THE AQUARIUM OF NAPLES
In spite of her promise, Freya made no effort to meet the sailor. "We
shall see each other.... I shall hunt you up." But it was Ferragut who
did the hunting, stationing himself around the hotel.
"How crazy I was the other morning!... I wonder what you could have
thought of me!" she said the first time that she spoke to him again.
Not every day did Ulysses have the pleasure of a conversation which
invariably developed from the _Via Partenope_ to Virgil's monument. The
most of the mornings he used to wait in vain opposite the oyster
stands, listening to the musicians who were bombarding the closed
windows of the hotel with their sentimental romances and mandolins.
Freya would not appear.
His impatience usually dragged Ulysses back to the hotel in order to
beg information of the porter. Animated by the hope of a new bill, the
flunkey would go to the telephone and inquire of the servants on the
upper floor. And then with a sad and obsequious smile, as though
lamenting his own words: "The _signora_ is not in. The _signora_ has
passed the night outside of the _albergo_." And Ferragut would go away
furious.
Sometimes he would go to see how the repairs were getting on in his
boat,--an excellent pretext for venting his wrath on somebody. On other
mornings he would go to the garden of the beach of Chiaja,--to the very
same places through which he had strolled with Freya. He was always
looking for her to appear from one moment to another. Everything 'round
about suggested some reminder of her. Trees and benches, pavements and
electric lights knew her perfectly because of having formed a part of
her regular walk.
Becoming convinced that he was waiting in vain, a last hope made him
glance toward the white building of the Aquarium. Freya had frequently
mentioned it. She was accustomed to amuse herself, oftentimes passing
entire hours there, contemplating the life of the inhabitants of the
sea. And Ferragut blinked involuntarily as he passed rapidly from the
garden boiling under the sun into the shadow of the damp galleries with
no other illumination than that of the daylight which penetrated to the
interior of the Aquarium,--a light that, seen through the water and the
glass, took on a mysterious tone, the green and diffused tint of the
subsea depths.
This visit enabled him to kill time more placidly. There came to his
mind old readings confirmed now by direct vision. He was not the kind
of sailor that sails along regardless of what exists under his keel. He
wanted to know the mysteries of the immense blue palace over whose roof
he was usually navigating, devoting himself to the study of
oceanography, the most recent of sciences.
Upon taking his first steps in the Aquarium, he immediately pictured
the marine depths which exploration had divided and charted so
unequally. Near the shores, in the zone called "the littoral" where the
rivers empty, the materials of nourishment were accumulated by the
impulse of the tides and currents, and there flourished sub-aquatic
vegetation. This was the zone of the great fish and reached down to
within two hundred fathoms of the bottom,--a depth to which the sun's
rays never penetrate. Beyond that there was no light; plant life
disappeared and with it the herbivorous animals.
The submarine grade, a gentle one down to this point, now becomes very
steep, descending rapidly to the oceanic abysses,--that immense mass of
water (almost the entire ocean), without light, without waves, without
tides, without currents, without oscillations of temperature, which is
called the "abyssal" zone.
In the littoral, the waters, healthfully agitated, vary in saltiness
according to the proximity of the rivers. The rocks and deeps are
covered with a vegetation which is green near the surface, becoming
darker and darker, even turning to a dark red and brassy yellow as it
gets further from the light. In this oceanic paradise of nutritive and
luminous waters charged with bacteria and microscopic nourishment, life
is developed in exuberance. In spite of the continual traps of the
fishermen, the marine herds keep themselves intact because of their
infinite powers of reproduction.
The fauna of the abyssal depths where the lack of light makes all
vegetation impossible, is largely carnivorous, the weak inhabitants
usually devouring the residuum and dead animals that come down from the
surface. The strong ones, in their turn, nourish themselves on the
concentrated sustenance of the little cannibals.
The bottom of the ocean, a monotonous desert of mud and sand, the
accumulated sediment of hundreds of centuries, has occasional oases of
strange vegetation. These grove-like growths spring up like spots of
light just where the meeting of the surface currents rain down a manna
of diminutive dead bodies. The twisted limestone plants, hard as stone,
are really not plants at all, but animals. Their leaves are simply
inert and treacherous tentacles which contract very suddenly, and their
flowers, avid mouths, which bend over their prey, and suck it in
through their gluttonous openings.
A fantastic light streaks this world of darkness with multicolored
shafts, animal light produced by living organisms. In the lowest
abysses sightless creatures are very scarce, contrary to the common
opinion, which imagines that almost all of them lack eyes because of
their distance from the sun. The filaments of the carnivorous trees are
garlands of lamps; the eyes of the hunting animals, electric globes;
the insignificant bacteria, light-producing little glands all of which
open or close with phosphorescent switches according to the necessity
of the moment,--sometimes in order to persecute and devour, and at
others in order to keep themselves hidden in the shadows.
The animal-plants, motionless as stars, surround their ferocious mouths
with a circle of flashing lights, and immediately their diminutive prey
feel themselves as irresistibly drawn toward them as do the moths that
fly toward the lamp, and the birds of the sea that beat against the
lighthouse.
None of the lights of the earth can compare with those of this abyssal
world. All artificial fires pale before the varieties of its organic
brilliance.
The living branches of polyps, the eyes of the animals, even the mud
sown with brilliant points, emit phosphoric shafts like sparks whose
splendors incessantly vanish and reappear. And these lights pass
through many gradations of colors:--violet, purple, orange, blue, and
especially green. On perceiving a victim nearby, the gigantic
cuttle-fishes become illuminated like livid suns, moving their arms
with death-dealing strokes.
All the abyssal beings have their organs of sight enormously developed
in order to catch even the weakest rays of light. Many have enormous,
protruding eyes. Others have them detached from the body at the end of
two cylindrical tentacles like telescopes.
Those that are blind and do not throw out any radiance are compensated
for this inferiority by the development of the tactile organs. Their
antennae and swimming organs are immeasurably prolonged in the
darkness. The filaments of their body, long hairs rich in nerve
terminals, can distinguish instantaneously the appetizing prey, or the
enemy lying in wait.
The abyssal deeps have two floors or roofs. In the highest, is the
so-called neritic zone,--the oceanic surface, diaphanous and luminous,
far from any coast. Next is seen the pelagic zone, much deeper, in
which reside the fishes of incessant motion, capable of living without
reposing on the bottom.
The corpses of the neritic animals and of those that swim between the
two waters are the direct or indirect sustenance of the abyssal fauna.
These beings with weak dental equipment and sluggish speed, badly armed
for the conquest of living prey, nourish themselves with the dropping
of this rain of alimentary material. The great swimmers, supplied with
formidable mandibles and immense and elastic stomachs, prefer the
fortunes of war, the pursuit of living prey, and devour,--as the
carnivorous devour the herbivorous on land,--all the little feeders on
débris and _plancton_. This word of recent scientific invention
presented to Captain Ferragut's mind the most humble and interesting of
the oceanic inhabitants. The _plancton_ is the life that floats in
loose clusters or forming cloud-like groups across the neritic surface,
even descending to the abyssal depths.
