Wonder Stories: The Best Myths for Boys and GirlsBailey, Carolyn Sherwin
General
Wonder Stories: The Best Myths for Boys and Girls
Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin
Mythology, Classical -- Juvenile literature
Jupiter decided that the people of the earth should be further punished.
He imprisoned the north wind which scatters the clouds and sent out the
south wind to cover the face of the sky with pitchy darkness. The clouds
were driven together with a crash and torrents of rain fell. The crops
were laid low so that all the year's labor of the husbandman was
destroyed. Jupiter even called upon his brother, Neptune, who was the
god of the sea, to let loose the rivers and pour them over the land. He
tore the land with an earthquake so that even the sea overflowed its
shores. Such a flood as followed; the earth was nearly all sea without
shore! The hills were the only land, and people were obliged to ride
from one to another of them in boats while the fish swam among the tree
tops. If an anchor was dropped, it found a place in a garden. Awkward
sea-calves gamboled about where there had once been lambs playing in
green pastures; wolves struggled in the water among sheep, and yellow
lions and tigers were submerged by the rush of the sea.
It really seemed as if the earth was about to be lost in a second chaos,
but at last a green mountain peak appeared above the waste that the
waters had made and on it a man and woman of the race the giant
Prometheus had made took refuge. Remembering the heavenly seed that was
part of their birthright, they looked up toward the sky and asked
Jupiter to take pity on them. Jupiter ordered the north wind to drive
away the clouds, and Neptune sounded his horn to order the waters to
retreat. The waters obeyed, and the sea returned to its basins.
It was a very bare and desolate earth upon which the people looked down
from the Mount of Parnassus. They had not forgotten how to build and
mine and plant and harvest and keep a home. They would have to begin
things all over again, they knew, and there were two ways of going about
it.
One way would be to leave the earth the desert place which it now was
and try to wreak vengeance on the gods for the destruction they had
brought upon the earth. Prometheus, the Titan, still lived and he was
possessed of a secret by means of which he could take Jupiter's throne
away from him. He would probably never have used this secret, but the
fact that he had it came to the ears of the mighty Jupiter and caused
much consternation among the gods. Jupiter ordered Vulcan, the smith of
the gods, to forge some great links for a heavy chain. With these he
chained Prometheus to a rock and sent a vulture to eat his flesh which
grew again continually so that Prometheus suffered most terrible pain as
the vulture returned each day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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