The Artillery Salute
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Não faltam ali os raios de artifício, Os trêmulos cometas imitando; Fazem os bombardeiros seu ofício, O céu, a terra e as ondas atroando. Mostra-se dos Ciclopas o exercício Nas bombas que de fogo estão queimando; Outros com vozes, com que o céu feriam, Instrumentos altíssonos tangiam.
Nor are there lacking flashes of firework there, mimicking trembling comets; the gunners do their office, deafening the sky, the earth, and the waves. The labor of the Cyclopes is put on show in the shells that stand burning with fire; while others, with voices that struck at heaven, were sounding their loud instruments.
As Gama's fleet is welcomed at Melinde, the Portuguese answer the shore's festivity with a thunderous display of fireworks and cannon-fire that shakes sky, land, and sea.
This is the noise of arrival. Gama's ships have reached the friendly port of Melinde on the East African coast, and the fleet returns the shore's welcome with a barrage: rockets that mimic comets, cannon that shake sky, land, and sea at once, and blaring instruments. The stanza is pure spectacle, a burst of sound and light that closes Canto II on a note of festive alliance rather than the treachery the Portuguese met at Mombasa.
What a first reader can miss is the Cyclopes. Camões does not just say the cannon are loud; he says the gunnery displays "the labor of the Cyclopes"; the one-eyed giants who, in Virgil and Ovid, forge Jupiter's thunderbolts in Vulcan's smithy under Etna. So the firework "raios" (bolts) and the burning bombs are quietly cast as man-made thunder, human artifice reaching for the weaponry of the gods; a small classical boast folded into what looks like mere celebration.
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