The Conch Sounds
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Na mão a grande concha retorcida Que trazia, com força, já tocava; A voz grande canora foi ouvida Por todo o mar, que longe retumbava. Já toda a companhia apercebida Dos Deuses para os paços caminhava Do Deus, que fez os muros de Dardânia, Destruídos depois da Grega insânia.
In his hand he was already sounding, with force, the great twisted conch he always carried; the huge singing voice was heard across the whole sea, which thundered far away. Already the entire company of the Gods, roused and ready, was walking toward the halls of the God who built the walls of Dardania — walls later destroyed by the madness of the Greeks.
Neptune has called a council of the sea-gods. Triton, his herald, lifts the twisted shell he always carries and blows; the gods answer the summons and file toward Neptune's palace.
This is the summons that opens the council. Triton blows, the sound travels the whole ocean, and the gods start moving. Camões keeps the whole stanza in the imperfect tense — tocava, retumbava, caminhava — so nothing lands; the horn is still blowing while the gods are still on their way. The action of the stanza is a door swinging open.
The sting is in the last two lines. Neptune is identified not as king of the sea but as the god who built Troy's walls — and Camões immediately adds that those walls came down. The reader is standing in the palace of a god whose one famous piece of construction failed. That is the frame Camões wants around the council he is about to report: a sea-god plotting the ruin of Gama's fleet, introduced by the memory of his own ruined masonry. Insânia is the Latin word, and it points at Troy's fall from both sides — Greek fury, and the folly that ends by destroying what a god made.
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