Aetna

For having been smitten to his very soul, he was crumbled to a cinder, and thunder-blasted in his prowess.

And now a helpless and paralyzed form is he, lying hard by a narrow frith, pressed down beneath the roots of Aetna.

And seated on the topmost peaks, Vulcan forges the molten masses, whence there shall one day burst forth floods devouring with fell jaws the level fields of fruitful Sicily.

With rage such as this shall Typhon boil over in hot artillery of a never-glutted fire-breathing storm, albeit he hath been reduced to ashes by the thunderbolt of Jupiter.

Nothing loath, he obeyed, and in echoing chambers beneath the ocean floor heard her solemn tones as if it were the muffled booming of the surges overhead, revealing things to come and all the means whereby he should achieve the victory in store for him.

Then at her behest, he journeyed on and on under the Midland Sea through endless corridors whose rocky walls shone thick with diamond sparks, through vaults of snowy quartz where veins of gold branched roofwards like avenues of giant ferns, until he came at last to the forge of the Cyclopes in the roots of an island mountain that is called Aetna.

Now, the Cyclopes are earth-born smiths, swart and grim of aspect, having each a single eye set in the midst of his forehead.

The peak of Aetna glitters with eternal snow, but in its hollow base is a burning fiery furnace, whence fountains of flame and torrents of molten rock spout forth at times on the mountaintop to the terror of mortals.

Beside this furnace, the Cyclopes toiled, smelting iron from the ore and forging it upon their anvils.

This task was set them by Cronus, and he it was who had shut them up in that nether dungeon.

For while they yet dwelt at liberty on the slopes of Aetna, he saw their skill in the craft of smiths and made slaves of them that all their handiwork might be his alone.

The Cyclopes stared in dumb surprise at the young god as he stood before them, but when they heard the errand he was come upon, they were glad and hastened to do his bidding.