Wherever the _plancton_ goes, there is living animation, grouping
itself in closely packed colonies. The purest and most translucent salt
water shows under certain luminous rays a multitude of little bodies as
restless as the dust motes that dance in shafts of sunlight. These
transparent beings mingled with microscopic algae and embryonic
mucosities are the _plancton_. In its dense mass, scarcely visible to
the human eye, float the _siphonoforas_, garlands of entities united by
a transparent thread as fragile, delicate and luminous as Bohemian
crystal. Other equally subtle organisms have the form of little glass
torpedoes. The sum of all the albuminous materials floating on the sea
are condensed in these nutrient clouds to which are added the
secretions of living animals, the remnants of cadavers, the bodies
brought down by the rivers, and the nourishing fragments from the
meadows of algae.
When the _plancton_, either by chance or following some mysterious
attraction, accumulates on some determined point of the shore, the
waters boil with fishes of an astonishing fertility. The seaside towns
increase in number, the sea is filled with sails, the tables are more
opulent, industries are established, factories are opened and money
circulates along the coast, attracted thither from the interior by the
commerce in fresh and dried fish.
If the _plancton_ capriciously withdraws itself, floating toward
another shore, the marine herds emigrate behind these living meadows,
and the blue plain remains as empty as a desert accursed. The fleets of
fishing boats are placed high and dry on the beach, the shops are
closed, the stewpot is no longer steaming, the horses of the
gendarmerie charge against protesting and famine stricken crowds, the
Opposition howls in the Chambers, and the newspapers make the
Government responsible for everything.
This animal and vegetable dust nourishes the most numerous species
which, in their turn, serve as pasture for the great swimmers armed
with teeth.
The whales, most bulky of all the oceanic inhabitants, close this
destructive cycle, since they devour each other in order to live. The
Pacific giant, without teeth, supplies his organism with _plancton_
alone, absorbing it by the ton; that imperceptible and crystalline
manna nourishes his body (looking like an overturned belfry), and makes
purple, fatty rivers of warm blood circulate under its oily skin.
The transparency of the beings in the _plancton_ recalled to Ferragut's
memory the marvelous colorings of the inhabitants of the sea, adjusted
exactly to their needs of preservation. The species that live on the
surface have, as a general rule, a blue back and silver belly. In this
way it is possible for them to escape the sight of their enemies; seen
from the shadows of the depths, they are confounded with the white and
luminous color of the surface. The sardines that swim in shoals are
able to pass unnoticed, thanks to their backs blue as the water, thus
escaping the fish and the birds which are hunting them.
Living in the abysses where the light never penetrates, the pelagic
animals are not obliged to be transparent or blue like the neritic
beings on the surface. Some are opaque and colorless, others, bronzed
and black; most of them are clad in somber hues, whose splendor is the
despair of the artist's brush, incapable of imitating them. A
magnificent red seems to be the base of this color scheme, fading
gradually to pale pink, violet, amber, even losing itself in the milky
iris of the pearls and in the opalescence of the mother-of-pearl of the
mollusks. The eyes of certain fish placed at the end of jaw bones
separated from the body, sparkle like diamonds in the ends of a double
pin. The protruding glands, the warts, the curving backs, take on the
colorings of jewelry.
But the precious stones of earth are dead minerals that need rays of
light in order to emit the slightest flash. The animated gems of the
ocean--fishes and corals--sparkle with their own colors that are a
reflex of their vitality. Their green, their rose color, their intense
yellow, their metallic iridescence, all their liquid tints are
eternally glazed by a moist varnish which cannot exist in the
atmospheric world.
Some of these beings are capable of a marvelous power of mimicry that
makes them identify themselves with inanimate objects, or in a few
moments run through every gamut of color. Some of great nervous
activity, make themselves absolutely immovable and contract, filling
themselves with wrinkles, taking on the dark tone of the rocks. Others
in moments of irritation or amorous fever, cover themselves with
streaks of light and tremulous spots, different colored clouds passing
over their epidermis with every thrill. The cuttlefish and ink fish,
upon perceiving that they are pursued, enwrap themselves in a cloud of
invisibility, just as did the enchanters of old in the books of
chivalry, darkening the water with the ink stored in their glands.
Ferragut continued to pass slowly along the Aquarium between the two
rows of vertical tanks,--stone cases with thick glass that permitted
full view of the interior. The clear and shining walls that received
the fire of the sun through their upper part, spread a green reflection
over the shadows of the corridors. As they made the rounds, the
visitors took on a livid paleness, as though they were marching through
a submarine defile.
The tranquil water within the tanks was scarcely visible. Behind the
thick glass there appeared to exist only a marvelous atmosphere, an air
of dreamland in which drifted up and down various floating beings of
many colors. The bubbles of their respiration was the only thing that
announced the presence of the liquid. In the upper part of these
aquatic cages, the luminous atmosphere vibrated under a continual spray
of transparent dust,--the sea water with air injected into it that was
renewing the conditions of existence for these guests of the Aquarium.
Seeing these revivifying streams, the captain admired the nourishing
force of the blue water upon which he had passed almost all his life.
Earth lost its pride when compared with the aquatic immensity. In the
ocean had appeared the first manifestations of life, continuing then
its evolutionary cycle over the mountains which had also come up from
its depths. If the earth was the mother of man, the sea was his
grandmother.
The number of terrestrial animals is most insignificant compared with
the maritime ones. Upon the earth's surface (much smaller than the
ocean) the beings occupy only the surface of the soil, and an
atmospheric canopy of a certain number of meters. The birds and insects
seldom go beyond this in their flights. In the sea, the animals are
dispersed over all its levels, through many miles of depth multiplied
by thousands and thousands of longitudinal leagues. Infinite quantities
of creatures, whose number it is impossible to calculate, swim
incessantly in all the strata of its waters. Land is a surface, a
plane; the sea is a volume.
The immense aquatic mass, three times more salty than at the beginning
of the planet, because of a millennarian evaporation that has
diminished the liquid without absorbing its components, retains mixed
with its chlorides, copper, nickel, iron, zinc, lead, and even gold,
from the metallic veins that planetary upheaval deposits upon the
oceanic bottom; compared with this mass, the veins of mountains with
their golden sands deposited by the rivers are but insignificant
tentacles.
Silver also is dissolved in its waters. Ferragut knew by certain
calculations that with the silver floating in the ocean could be
erected pyramids more enormous than those in Egypt.
