles apart. We ought not to look for the accuracy of one of Mr. Murray's handbooks in a narrative that tells us of a monster with six heads and three rows of teeth. It is enough if there are a few grains of truth, and these there are: for Scylla is a high rock looking West, and Charybdis is (for those days) a formidable whirlpool, on the other side the Straits, off lower ground, and hard by the approach to a three pointed island. According to Admiral Smyth it is just outside Messina harbour, and is now called Galofaro. Admiral Smyth says of it:—
To the undecked boats of the Rhegians, Locrians, Zancleans and Greeks, it must have been formidable for even in the present day small craft are sometimes endangered by it, and I have seen several men-of-war, and even a seventy-four-gun, ship, whirled round on its surface; but by using due caution there is generally very little danger or inconvenience to be apprehended (Sicily and its Islands, Murray, 1824, p. 123).
I do not doubt that the Galofaro is the nucleus round which the story of Charybdis gathered, but I have seen considerable disturbance in the sea all through the Straits of Messina. Very much depends upon the state of the winds, which sometimes bank the water up in the angle between the toe of Italy and the North coast of Sicily, on which a current and strong eddies occur in the Straits of Messina. At other times there is hardly anything noticeable.
Passing over the nine days drifting in the sea, which take Ulysses from Charybdis to the island of Calypso, i.e. Pantellaria—and we may be sure he would have been made to take longer time if the writer had dared to keep him longer without food and water—it only remains for me to deal at somewhat fuller length than I have yet done with the voyage from Pantelleria to Trapani. On the eighteenth day after Ulysses had left Pantellaria, steering towards the Great Bear, but keeping it on his left, he saw the long low line of the Lilybæan coast rising on the horizon. He does not appear to have seen the island of Favognana, which must have been quite near, and it was perhaps as well that he did not, for he could hardly have failed to recognise it as the one on which he had hunted the goats some eight or nine years previously, and this might have puzzled him.
But though he is allowed to see the land he must not be permitted to follow it up, or, as I have explained already, he would have gone straight into the harbour of Scheria, whereas he is particularly wanted to meet Nausicaa on the North side of the town, and to know nothing about Scheria till she brings him to it. Neptune, therefore, is made to catch sight of him at this moment and to raise a frightful hurricane; sea and sky become obscured in clouds, with a darkness as dense as night (v. 291-294), and thus Ulysses is carried a long distance apparently to the North, for when he has been taken far enough, Minerva blows him two days and two nights before a North wind, and hence Southwards, till he reaches the harbour near which Nausicaa can meet him.
There are no other such noticeable darknesses in the Odyssey, as this and the one of Book ix. 144, alluded to on p. 188. They both occur in the same place, and for the same reason—to keep the town of Scheria in reserve.