Odyssey 10.148 · Book 10, lines 148–150
Smoke through the woods
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ἔστην δὲ σκοπιὴν ἐς παιπαλόεσσαν ἀνελθών, καί μοι ἐείσατο καπνὸς ἀπὸ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης, Κίρκης ἐν μεγάροισι διὰ δρυμὰ πυκνὰ καὶ ὕλην.
And I stood, having climbed onto a rugged peak, and to me appeared smoke from the wide-wayed earth, in Circe's halls, through dense thickets and woodland.
Word by word
The setting
From the high ground Odysseus scans Aeaea — and catches the first sign of life on the island.
A note on this passage
The scout's find. Odysseus reaches the summit and sees it: a thread of smoke rising through thick forest, the mark of a hearth somewhere among the trees. That smoke is Circe's house, and with it the whole plot of the island turns toward her.
The undercurrent is the oldest sign in the world. Smoke means a fire, a home, someone tending it — and the homeless man is drawn straight to it. But the reader already knows the name Homer attaches to the hearth: it is "in Circe's halls." What reads to Odysseus as a promise of welcome is the mouth of the year-long enchantment. The epithet εὐρυόδεια, the "wide-wayed" earth, opens the frame to the whole broad world at the very moment the story narrows to a single roof in the trees.
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