The men who once had thought of exploiting these mineral riches had
given up the visionary idea because the minerals were too diluted and
it would be impossible to make use of them. The oceanic beings know
better how to recognize their presence, letting them filter through
their bodies for the renovation and coloration of their organs. The
copper accumulates in their blood; the gold and silver are discovered
in the texture of the animal-plants; the phosphorus is absorbed by the
sponges; the lead and the zinc by species of algae.
Every oceanic creature is able to extract from the water the residuum
from certain metals dissolved into particles so incalculably tiny that
no chemical process could ever capture them. The carbonates of lime
deposited by the rivers or dragged from the coast serve innumerable
species for the construction of their coverings, skeletons, and spiral
shells. The corals, filtering the water across their flabby and mucous
bodies, solidify their hard skeletons so that they may finally be
converted into habitable islands.
The beings of disconcerting diversity that were floating, diving, or
wiggling around Ferragut were no more than oceanic water. The fish were
water made into flesh; the slimy, mucilaginous animals were water in a
gelatinous state; the crustaceans and the polypi were water turned to
stone.
In one of the tanks he saw a landscape which appeared like that of
another planet, grandiose yet at the same time reduced, like a woods
seen in a diorama. It was a palm grove, surging up between the rocks,
but the rocks were only pebbles, and the palm trees,--annelides of the
sea,--were simply worms holding themselves in upright immovability.
They kept their ringed bodies within a leathern tube that formed their
protective case, and from this rectilinear, marble-colored trunk sent
forth, like a spout of branches, the constantly moving tentacles which
served them as organs for breathing and eating.
Endowed with rare sensitiveness, it was enough for a cloud to pass
before the sun to make them shrink quickly within these tubes, deprived
of their showy capitals, like beheaded palm trees. Then, slowly and
prudently the animated pincers would come protruding again through the
opening of their cylindrical scabbards, floating in the water with
anxious hope. All these trees and flower-animals developed a mechanical
voracity whenever a microscopic victim fell under the power of their
tentacles; then the soft clusters of branches would contract, close,
drawing in their prey, and the worm, withdrawing into the lowest part
of the slender tower secreted by himself, would digest his conquest.
The other tanks then attracted the attention of the sailor.
Slipping over the stones, introducing themselves into their caverns,
drowsing, half buried in the sand,--all the varied and tumultuous
species of crustaceans were moving their cutting and tentacular
grinders and making their Japanese armor gleam: some of their frames
were red--almost black--as though guarding the dry blood of a remote
combat; others were of a scarlet freshness as though reflecting the
first fires of the flaming dawn.
The largest of the lobsters (the _homard_, the sovereign of the tables
of the rich) was resting upon the scissors of its front claws, as
powerful as an arm, or a double battle-axe. The spiny lobster was
leaping with agility over the peaks, by means of the hooks on its
claws, its weapons of war and nutrition. Its nearest relative, the
cricket of the sea, a dull and heavy animal, was sulking in the corners
covered with mire and with sea weed, in an immovability that made it
easily confounded with the stones. Around these giants, like a
democracy accustomed to endure from time to time the attack of the
strong, crayfish and shrimps were swimming in shoals. Their movements
were free and graceful, and their sensitiveness so acute that the
slightest agitation made them start, taking tremendous springs.
Ulysses kept thinking of the slavery that Nature had imposed upon these
animals, giving them their beautiful, defensive envelopment.
They were born armored and their development obliged them repeatedly to
change their form of arms. They sloughed their skins like reptiles, but
on account of their cylindrical shape were able to perform this
operation with the facility of a leg that abandons its stocking. When
it begins to crack, the crustaceans have to withdraw from out their
cuirass the multiple mechanism of their members and appendages,--claws,
antennae and the great pincers,--a slow and dangerous operation in
which many perish, lacerated by their own efforts. Then, naked and
disarmed, they have to wait until a new skin forms that in time is also
converted into a coat of mail,--all this in the midst of a hostile
environment, surrounded with greedy beasts, large and small, attracted
by their rich flesh,--and with no other defense than that of keeping
themselves in hiding.
Among the swarm of small crustaceans moving around on the sandy bottom,
hunting, eating, or fighting with a ferocious entanglement of claws,
the onlookers always search for a bizarre and extravagant little
creature, the _paguro_, nicknamed "Bernard, the Hermit." It is a snail
that advances upright as a tower, upon crab claws, yet having as a
crown the long hair of a sea-anemone.
This comical apparition is composed of three distinct animals one upon
the other--or, rather, of two living beings carrying a bier between
them. The _paguro_ crab is born with the lower part of his case
unprotected,--a most excellent tid-bit, tender and savory for hungry
fishes. The necessity for defending himself makes him seek a snail
shell in order to protect the weak part of his organism. If he
encounters an empty dwelling of this class, he appropriates it. If not,
he eats the inhabitant, introducing his posterior armed with two hooked
claws into its mother-of-pearl refuge.
But these defensive precautions are not sufficient for the weak
_paguro_. In order to live he needs rather to put himself on the
offensive, to inspire respect in devouring monsters, especially in the
octopi that are seeking as prey his trunk and hairy claws, exposed to
locomotion outside his tower.
In course of time a sea-anemone comes along and attaches itself to the
calcareous peak, the number often amounting to five or six, although
there is no bodily relation between the _paguro_ and the organisms on
top. They are simply partners with a reciprocal interest. The
animal-plants sting like nettles; all the monsters without a shell flee
from the poison of their tingling organs, and the fragments of their
hair burn like pins of fire. In this manner the humble _paguro_,
carrying upon his back his tower crowned with formidable batteries,
inspires terror in the gigantic beasts of the deep. The anemones on
their part are grateful to him for being thus able to pass incessantly
from one side to the other, coming in contact with every class of
animals. In this way, they can eat with greater facility than their
sisters fixed on the rocks; for they do not have to wait, as the others
must, until food drifts casually to their tentacles. Besides this,
there is always floating on top some of the remains of the booty that
the crafty crab in his wandering impunity has gathered below.
Ferragut, on passing from one tank to the other, mentally established
the gradation of the fauna from the primitive protoplast to the perfect
organism.
The sponges of the Mediterranean swam as soon as they were born, when
they were like pin-heads, with vibratory movements. Then they remained
immovable, the water filtering through the cracks and crannies of their
texture, protecting their delicate flesh with a bristling of
spikes,--sharp limestone needles with which they pierced the passing
fishes and rendered them immovable, availing themselves of the
nourishment of their putrefying remains.
The nettles of the sea spread out their stinging threads by the
thousands, discharging a venom that stupefies the victim and makes him
fall into their corolla. With unlimited voracity, and fastened to the
rocks, they overpower fish much larger than they, and at the first hint
of danger shrink together in such a way that it is very difficult to
see them. The sea-plumes lie flabby and dark as dead animals, until
absorbing water, they suddenly rear themselves up, transparent and full
of leaves. Thus they go from one side to the other, with the lightness
of a feather, or, burrowing in the sand, send forth a phosphoric glow.
