Read the excerpt from The Odyssey.As in a smithyone sees a white-hot axehead or an adzeplunged and wrung in a cold tub, screeching steam–the way they make soft iron hale and hard—:just so that eyeball hissed around the spike.

The excerpt compares the Cyclops’s eye hissing around the spike to red-hot iron plunged into cold water. That image emphasizes how hot and searing the spike is, so the best answer is “how hot the spear actually is.”

AI-written and checked against the verified answer.