Scylla and Charybdis
From The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
Scylla and Charybdis are figures from Greek mythology. Scylla is a legendary, man-eating monster that lives on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart, the sea-swallowing monster Charybdis. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other — so close that sailors attempting to avoid the whirlpools of Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa.
In the Sherlock Holmes stories
- Dr. Watson used Scylla and Charybdis to compare two previous Sherlock Holmes stories :
- « The small matter which I have chronicled under the heading of 'A Study in Scarlet,' and that other later one connected with the loss of the Gloria Scott, may serve as examples of this Scylla and Charybdis which are for ever threatening his historian. » (RESI 4).