The belles of the sea, the elegant Medusae, open out the floating
circle of their fragile beauty. They are transparent fungi, open
umbrellas of glass that advance by means of their contractions. From
the inner center of their dome hangs a tube equally transparent and
gelatinous,--the mouth of the animal. Long filaments depend from the
edges of their circular forms, sensitive tentacles that at the same
time maintain their floating equilibrium.
These fragile beings, that appear to belong to an enchanted fauna,
white as rock crystal with soft borders of rose color or violet, sting
like nettles and defend themselves by their fiery touch. Some subtle
and colorless parasols were living here in the tank under the
protection of a second enclosure of crystal, and their mucous mistiness
scarcely showed itself within this bell-shaped glass except as a pale
line of blue vapor.
Below these transparent and ethereal forms that burn whatever they
touch, venturing to capture prey much larger than themselves, were
grouped as in gardens the so-called "flower of blood," the red coral,
and especially the star-fish, forming with their corolla an
orange-colored ring.
The captain had seen these stony vegetations, like submerged groves, in
the depths of the Dead Sea and also in the southern seas. He had sailed
over them under the illusion that through the bluish depths of the
ocean were circulating broad rivers of blood.
The _oseznos_ (bear-cubs) and the star-fish were slowly waving the
forms that had given rise to their names, secreting poisons in order to
paralyze their victims, contracting themselves until they formed a ball
of lances that grasped their prey in a deadly embrace or cut it with
the bony knives of their radiating body. The iris of the sea balanced
themselves on end, moving their members as though they were petals.
Upon the fine sandy depths or attached to the rocks, the mollusks lived
in the protection of their shells.
The necessity of giving themselves up to sleep with relative security,
without fear of the general rapacity which is the oceanic law, is a
matter of concern to all of these marine beings, making them
constructive and inventive. The crustaceans live within their shells or
take advantage of ready-made refuges of limestone, expelling their
former owners; the animal-plants exhale toxins; the _planctonic_
beings, transparent and gelatinous, burn like a crystal exposed to
fire; some organisms apparently weak and flabby, have in their tails
the force of a carpenter's bit, perforating the rock sufficiently to
create a cavern of refuge in its hard interior.... And the timid
mollusks, trembling and succulent pulp, have fabricated for their
protection the strong shields of their valves,--two concave walls that
on opening form their door, and on closing, their house.
A bit of flesh protrudes outside these shells, like a white tongue. In
some it takes the form of a sole, and serves as a foot, the mollusk
marching with his dwelling upon the back of this unique support. In
others it is a swimmer, and the shell, opening and shutting its valves
like a propelling mouth, ascends in a straight line to the surface,
falling afterwards with the two shields closed.
These herbivorous fresh-water animals live by drinking in the
light,--feeling the necessity of the surface waters or the shallow
depths with their limpid glades--and this light, spreading over the
white interior of their dwelling, decorates it with all the fleeting
colors of the iris, giving to the limestone the mysterious shimmer of
mother-of-pearl.
Ulysses admired the odd forms of their winding passageways. They were
like the palaces of the Orient, dark and forbidding on the outside,
glistening within like a lake of pearl. Some received their terrestrial
names because of the special form of their shell--the rabbit, the
helmet, triton's horn, the cask, the Mediterranean parasol.
They were grazing with bucolic tranquillity on the maritime pasture
lands, contemplated from afar by the mussels, the oysters, and other
bi-valves, attached to the rocks by a hard and horny hank of silk that
enwrapped their enclosures. Some of these shells, called hams,--clams
of great size, with valves in the form of a club,--had fixed themselves
upright in the mire, giving the appearance of a submerged Celtic camp,
with a succession of obelisks swallowed up by the depths of the sea.
The one called the date-shell can, assisted by its liquid acid, pierce
the hardest stone with its cylindrical gimlet. The columns of Hellenic
temples, submerged in the Gulf of Naples and brought to light by an
earthquake, are bored from one end to the other by this diminutive
perforator.
Cries of surprise and nervous laughter suddenly reached Ferragut. They
came from that part of the Aquarium where the fish tanks were. In the
corridor was a little trough of water and at the bottom a kind of rag,
flabby and gray, with black rings on the back. This animal always
attracted the immediate curiosity of the visitors. Everybody would ask
for it.
Groups of countrymen, city families preceded by their offspring, pairs
of soldiers, all might be seen consulting before it and experimenting,
advancing their hands over the trough with a certain hesitation.
Finally they would touch the living rag at the bottom,--the gelatinous
flesh of the fish-torpedo,--receiving a series of electric shocks which
quickly made them loosen their prey, laughing and raising the other
hand to their jerking arms.
Ulysses on reaching the fish tanks had the sensation of a traveler who,
after having lived among inferior humanity, encounters beings that are
almost of his own race.
There was the oceanic aristocracy, the fish free as the sea, swift,
undulating and slippery, like the waves. They all had accompanied him
for many years, appearing in the transparencies opened by the prow of
his vessel.
They were vigorous and therefore had no neck,--the most fragile and
delicate portion of terrestrial organism,--making them more like the
bull, the elephant and all the battering animals. They needed to be
light, and in order to be so had dispensed with the rigid and hard
shell of the crustacean that prevents motion, preferring the coat of
mail covered with scales, which expands and contracts, yields to the
blow but is not injured. They wished to be free, and their body, like
that of the ancient wrestlers, was covered with a slippery oil, the
oceanic mucus that becomes volatilized at the slightest pressure.
The freest animals on earth cannot be compared with them. The birds
need to perch and to rest during their sleep, but the fish continue
floating around and moving from place to place while asleep. The entire
world belongs to them. Wherever there is a mass of water,--ocean, river
or lake, in whatever altitude or latitude, a mountain peak lost in the
clouds, a valley boiling like a whirlpool, a sparkling and tropical sea
with a forest of colors in its bosoms, or a polar sea encrusted with
ice and people, with sea-lions and white bears,--there the fish always
appears.
The public of the Aquarium, seeing the flat heads of the swimming
animals near the glass, would scream and wave their arms as though they
could be seen by the fishy eyes of stupid fixity. Then they would
experience a certain dismay upon perceiving that the fish continued
their course with indifference.
Ferragut smiled before this deception. The crystal that separated the
water from the atmosphere had the density of millions of leagues,--an
insuperable obstacle interposed between two worlds that do not know
each other.
The sailor recalled the imperfect vision of the ocean inhabitants. In
spite of their bulging and movable eyes that enable them to see before
and behind them, their visual power extends but a short distance. The
splendors with which Nature clothes the butterfly cannot be appreciated
by them. Absolutely color-blind, they can appreciate only the
difference between light and darkness.
