But the man who had begun said: “Oh, sure. That lie is as true as if someone should like to say that by a muttered magic spell swift rivers run backward, the sluggish sea is bound fast, the winds breathe their last and lie lifeless, the sun is checked, the moon drips its foam, the stars are plucked out, the day is taken away and the night is held fast.”

The list is the stock catalogue of what Thessalian witches were believed able to do, and Latin poets had made it a set piece: reversing rivers, stilling the sea, halting the sun, pulling down the moon and the stars. Lucan gives the witches of Thessaly the same powers in Book 6 of his Civil War. Helm’s own note on this line points to Lucan 6.506, where the moon, pressed down by the chanting, comes near and drips its foam onto the herbs below, the same rare verb, despumare. The word for the spell is susurramen, “a muttering,” and Lewis & Short’s first example for it is this phrase, magicum; the other is from Martianus Capella. It comes from the same family as susurrus, the “charming whisper” of the prologue. Its sentence also holds a word Lewis & Short calls “Appuleian”: inanimis, “without breath,” said here of winds that run out of breath, “that does not blow.” The first word, nē, is a particle of assurance, “truly,” said with a sneer: “oh, sure.”