Adventure Magazine Cover — page 133: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

¢ 5, ee a cage fh SeMars Author of ‘The Green Devil,” “Hunger Mad,” etc. MOMETHING had happened very SW\SAS Suddenly deep, deep down in the pi roysterious abyss of the wonder- # ful, clear azure sea. You could see down—could see the exquisite, ‘hanging gardens” of the sea, green weed of a hundred tones and half-tones; could see the dire bar- racuda, as though they were monster En- glish pike, packed close in a poised, motion- less shoal, a host of staring black eyes; could see the forest-like fringe of kelp, wav- ing under the waves and alive with parrot- fish, each as brilliant as any macaw; could see the jelly-fish of weird shape and pale, ghostly color, some .with streamers yards long; could behold the golden bolt that was a yellow-fin albacore fish—a glorified mack- erel—four feet long; and the silver flash where the white bass turned full in the light to engulf a strayed anchovy. Then you could see more, much more, too much more. It was as if, far, far down, where all faded out into blue and deeper blue haze, gigantic bubbles, nebulous and uncertain, mere shadows of the depths, had moved, and— ah!—and were coming up, were taking shapes, were changing rapidly; first shadows then bubbles of enormous size, then stu- pendous pearls, black pearls, then forms, then—fish! Nay, not fish merely—that were too slight a term for them that came— but FISH. Impossible to say what they were, except that by any standard they were giants; but not impossible to say what they did! The pure blue of the sea was streaked with that flaming crimson that can spell only one word. They fought, and here, in a word, in this warm place, in sight of the Southern Cross low down to the south, in sight of the fairy palms, just off the growing atoll of the key that was a glaring garden of coral, was a battle of the overlords of the seas. Up they came—shooting up, and with such speed that a southern sea-lion, scan- dalized but inquisitive, had bare time to hurl flying out of their way with those great flippers of his—up, the fifty-foot mountain of flesh, all gleaming, glistening, a hump- back whale, the streaking, waving, weaving lesser leviathans, brown-gray and inde- terminate gray and ghostly, skirmishing on, under, and variously about the first. Then, as they broke the surface, foam, spray, and tortured water lashed, as an egg is whipped, into a blinding smother. The greater monster, the whale—the only one of the fighters not a fish—heaved bodily aloft, stood for a moment on end, a mighty column of pure marble as seen from miles away, and fell again with a crash like the crash of a landslide. Instantly two of the lesser terrors, sharks marked and stamped indelibly—known at a glance, with the wicked, evil, sinuous, vermin cut and rig of all the sharks, but sharks fifteen feet long—sprang bodily aloft, too. They sprang, and, falling back upon 127 Eomichooks con ~“