Complete silence accompanies their incomplete vision. All the aquatic
animals are deaf, or rather they completely lack the organs of hearing,
because they are unnecessary to them. Atmospheric agitations,
thunder-bolts and hurricanes do not penetrate the water. Only the
cracking shell of certain crabs and the dolorous moaning near the
surface of certain fishes, called snorers, alter this silence.
Since the ocean lacks acoustic waves, their inhabitants have never
needed to form the organs that transform them into sound. They feel
impetuously the primal necessities of animal life,--hunger and love.
They suffer madly the cruelty of sickness and pain; among themselves
they fight to the death for a meal or a mate. But all in absolute
silence, without the howl of triumph or agony with which terrestrial
animals accompany the same manifestations of their existence.
Their principal sense is that of smell, as is that of sight in the
bird. In the twilight world of the ocean, streaked with phosphorescent
and deceptive splendors, the big fish trust only to their sense of
smell and at times to that of touch.
Sometimes buried in the mud, they will ascend hundreds of yards,
attracted by the odor of the fish that are swimming on the surface.
This prodigious faculty renders useless, in part, the colors in which
the timid species clothe themselves in order to confound themselves
with lights or shadows. The greatest flesh-eaters see badly, but they
scrape the bottom with a divining touch and scent their prey at
astonishing distances.
Only the Mediterranean fishes, especially those of the Gulf of Naples,
were living in the tanks of this Aquarium. Some were lacking,--the
dolphin, of nervous movement, and the tunny, so impetuous in its
career. The captain smiled upon thinking of the mischievous pranks of
these ungovernable guests whose presence had been declined.
The voracious shark (_cabeza de olla_), the persecuting wolf of the
Mediterranean herds, was not here either. In his place were swimming
other animals of the same species, whitish and long, with great fins,
with eyes always open for lack of movable eyelids, and a mouth split
like a half-moon, under the head at the beginning of the stomach.
Ferragut sought on the bottom of the tanks the fishes of the
deep,--flattened animals that pass the greater part of their time sunk
in the sand under a coverlet of algae. The dark _uranoscopo_, with its
eyes almost united on the peak of its enormous head and its body in the
form of a club, leaves visible only a long thread coming from its lower
jaw, waving it in all directions in order to attract its prey.
Believing it a worm, the victims usually chase the moving bait until
pounced upon by the teeth of the hunter who then springs from his bed,
floats around for a few moments, and falls heavily to the bottom,
opening a new pit with his pectoral, shovel-shaped swimming bladders.
The toad fish, the most hideous animal of the Mediterranean, goes
hunting in the same way. Three-fourths of his flattened body is made up
of head, mostly mouth, armed with hooks and curved knives. Guided by
his yellowish eyes fixed on top, he waves his pointed little beard, cut
like leaves, and a pair of dorsal appendages like feathers. This false
bait attracts the unwary ones and soon the cavernous mandibles close
upon them.
The plane fishes swim quickly over these monsters of the mire, that are
always horizontally flat resting upon their bellies, whilst the
flatness of the soles and others of the same species is vertical. The
two sides of the bodies of the soles, compressed laterally, have
different colorings. In this way, when lying down, they are able to
merge themselves at the same time with the light of the surface and the
shadow of the bottom, thus getting rid of their persecutors.
All the infinite varieties of the Mediterranean fauna were moving in
the other tanks.
There passed by the greenish plates of glass the giltheads, the
cackerels, and the sea roaches, clad in vivid silver with bands of gold
on their sides. There also flashed past the purple of the salmonoids,
the brilliant majesty of the gold fish, the bluish belly of the sea
bream, the striped back of the sheep's head, the trumpet-mouthed marine
sun-fish, the immovable sneer of the so-called "joker," the dorsal
pinnacle of the peacock-fish which appears made of feathers, the
restless and deeply bifurcated tail of the horse mackerel, the
fluttering of the mullet with its triple wings, the grotesque rotundity
of the boar-fish and the pig-fish, the dark smoothness of the
sting-ray, floating like a fringe, the long snout of the woodcock-fish,
the slenderness of the haddock, agile and swift as a torpedo, the red
gurnard all thorns, the angel of the sea with its fleshy wings, the
gudgeon, bristling with swimming angularities, the notary, red and
white, with black bands similar to the flourishes on signatures, the
modest _esmarrido_, the little sand fish, the superb turbot almost
round with fan tail and a swimming fringe spotted with circles, and the
gloomy conger-eel whose skin is as bluish black as that of the ravens.
Hidden between two rocks like the hunting crustaceans was the
_rascaza_,--the scorpion of the Valencian sea that Ferragut had known
in his childhood, the animal beloved by his uncle, the _Triton_,
because of its substantial flesh which thickened the seamen's soup, the
precious component sought by Uncle Caragol for the broth of his
succulent rice dishes. The enormous head had a pair of eyes entirely
red. Its great swimming bladders stung venomously. The heavy body with
its dark bands and stripes was covered with singular appendages in the
form of leaves and could easily take the color of the deep where, in
the semi-obscurity, it looked like a stone covered with plants. With
this mimicry it was accustomed to escape its enemies and could better
detect its prey.
A gloomy creature, in Ferragut's opinion like a beadle of the Holy
Office, was parading through the upper part of the tanks, passing from
glass to glass, reflected like a double animal when it approached the
surface. It was the ray-fish with a flat head, ferocious eyes, and
thong-like tail, moving the black mantle of its fleshy wings with a
deliberation that rippled the edges.
From the sandy bottom was struggling forth a convex shield that, when
floating, showed its lower face smooth and yellow. The four wrinkled
paws and the serpent-like head of the turtle were emerging from its
cuirass of tortoise-shell. The little sea horses, slender and graceful
as chess-pieces, were rising and descending in the bluish environment,
wiggling their tails and twisting themselves in the form of
interrogation points.
When the captain approached the end of the four galleries of the
Aquarium without having seen more than the maritime animals behind the
glistening glasses and a few uninteresting people in the greenish
semi-light, he felt all the discouragement of a day lost.
"She won't come now!..."
In passing from this damp, cellar-like atmosphere to the sunlit garden,
the report of the midday gun struck him like an atmospheric blow. Lunch
hour!... And surely Freya was not going to lunch in the hotel!
During the afternoon his footsteps strayed instinctively toward the
hill streets of the district of Chiaja. All old buildings of manorial
aspect invariably attracted his attention. These were great, reddish
houses of the time of the Spanish viceroys, or palaces of the reign of
Charles III. Their broad staircases were adorned with polychrome busts
brought from the first excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Ulysses had faint hopes of running across the widow while passing in
front of one of these mansions, now rented in floors and displaying
little metal door-plates indicative of office and warehouse. In one of
these undoubtedly must be living the family that was so friendly to
Freya.
