In such manner the great doubter is getting toward shore, but even here his doubts cease not. Steep jutting cliffs may not permit him to land, the billows may dash him to death on the sharp shoaly rocks, or carry him out again to sea, or some huge monster of the deep may snap him up in its jaws; thus he is dashed about internally, on the billows of doubt. But this grinding within is stopped by the grinding he gets without; a mighty surge overwhelms him, he clutches a rock and saves himself, but leaves flakes of flesh from his hands behind on the rock. "He swam along the coast and eyed it well," he even reaches the mouth of a soft-flowing river, where was a smooth beach and a shelter from the wind. Here is the spot so long desired, here then he passes to an act of faith, he prays to the river which becomes at once to the Greek imagination a God. 3. This brings us to the third water deity, and we observe a kind of scale from the universal one, Neptune, down to a local one, that of the river. The middle one, Ino, is the humane kindly phase of the great deep, showing her kinship with man; Neptune was the ruder god of the physical sea, and, to the Homeric Greek, the most powerful and natural. No wonder that he was angry at that little raft and its builder; it meant his ultimate subjection. The prayer of Ulysses to the River-God is, on the whole, the finest passage in the present Book. It shows him now a man of faith, humbled though he be to the last degree of misery: "Hear me, ruler, whoever thou art, I approach thee much-besought. The deathless Gods revere the prayer of him who comes to them and asks for mercy, as I now come to thy stream. Pity, ruler, me thy suppliant." Certainly a lofty recognition of the true nature of deity; no wonder that the River stayed his current, smoothed the waves and made a calm before him. Such a view of the Gods reveals to us the inner depths of the Hero's character; it calls to mind that speech of Phoenix in the Iliad (Book Ninth) where he says that the Gods are placable. As soon as Ulysses makes this utterance from his heart, he is saved, the Divine Order is adjusted to his prayer, he having of course put himself into harmony with the same. He has no longer any need of the protecting veil of the sea-goddess Ino, having escaped from the angry element, and obtained the help of the new deity belonging to the place. He restores the veil to the Goddess according to her request, in which symbolic act we may possibly read a consecration of the object which had saved him, as well as a recognition of the deity: "This veil of salvation belongs not to me, but to the Goddess." Not of his strength alone was he saved from the waves.