Guided by the Mannikin, Faust and Mephistopheles arrive at the Pharsalian fields--the great plain of Thessaly, renowned for the battle of Pharsalus, in which Caesar conquered Pompey--renowned too as the classic ground of witches and wizards. Griffins, Sphinxes and Sirens meet them. They can tell Faust nothing about Helen, but they direct him to Cheiron the Centaur (a link, as it were, between the monstrous forms of barbarous oriental imagination and Hellenic art). Cheiron the Centaur has himself borne Helen on his back, and excites Faust's passion by the description of her beauty. He takes Faust to the prophetess Manto, daughter of the old blind Theban prophet Teiresias, and she conducts him to a dark fissure--a Bocca dell' Inferno--at the foot of Mount Olympus, such as that which you may have seen in the Sibyl's cave on Lake Avernus; and here (as once Orpheus did in search of Eurydice) he descends to the realms of the dead to seek the help of Persephone, Queen of Hades, in his quest for Helen. Meanwhile Mephisto has found that in spite of his distaste for classic art and beauty there are elements in the classical witches' sabbath not less congenial to him than those of the Blocksberg with its northern and more modern types of devilry and bestiality. He is enchanted with the ghoulish vampire Empusa and the monster Lamia, half-snake half-woman, and at length finds _his_ ideal of beauty in the loathsome and terrible Phorkyads, daughters of Phorkys, an old god of the sea. The Phorkyads are sometimes described as identical with, sometimes as sisters of, the Gorgons, and represent the climax of all that Greek imagination has created of the horrible. The three sisters are pictured in Greek mythology as possessing between them only one eye and one tooth, which they pass round for use. They dwelt in outer darkness, being too terrible for sun or moon to look upon. Even Mephistopheles is at first a little staggered by the sight, but he soon finds himself on familiar terms with them and ends by borrowing the form of one of them (she becoming for the time absorbed into her two sisters)--for as medieval devil he has no right of entrée into that classical scene in which he and Faust are now to play their parts. It is therefore in the form of a Phorkyad or Gorgon that Mephisto will appear when we next meet him.