Then, noticing the whiteness of the showy constructions rising up
around the old districts, he became dubious. The doctor would dwell
only in a modern and hygienic edifice. But not daring to ask questions,
he passed on, fearing to be seen from a window.
Finally he gave it up. Chiaja had many streets and he was wandering
aimlessly, since the concierge of the hotel had not been able to give
him any precise directions. The _signora_ Talberg was evidently bent on
outwitting all his finesse, trying to keep from him the address of her
friends.
The following morning the captain took up his usual watch in the
promenade near the white Virgil. It was all in vain. After ten o'clock
he again wandered into the Aquarium, animated by a vague hope.
"Perhaps she may come to-day...."
With the superstition of the enamored and all those who wait, he kept
hunting certain places preferred by the widow, believing that in this
way he would attract her from her distant preoccupation, obliging her
to come to him.
The tanks of the molluscas had always been especially interesting to
her. He recalled that Freya had several times spoken to him of this
section.
Among its aquatic cases she always preferred the one marked number
fifteen, the exclusive dominion of the polypi (cuttlefish). A vague
presentiment warned him that something very important in his life was
going to be unrolled in that particular spot. Whenever Freya visited
the Aquarium, it was to see these repulsive and gluttonous animals eat.
There was nothing to do but to await her before this cavern of horrors.
And while she was making her way thither, the captain had to amuse
himself like any landlubber, contemplating the ferocious chase and
laborious digestion of these monsters.
He had seen them much larger in the deep-sea fishing grounds; but by
curtailing his imaginative powers he could pretend that the blue sheet
of the tank was the entire mass of the ocean--the rough bits of stone
on the bottom its submarine mountains, and by contracting his own
personality, he could reduce himself to the same scale as the little
victims that were falling under the devouring tentacles. In this manner
he could fancy of gigantic dimensions these cuttlefish of the Aquarium,
just as the monstrous oceanic octopi must be that, thousands of yards
down, were illuminating the gloom of the waters with the greenish star
of their phosphorescent nuclei.
From prehistoric times the men of the sea had known this great, ropy
beast of the abysses. The geographers of antiquity used to speak of it,
giving the measurement of its terrible arms.
Pliny used to recount the destruction accomplished by a gigantic
octopus in the vivarium of the Mediterranean. When some sailors
succeeded in killing it they carried it to the epicure, Lucullus,--the
head as big as a barrel, and some of its tentacles so huge that one
person could hardly reach around them. The chroniclers of the Middle
Ages had also spoken of the gigantic cuttlefish that on more than one
occasion had, with its serpentine arms, snatched men from the decks of
the ships.
The Scandinavian navigators, who had never encountered it in their
fjords, nicknamed it the _kraken_, exaggerating its proportions and
even converting it into a fabulous being. If it came to the surface,
they confounded it with an island; if it remained between the two
waters, the captains, on making their soundings, became confused in
their calculations, finding the depth less than that marked on their
charts. In such cases they had to escape before the _kraken_ should
awake and sink the vessel as though it were a fragile skiff among its
whirlpools of foam.
During many long years Science had laughed at the gigantic polypus and
at the sea serpent, another prehistoric animal many times encountered,
supposing them to be merely the inventions of an imaginative sailor,
stories of the forecastle made up to pass the night-watch. Wise men can
only believe what they can study directly and then catalogue in their
museums....
And Ferragut laughed in his turn at poor Science, ignorant and
defenseless before the mysterious immensity of the ocean, and having
scarcely achieved the measurement of its great depth. The apparatus of
the diver could go down but a few meters; their only instrument of
exploration was the metal diving-bell, less important than a spider-web
thread that might try to explore the earth by floating across its
atmosphere.
The great cuttlefish living in the tremendous depths do not deign to
come to the surface in order to become acquainted with mankind.
Sickness and oceanic war are the only agents that from time to time
announce their existence in a casual way, as they float over the waves
with members relaxed, snatched at by the iron jaws of the flesh-eating
fish. The great danger for them is that a chance current might place
this plunder of the immense marine desert before the prow of a
slow-going sailboat.
A corvette of the French navy once encountered near the Canary Isles a
complete specimen of one of these monsters floating upon the sea, sick
or wounded. The officials sketched its form and noted its
phosphorescence and changes of color, but after a two-hour struggle
with its indomitable force and its slippery mucosity constantly
escaping the pressure of blows and harpoons, they had to let it slip
back into the ocean.
It was the Prince of Monaco, supreme pontiff of oceanographic science,
who established forever the existence of the fabulous _kraken_. In one
of his intelligent excursions across oceanic solitudes he fished up an
arm of a cuttlefish eight yards long. Furthermore the stomachs of
sharks, upon being opened, had revealed to him the gigantic fragments
of the adversary.
Short and terrible battles used to agitate the black and phosphorescent
water, thousands of fathoms from the surface, with whirlwinds of death.
The shark would descend, attracted by the appetizing prospect of a
boneless animal,--all flesh and weighing several tons. He would make
his hostile invasion in all haste so as not to be obliged to endure for
a long time the formidable pressure of the abyss. The struggle between
the two ferocious warriors disputing oceanic dominion was usually brief
and deadly,--the mandible battling with the sucker; the solid and
cutting equipment of teeth with the phosphorescent mucosity incessantly
slipping by and opposing the blow of the demolishing head like a
battering ram, with the lashing blow of tentacles thicker and heavier
than an elephant's trunk. Sometimes the shark would remain down
forever, enmeshed in a skein of soft snakes absorbing it with
gluttonous deliberation; at other times it would come to the surface
with its skin bristling with black tumors,--open mouths and slashes big
as plates,--but with its stomach full of gelatinous meat.
These cuttlefish in the Aquarium were nothing more than the seaside
inhabitants of the Mediterranean coast,--poor relations of the gigantic
octopus that lighten the black gloom of the oceanic night with their
bluish gleam of burned-out planets. But in spite of their relative
smallness, they are animated by the same destructive iniquity as the
others. They are rabid stomachs that cleanse the waters of all animal
life, digesting it in a vacuum of death. Even the bacteria and
infusoria appear to flee from the liquid that envelops these ferocious
solitudes.
Ferragut passed many mornings contemplating their treacherous
immovability, followed by deadly unfoldings the moment that their prey
came down into the tank. He began to hate these monsters for no other
reason than because they were so interesting to Freya. Their stupid
cruelty appeared to him but a reflex of that incomprehensible woman's
character that was repulsing him by fleeing from him and yet, at the
same time, by her smiles and her signals, was sending out a wireless in
order to keep him prisoner.
Masculine wrath convulsed the sailor after each futile daily trip in
pursuit of her invisible personality.
"She's just doing it to lead me on!..." he exclaimed. "It's got to come
to an end! I won't stand any more bull-baiting.... I'll just show her
that I'm able to live without her!"
