In replying she of course lost her grip on the baton and plummeted to the sea below.* "I don't know I've got my eyes closed, pal." Knowing that as a polite and well brought up young lass Abscissa was bound to answer, which she did saying "Lovely view from up here, eh, Your Highness?" Although this was Abscissa's first flight all went well until they were halfway across the sea, when the swan's sense of humour and incorrigible lack of responsibility led him to say In Abscissa's case by gripping the baton with her teeth. This referred to the swan's usual method of carrying passengers, namely balancing a stout wooden baton across the tops of his webbed feet with his passenger holding onto the central part of the baton. "Just remember to keep your mouth closed on the way across." King Nestor's parting words to Abscissa were The swan, who to be fair was often misunderstood due to his love of practical jokes and his astringently dry sense of humour, which he kept to himself, was more used to ferrying turtles so he was more than a bit honoured by this task. King Nestor said that rather than going all the way round the great sea Abscissa could use the swan to fly her across, that way she would be back in time for the latest episode of Homer's Odyssey. One day King Nestor called for Abscissa and instructed her to pop across to his brother King Zog of Charybdis and see if he had finished with the two dozen goats he had borrowed the previous weekend to graze the lawn. The one positive aspect of Abscissa's ugliness was that the goddess Athene, who was reputedly very beautiful and notoriously unkind towards attractive female mortals saw that Abscissa was no sort of rival and therefore regarded her as one of her favourites. What is agreed by all authorities is that she had teeth and jaws of immense strength, and no argument about the trotters. Other sources say that while she was certainly repulsive to a remarkable degree, she only looked like a donkey and kept the real donkey's head in a pot of basil in a box room in the highest turret of the north west tower, behind the hyperboreans. It is said in some sources that while in every other respect she appeared to be a fairly normal, run of the mill princess she possessed instead of a human head the head of a donkey, and instead of hands pigs trotters. ("What are you lot complaining about now? Look at the quality of that you'd have to go a long way to find better than that! Fair cleans the tubes out, eh?"Īnd so on in that vein.) - so that was the end of the matter.Ībscissa was the hideously ugly seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of the immensely rich King Nestor of Scylla, so that's alright then. The owners of these sheep and cattle made numerous pleas to the gods to rid them of this monster but Poseidon had repeatedly advised them to stop complaining and be grateful for the large quantities of exceptionally high quality manure that Gyron left behind For the most part Gyron contented himself with large quantities of fish and other sea creatures for food but would occasionally (usually on quarter days) emerge from the murky depths to devour a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep - always in multiples of six animals, for although he had nine heads he had only six stomachs. Gyron was the nine headed sea-serpent which lived in the immeasurable depths of the great inland sea that lay between the twin cities of Scylla and Charybdis. The tale of Gyron and Abscissa was one of those considered by Ovid but not used in the Metamorphoses. Jan, Feb 76 (digital reworking - April 2009)Ġ Contents 00 0 Previous image 00 0 File A 00 0 Next image 00 0 Notes and biography
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