After the first Dionysos had been slaughtered, Father Zeus learnt the trick of the mirror with its reflected image. He attacked the mother of the Titans with avenging brand, and shut up the murderers of horned Dionysos within the gate of Tartaros : the trees blazed, the hair of suffering Earth was scorched with heat. He kindled the Fast : the dawn-lands of Bactria blazed under blazing bolts, the Assyrian waves set afire the neighbouring Caspian Sea and the Indian mountains, the Red Sea rolled billows of flame and warmed Arabian Nereus, The opposite West also fiery Zeus blasted with his thunderbolt in love for his child; and under the foot of Zephyros the western brine half-burnt spat out a shining stream; the Northern ridges—even the surface of the frozen Northern Sea bubbled and burned : under the clime of snowy Algoceros the Southern corner boiled with hotter sparks.
Now Oceanos poured rivers of tears from his watery eyes, a libation of suppliant prayer. Then Zeus calmed his wrath at the sight of the scorched earth; he pitied her, and wished to wash with water the ashes of ruin and the fiery wounds of the land.
Then Rainy Zeus covered the whole sky with clouds and flooded all the earth. Zeus’s heavenly trumpet bellowed with its thunderclaps, while all the stars moved in their appointed houses: when the Sun in his four-horse chariot drove shining over the Lion’s back, his own house ; the Moon of threefold form rolled in her onrunning car over the eightfoot Crab; Cypris in her equinoctial course under the dewy region had left the Ram’s horn behind, and held her spring-time house in the heavenly Bull which knows no winter: the Sun’s neighbour Ares possessed the Scorpion, harbinger of the Plow, encircled by the blazing Bull, and ogled Aphrodite opposite with a sidelong glance; Zeus of nightfall, the twelvemonth traveller who completes the was treading on the starry Fishes, having on his right the round- faced Moon in trine; Cronos passed through the showery back of Aigoceros drenched in the frosty light ; round the bright Maiden Hermes was poised on his pinions, because as a dispenser of justice he had Justice for his house,
Now the barriers of the seven-zoned watery sky were opened, when Zeus poured down his showers. The mountain-torrents roared with fuller fountains of the loud-splashing gulf. The lakes, liquid daughters cut off from Oceanos, raised their surface. The fountains shot spouts of the lower waters of Oceanos into the air. The cliffs were besprinkled, the dry thirsty hills were drenched as with rivers streaming over the heights : the sea rose until Nereids became Oreads on the hills over the woodland. O poor thing! Maid Echo had to swim with unpractised hands, and felt a new fear for that old maiden zone—Pan she had escaped, but she might be caught by Poseidon ! Sea-lions now leaped with dripping limbs in the land-lions’ cave among rocks they knew not, and in the […] of a mountain-torrent a stray boar met with a dolphin of the sea. Wild beasts and fishes navigated in common stormy floods that poured from the mountains. The many-footed squid dragged his many coils into the hills, and pounced on the hare. The dripping Tritons at the edge of a secret wood wagged their green forked tails against their flanks, and hid in the mountain vaults where Pan had his habitation, leaving their familiar speckled conchs to sail about with the winds. Nereus on his travels met rock-loving Pan on a submerged hill, the rock-dweller left his sea and changed it for the hill, leaving the waterlogged pan’s-pipes that floated ; while he took to the watery cave where Pholos once had sheltered.
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