5
Put out your hand, Hermes. This is an uncommonly big piece of stage-machinery that you are mounting me on.
5
Must be done, if you are bound to see everything, Charon. One can’t see sights without taking chances. Come, take hold of my right hand and look out you don’t step where it is slippery. Good, you are up too, As Parnassus has two peaks, let us each take a suminit for himself and sit on it. Now, then, look round about you and inspect everything.
6
I see a quantity of land with a great lagoon encircling it, mountains, rivers bigger than Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon, tiny little men, and things which look like their hiding-places.
6
Those things which you take to be hiding-places are cities.
6
Do you know, Hermes, we haven’t accomplished anything, but have moved Mount Parnassus, Castaly and all, Mount Oeta and the rest of them for nothing.
6
Why?
6
I can’t see anything plainly from on high. What I wanted was not just to look at cities and mountains as in a picture, but to observe men themselves, what they are doing and what they are saying. For instance, when we first met and you saw me laughing and asked what I was laughing at, I had heard something which amused me vastly.
6
What was it?
6
A man who had been invited to dinner, I take it, by one of his friends for the next day replied “Certainly I shall come,” and even as he spoke a tile from the roof which someone had dislodged fell on him and killed him. I had to laugh at him because he did not keep his promise—I_ think I shall go down a little, so as to see and_ hear better.
7
Hold still; I will remedy that for you too and will. make you sharp-sighted in a minute by getting a charm out of Homer for this purpose as well as the other. When I say the verses remember not to ‘be short-sighted any longer, but to sce everything distinctly.
7
Only say them!