He swore not to seek her any more. It was an agreeable diversion for
the weeks that he had to spend in Naples, but why keep it up when she
was fatiguing him in such an insufferable way?...
"All is ended," he said again, clenching his hands.
And the following day he was waiting outside of the hotel just as on
other days. Then he would go for his customary stroll, afterwards
entering the Aquarium in the same, old hope of seeing her before the
tanks of the cuttlefish.
He finally met her there one morning, about midday. He had been over to
his boat and on returning entered, through force of habit, sure that at
this hour he would find nobody but the employees feeding the fishes.
His dazzled eyes were affected with almost instantaneous blindness
before becoming accustomed to the shadows of the greenish galleries....
And when the first images began to be vaguely outlined on his retina,
he stepped hastily backward, so great was his surprise.
He couldn't believe it and raised his hand to his eyes as though
wishing to clarify his vision with an energetic rubbing. Was that
really Freya?... Yes, it was she, dressed in white, leaning on the bar
of iron that separated the tanks from the public, looking fixedly at
the glass which covered the rocky cavern like a transparent door. She
had just opened her hand-bag, giving some coins to the guardian who was
disappearing at the end of the gallery.
"Oh, is that you?" she said, on seeing Ferragut, without any surprise,
as if she had left him but a short time before.
Then she explained her presence at this late hour. She had not visited
the Aquarium for a long time. The tank of cuttlefish was to her like a
cage of tropical birds, full of colors and cries that enlivened the
solitude of a melancholy matron.
She always adored the monsters living on the other side of these
crystals, and before going to lunch she had felt an irresistible desire
to see them. She feared that the guard had not been taking good care of
them during her absence.
"Just see how beautiful they are!..."
And she pointed to a tank that appeared empty. Neither in its quiet
still waters nor on the floor of the oily sand could be seen the
slightest animal motion. Ferragut followed the direction of her eyes
and after long contemplation discovered there three occupants. With the
amazing mimicry of their species, they had changed themselves to appear
like minerals. Only a pair of expert eyes would have been able to
discover them, heaped together, each one huddled in a crack of the
rocks, voluntarily raising his smooth skin into stone-like
protuberances and ridges. Their faculty of changing color permitted
them to take on that of their hard base and, disguised in this way like
three rocky excrescences, they were treacherously awaiting the passing
of their victim, just as though they were in the open sea.
"Soon we shall see them in all their majesty," continued Freya as
though she were speaking of something belonging to her. "The guardian
is going to feed them.... Poor things! Nobody pays any attention to
them; everybody detests them. To me they owe whatever they get between
meals."
As if scenting the proximity of food, one of the three stones suddenly
shuddered with a polychromatic chill. Its elastic covering began
swelling. There passed over its surface stripes of color, reddish
clouds changing from crimson to green, circular spots that became
inflated in the swelling, forming tremulous excrescences. Between two
cracks there appeared a yellowish eye of ferocious and stupid fixity; a
darkened and malignant globe like that of serpents, was now looking
toward the crystal as though seeing far beyond that diamond wall.
"They know me!" exclaimed Freya joyously. "I'm sure that they know
me!..."
And she enumerated the clever traits of these monsters to whom she
attributed great intelligence. They were the ones that, like astute
builders, had dappled the stones piled up on the bottom, forming
bulwarks in whose shelter they had disguised themselves in order to
pounce upon their victims. In the sea, when wishing to surprise a
meaty, toothsome oyster, they waited in hiding until the two valves
should open to feed upon the water and the light, and had often
introduced a pebble between the shells and then inserted their
tentacles in the crevice.
Their love of liberty was another thing which aroused Freya's
enthusiasm. If they should have to endure more than a year of enclosure
in the Aquarium, they would become sick with sadness and would gnaw
their claws until they killed themselves.
"Ah, the charming and vigorous bandits!" she continued in hysterical
enthusiasm. "I adore them. I should like to have them in my home, as
they have gold-fishes in a globe, to feed them every hour, to see how
they would devour...."
Ferragut felt a recurrence of the same uneasiness that he had
experienced one morning in the temple of Virgil.
"She's crazy!" he said to himself.
But in spite of her craziness, he greatly enjoyed the faint perfume
that exhaled through the opening at her throat.
He no longer saw the silent world that, sparkling with color, was
swimming or paddling behind the crystal. She was now the only creature
who existed for him. And he listened to her voice as though it were
distant music as it continued explaining briefly all the particulars
about those stones that were really animals, about those globes that,
on distending themselves, showed their organs and again hid themselves
under a gelatinous succession of waves.
They were a sac, a pocket, an elastic mask, in whose interior existed
only water or air. Between their armpits was their mouth, armed with
long jaw bones, like a parrot's beak. When breathing, a crack of their
skin would open and close alternately. From one of their sides came
forth a tube in the form of a tunnel that swallowed equally the
respirable water and drew it through both entrances into its branching
cavity. Their multiple arms, fitted out with cupping glasses,
functioned like high-pressure apparatus for grasping and holding prey,
for paddling and for running.
The glassy eye of one of the monsters appearing and disappearing among
its soft folds, stirred Freya's memories. She began speaking in a low
tone as if to herself, without paying any attention to Ferragut who was
perplexed at the incoherence of her words. The appearance of this
octopus brought to her mind "the eye of the morning."
The sailor asked: "What is the 'eye of the morning'?"... And he again
told himself that Freya was crazy when he learned that this was the
name of a tame serpent, a reptile of checkered sides that she wore as
necklace or bracelet over there in her home in the island of Java,--an
island where groves exhaled an irresistible perfume, covered in the
sunlight with trembling and monstrous flowers like animals, peopled at
night with phosphorescent stars that leaped from tree to tree.
"I used to dance naked, with a transparent veil tied around my hips and
another floating from my head ... I would dance for hours and hours,
just like a Brahman priestess before the image of the terrible Siva,
and the 'eye of the morning' would follow my dances with elegant
undulations ... I believe in the divine Siva. Don't you know who Siva
is?..."
Ferragut uttered an impatient aside to the gloomy god. What he wanted
to know was the reason that had taken her to Java, the paradisiacal and
mysterious island.
"My husband was a Dutch commandant," she said. "We were married in
Amsterdam and I followed him to Asia."
Ulysses protested at this piece of news. Had not her husband been a
great student?... Had he not taken her to the Andes in search of
prehistoric beasts?...
Freya hesitated a moment in order to be sure, but her doubts were
short.
"So he was," she said as a matter of course. "That professor was my
second husband. I have been married twice."
The captain had not time to express his surprise. Over the top of the
tank, on the crystalline surface silvered by the sun, passed a human
shadow. It was the silhouette of the keeper. Down below, the three
shapeless bags began to move. Freya was trembling with emotion like an
enthusiastic and impatient spectator.
