SOURCE: "Song of the Sirens" (Sea-Cursed, 1919) by Edward Lucas White

DESCRIPTION: "There sat the sirens. Well I recognized now what they were. Both were awake now and both singing. What I had seen through the glass was visible more clearly, more intelligibly. They were indeed shaped like young, healthy women; like well-matured Caucasian women. They were covered all over with close, soft plumage, like the breast of a dove, a pale, delicate, iridescent, pinkish gray. As a woman's long hair might trail to her hips, there trailed from their heads a mass of long, dark strands. Imagine single strands of ostrich feathers, a yard long or more, curling spirally or at random, colored the deep, shot, blue-green of the eye of a peacock feather, or a gamecock's hackles...Their faces were oval, their features small, clean-cut, regular and shapely, their foreheads were wide and low, their brows were separate, arched, penciled and defined, not of hair, but of tiny feathers, of gold-shot, black, blue-green, like the color of their ringlets, but far darker...Their eyes were dark blue-gray, bright and young, their noses were small and straight, low between the eyes, neither wide nor narrow, and with molded nostrils, rolled and fine. Their upper lips were short, both lips crimson red and curved about their small mouths, their teeth were very white, their chins round and babyish. They were beautiful and the act of singing did not mar their beauty. Their mouths did not strain open, but their lips parted easily into an opening. Their throats seemed to ripple like the throat of a trilling canary-bird. They sang with zest and the zest made them all the more beautiful. But it was not so much their beauty that impressed me, it was the nobility of their faces. " ("The Song of the Sirens" by Edward Lucas White)

NOTES: Somewhere off the east shore of Africa, a whaling ship comes to an island inhabited by the sirens. Lying on a windrow of human bones, anyone who hears these weird bird-like creatures is enrapped until death takes them. The one deaf sailor tries to feed and save the crew but all die in time. He tries to approach the sirens but about forty feet all around them a weird force field exists, holding him back. Any thought of shooting the sirens with a gun or any other weapon fails within the mind of the man. He is not trapped but he can not raise his hand against them either. In the end he sails away alone. After regaining home and a fortune he buys a yacht and returns to the island. Whether to destroy the sirens or to die watching them is not sure.

HISTORY: White does a great job of making the sirens bird like. All his descriptors are bird based: "like the breast of a dove", "blue-green of the eye of a peacock feather", etc. This gives the classic creatures of Myth a very biological essence that singing women usually don't have. You can almost imagine these weird evolutionary freaks being the basis for the Greek stories.