At dawn Odysseus put on cloak and tunic. Calypso put on a great shining mantle, a golden belt, and a veil. She gave him a sharp bronze axe with an olive-wood handle and a polished adze, and led him to tall dry trees at the island’s edge — alder, poplar, and fir that would float lightly. Then she went back. He felled twenty timbers, cut them with bronze, smoothed them true to the line.
She brought augers. He bored and fitted the pieces, hammered them with pegs and fastenings, and made a raft as wide as a freighter’s bottom — deck on close-set ribs, long gunwales, mast and yard, steering-oar, willow fencing against the wave. She brought cloth for sails; he made braces and sheets and halyards, and with levers heaved her down to the bright salt water.
On the fourth day the work was done. On the fifth she bathed him, put fragrant clothes on him, stowed wine and water and provisions, and sent a warm following wind. Gladly he spread sail and steered.
Sleep never fell on his eyelids as he watched the Pleiades, late-setting Bootes, and the Bear — which alone has no share in Ocean’s baths. Calypso had told him to keep the Bear on his left. Seventeen days he sailed; on the eighteenth the Phaeacians’ shadowy mountains rose like a shield on the misty sea.