Adventure Magazine Cover — page 135: what you’re looking at

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

De Profundis feet, all boneless, heartless, nerveless, piti- less, all with the receding jaw, the expres- sionless eye, and the wriggling, long-lobed tail, all rending, tearing, struggling, like wolves again, or—but forgive the simile, gentlemen in red—a pack of hounds, and no less in earnest over the “‘worry.”’ And well they might be, for the matter of that; for it is not every day, nor every week, nor month, that such a harvest comes in the way of these hyenas of the sea. Indeed, only two combinations—and prob- ably no single living thing—can accomplish it: (1) the dread killer or orca in a pack; and (2) the sawfish and the thresher shark for once in unison. Be that as it may, the feat was done, and, being done, gave ‘“‘poor re- lief’ to many, for there was a great deal of whale to that carcass. ONLY an hour later, twenty dog- 2 fish—who were the models from ) which Nature built the full-sized shark—running the trail up-wind at full speed a couple of miles away, all but ran into, and respectfully pulled aside for, the sawfish, jerking and laving his way along with the unmistakable eel-like shark gait, inshore. He had had enough, more than enough, and was fed up in two senses, being as full as he could hold, for one thing, and a twelve-foot hammerhead shark having taken a chop out of his side in mistake for the whale, for another. The sawfish thought that they were going to follow him, under the mistaken impres- sion that he was the corpse whose blood their miraculous noses could scent from afar—and to be wounded in the sea is to bring all hell about your ears, as a rule— till he pointed out to them with his saw, and the argument, could not very well be ignored, that they would do no such thing. The sawfish was as a matter of fact seek- ing a place where he could lie with rather more safety, or to be exact a trifle less risk than the open sea affords, and sleep off his Lord Mayor’s banquet. For that reason he went inshore, where the rocks and the great waving kelp and weed forests were; and as the bottom came up out of the fathomless blue to meet him, all alternated with sheets of dazzling sand, white as snow, meadows of gay-tinted weed, and acres of green, red, and pink alge- covered stones, each stone a study in mosaic, each boulder the buttress for a brilliant sea 9 129 anemone, he settled him down between two rocks— ousting five much scandalized cray- fish therefrom—and shaded, as it were under a tree, by the beautiful chalice-like spread of a coral bunch, slept the long drowse of overrepletion. | Night slid overhead, flinging her dusky wing-shadows upon all things, and the in- comparable amethyst waters became blue- black, and each fish, each shellfish, each masterpiece of delicate, lace-like jelly-fish, each worm even, became a phosphorescent firework display all on its own, and each grove of weed and rock hollow an enchanted forest, a fairy grotto of streaming or starry lights. Weird and strange dark shapes, cloaked horrors of the deep, swam and dived, and crawled and careered abroad. In the position where he was, the sawfish’s dull, nondescript, gray-brown uniform con- jured him into a part of the rocks he was squeezed into even by daylight—the blue- and gold wonder daylight of the under- world of that sea. This may be one reason why an octopus chose to walk over him on its doubled arms in the night. It was horribly cold, that abomination, but it might have been red-hot by the way the sawfish slashed after it, like a Chinese executioner with his two-handed sword. And it may have been one reason, too, why a very father of all the crayfish walked—not over him. It died before it had gone half- way, cut down in mid-spring, shooting back- ward and prawn-like, in horror at its own mistake. Except for these two undoubted proofs that he still lived, the sawfish made no sign of visibly being anything but a rock or a corpse, till about midday next morn, near which time strange things happened, thus: Up to then—though at the first glimpse of dawn many of those that had restlessly prowled through the underworld during the dark hours mysteriously vanished into no- where—merely the ordinary ceaseless sub- marine traffic had passed above and about the great fish as he lay. You can picture them; the pike-like bar- racuda stalking felinely for his breakfast; the red crab, late home and in a hurry; the tacking, veering shoal of silvered sardines, like Summer lightning; the magic parrot- fish ablaze with colors; the big shell of a conch moving house, and really plowing its own furrow; the five-foot bonito shark, looking for prey, and the iridescent mackerel (ECO NAICS <S : (E(0) ,00