373Her prayers found their gods: for the mingled bodies of the two are joined, and a single face is put upon them, as when someone grafts branches onto a tree's bark and sees them join as they grow and mature together. 377So when their limbs came together in a clinging embrace, they are not two, and yet a double form, such that it could be called neither woman nor boy: they seem neither and both. 380So when Hermaphroditus sees that the clear waters, into which he had gone down a man, had made him half a man, and that his limbs had been softened in them, stretching out his hands, but no longer in a man's voice, he says: 'Grant a gift to your son, father and mother, to him who bears the name of you both: whatever man comes into these springs, let him come out from there half a man, and suddenly grow soft at the touch of the waters.' 387Both parents, moved, made the words of their two-formed son come true, and tainted the spring with an unchaste drug.' 389Her words were at an end.
389But still the offspring of Minyas press on with their work and scorn the god and profane his festival, when suddenly unseen drums clamoured with harsh sounds, and the flute with its curved horn and the tinkling bronzes ring out; 393myrrh and saffron give off their scent, and, a thing beyond belief, the webs began to grow green and the hanging cloth to put forth leaves in the likeness of ivy. 396Part turns into vines, and what were threads a moment ago are changed into vine-shoots; 397from the warp a vine-leaf comes out; 398the purple lends its brightness to the painted grapes. 399And now the day was spent, and the time was coming on which you could call neither darkness nor light, but the borderland of doubtful night, though still with light: suddenly the house seems to shake, and the oily lamps to blaze, and the rooms to glow with ruddy fires, and false phantoms of savage beasts to howl.
405For some time now the sisters have been hiding all through the smoke-filled house, and scattered in different places they shun the fires and lights; 407and while they seek the darkness, a membrane stretches over their small limbs and encloses their arms in a thin wing. 409Nor does the darkness let them know by what means they lost their former shape. 410No feathers lifted them, yet they held themselves up on translucent wings; 412and trying to speak, they utter a tiny voice, in proportion to their bodies, and make their slight complaints in squeaks. 414They haunt houses, not forests, and, hating the light, they fly by night, and take their name from the late evening.