713About to say such things, the Cyllenian saw that all the eyes had succumbed and their lights were covered in sleep. 715At once he checks his voice and deepens the sleep, stroking the drowsy eyes with his magic wand. 717Without delay he strikes him with his hooked sword as he nods, where the head meets the neck, and throws him bloody from the rock and stains the sheer cliff with blood. 720Argus, you lie low, and the light you had in so many lights is put out, and one night occupies a hundred eyes. 722Saturn's daughter takes them up and places them in the feathers of her bird and fills its tail with starry gems.
724At once she blazed with anger, and did not put off the time of her wrath, but set a horrifying Fury before the eyes and mind of the Argive rival, and buried hidden goads in her breast, and drove her in terror as a fugitive through the whole world. 728You remained, Nile, as the end of her boundless toil. 729As soon as she reached it, she sank down with her knees set on the edge of the bank and, lifting her face high with neck thrown back towards the stars, all she could lift, she seemed with groans and tears and mournful lowing to complain to Jupiter and beg for an end of her sufferings.
734He, embracing his wife's neck with his arms, asks her at last to end the punishment, and says, 'For the future lay aside your fears; 736she will never be a cause of grief to you': and he bids the Stygian marshes hear this. 738When the goddess was soothed, Io takes on her former face and becomes what she was before: the bristles flee from her body, the horns shrink, the orb of her eye becomes narrower, the gape of her jaws is contracted, her shoulders and hands return, and the hoof, parting into five nails, vanishes: nothing of the cow's form remains in her but her whiteness. 744And the nymph, content with the service of two feet, stands upright, and fears to speak, lest she should low like a heifer, and timidly tries again the words so long interrupted.