XI. THE PLACE OF DRAGONS 391

snake. Adders, according to an old fancy, were born from the jaws of their living mother. Supernatural horror attaches to this symbolic one, writhing out from between the teeth of that ophidian death’s-head. And the plague, not yet fully come forth, but already about its father’s business, venomously fastens on a frog, type of the sinner whose degradation is but the beginning of punishment. So soon the worm that dies not is also upon him-in its fang Circean poison to make the victim one with his plague, as in that terrible circle those, afflicted, whom “vita bestial piacque e non umana.”¹

231. Two spiral shells* lie on the sand, in shape related to each other as frog to lizard, or as Spenser’s urchins, spoken of above, to his snails. One is round and short, with smooth viscous-looking lip, turned over, and lying towards the spectator. The other is finer in form, and of a kind noticeable for its rows of delicate spines. But, since the dweller in this one died, the waves of many a long-fallen tide rolling on the shingle have worn it almost smooth, as you may see its fellows to-day by hundreds along Lido shore. Now, such shells were, through heathen ages innumerable and over many lands, holy things, because of their whorls moving from left to right,† in some mysterious sympathy, it seemed, with the sun in his daily course through heaven. Then as the open clam-shell was special symbol of Venus, so these became of the Syrian Venus, Ashtaroth, Ephesian Artemis, queen, not of purity but of abundance, Mylitta, htiV pot estin,² the many-named and widely worshipped.‡ In Syrian figures still existing

* Ovid associates shells with the enemy of Andromeda, but regarding it as a very ancient and fishlike monster, plants them on its back-

“Terga cavis super obsita conchis.”

-Ov., Met., iv. 724.

† In India, for the same reason, one of the leading marks of the Buddha’s perfection was his hair, thus spiral.

‡ Compare the curious tale about the Echeneis. Pliny, Hist. Nat., ix. 25. “De echeneide enjusque naturâ mirabili.”

¹ [Inferno, xxiv. 124.]

² [An adaptation of the first line of the first ode in the Agamemnon.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]