Something fell into the water, descending little by little, a bit of
dead sardine that was scattering filaments of meat and yellow scales.
An odd community interest appeared to exist among these monsters: only
the one nearest the prey bestirred himself to eat. Perhaps they
voluntarily took turns; perhaps their glance only reached a little
beyond their tentacles.
The one nearest to the glass suddenly unfolded itself with the violence
of a spring escaping from an explosive projectile. He gave a bound,
remaining fastened to the ground by one of his radiants, and raised the
others like a bundle of reptiles. Suddenly he converted himself into a
monstrous star, filling almost the entire glassy tank, swollen with
rage, and coloring his outer covering with green, blue, and red.
His tentacles clutched the miserable prey, doubling it inward in order
to bear it to his mouth. The beast then contracted, and flattened
himself out so as to rest on the ground. His armed feet disappeared and
there only remained visible a trembling bag through which was passing
like a succession of waves, from one extreme to the other, the
digestive swollen mass which became a bubbling, mucous pulpiness in a
dye-pot that colored and discolored itself with contortions of
assimilative fury; from time to time the agglomeration showed its
stupid and ferocious eyes.
New victims continued falling down through the waters and other
monsters leaped in their turn, spreading out their stars, then
shrinking together in order to grind their prey in their entrails with
the assimilation of a tiger.
Freya gazed upon this horrifying digestive process with thrills of
rapture. Ulysses felt her resting instinctively upon him with a contact
growing more intimate every moment. From shoulder to ankle the captain
could see the sweet reliefs of her soft flesh whose warmth made itself
perceptible through her clothing and filled him with nervous tremors.
Frequently she turned her eyes away from the cruel spectacle, glancing
at him quickly with an odd expression. Her pupils appeared enlarged,
and the whites of her eyes had a wateriness of morbid reflection.
Ferragut felt that thus the insane must look in their great crises.
She was speaking between her teeth, with emotional pauses, admiring the
ferocity of the cuttlefish, grieving that she did not possess their
vigor and their cruelty.
"If I could only be like them!... To be able to go through the streets
... through the world, stretching out my talons!... To devour!... to
devour! They would struggle uselessly to free themselves from the
winding of my tentacles.... To absorb them!... To eat them!... To cause
them to disappear!..."
Ulysses beheld her as on that first day near the temple of the poet,
possessed with a fierce wrath against men, longing extravagantly for
their extermination.
Their digestion finished, the polypi had begun to swim around, and were
now horizontal skeins, fluting the tank with elegance. They appeared
like torpedo boats with a conical prow, dragging along the heavy, thick
and long hair of their tentacles. Their excited appetite made them
glide through the water in all directions, seeking new victims.
Freya protested. The guard had only brought them dead bodies. What she
wanted was the struggle, the sacrifice, the death. The bits of sardine
were a meal without substance for these bandits that had zest only for
food seasoned with assassination.
As though the pulps had understood her complaints, they had fallen on
the sandy bottom, flaccid, inert, breathing through their funnels.
A little crab began to descend at the end of a thread desperately
moving its claws.
Freya pressed still closer to Ulysses, excited at the thought of the
approaching spectacle. One of the bags, transformed into a star,
suddenly leaped forward. Its arms writhed like serpents seeking the
recent arrival. In vain the guard pulled the thread up, wishing to
prolong the chase. The tentacles clamped their irresistible openings
upon the body of the victim, pulling upon the line with such force that
it broke, the octopus falling on the bottom with his prey.
Freya clapped her hands in applause.
"Bravo!..." She was exceedingly pale, though a feverish heat was
coursing through her body.
She leaned toward the crystal in order to see better the devouring
activity of that pyramidal stomach which had on its sharp point a
diminutive parrot head with two ferocious eyes and around its base the
twisted skeins of its arms full of projecting disks. With these it
pressed the crab against its mouth, injecting under its shell the
venomous output of its salivary glands, paralyzing thus every movement
of existence. Then it swallowed its prey slowly with the deglutition of
a boa constrictor.
"How beautiful it is!" she said.
The other beasts also seized their live victims, paralyzed and devoured
them, moving their flabby bodies in order to permit the passage of
their swelling nutritive waves and clouds of various colors.
Then the guard tossed in a crab, but one without any string whatever.
Freya screamed with enthusiasm.
This was the kind of hunt that takes place in the ferocious mystery of
the sea, a race with death, a destruction preceded with emotional agony
and hazards. The poor crustacean, divining its danger, was swimming
towards the rocks hoping to take refuge in the nearest crevice. A
polypus came up behind it, whilst the others continued their digestion.
"It's escaping!... It's escaping!" cried Freya, palpitating with
interest.
The crab scrambled through the stones, sheltering itself in their
windings. The polypus was no longer swimming; it was running like a
terrestrial animal, climbing over the rocks by its armed extremities,
which were now serving as apparatus of locomotion. It was the struggle
of a tiger with a mouse. When the crab had half of its body already
hidden within the green lichens of a hole, one of the heavy serpents
fell upon its back clutching it with the irresistible suction of his
air-holes, and causing it to disappear within his skein of tentacles.
"Ah!" sighed Freya, throwing herself back as though she were going to
faint on Ulysses' breast.
He shuddered, feeling that a serpentine band of tremulous pressure had
encircled his body. The acts of that unbalanced creature were fraying
his nerves.
He felt as though a monster of the same class as those in the tank but
much larger--a gigantic octopus from the oceanic depths--must have
slipped treacherously behind him and was clutching him in one of its
tentacles. He could feel the pressure of its feelers around his waist,
growing closer and more ferocious.
Freya was holding him captive with one of her arms. She had wound
herself tightly around him and was clasping his waist with all her
force, as though trying to break his vigorous body in two.
Then he saw the head of this woman approaching him with an aggressive
swiftness as if she were going to bite him.... Her enlarged eyes,
tearful and misty, appeared to be far off, very far off. Perhaps she
was not even looking at him.... Her trembling mouth, bluish with
emotion, a round and protruding mouth like an absorbing duct, was
seeking the sailor's mouth, taking possession of it and devouring it
with her lips.
It was the kiss of a cupping-glass, long, dominating, painful. Ulysses
realized that he had never before been kissed in this way. The water
from that mouth surging across her row of teeth, discharged itself in
his like swift poison. A shudder unfamiliar until then ran the entire
length of his back, making him close his eyes.
He felt as if all his interior had turned to liquid. He had a
presentiment that his life was going to date from this kiss, that with
it was going to begin a new existence, that he never would be able to
free himself from these deadly and caressing lips with their faint
savor of cinnamon, of incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with
sensuousness and intrigue.
And he let himself be dragged down by the caress of this wild beast,
with thought lost and body inert and resigned, like a castaway who
descends and descends the infinite strata of the abyss without ever
reaching bottom.