Adventure Magazine Cover — page 136: what you’re looking at

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

- 130 to be, petrified. avoiding being made into prey; the white bass, like a green-streaked bar of silver, and the yellow-tail fish, like a silver- streaked bar of gold; the sea porcupine, blown up like a football, that wouldn’t sink, and fled upward, cork-fashion; and the dying anchovy that couldn’t float, and sank down- ward stone-wise. ; Down there, you must understand, it was very still—still as_it will be on the Last Day; and so silent that the heart of the Sahara would have been a Babylon com- pared to it. Very few of those cold-blooded inhabitants ofthat blue world had any voice, and if they had, perhaps they could not have been heard. And, for all its beauty, it was not a sweet place; one felt that death was too near, and that nobody had any soul, and that all pity was, as the scene appeared Then, without warning, entered sud- denly, with wild commotion to all, a per- fectly diabolical people. All the sawfish saw of them at first—if he were awake—was a sudden darkening of one side of the sea, as a Summer land- scape darkens under a cloud. But this was much worse than: any cloud. It was ink, real ink ofa kind, and filling the air, or, rather, the water, and rushing forward. In a dozen moments the whole of the sea became a chaos of swirling film, blue-black, eddied and rocked, and torn by currents of water forced in all directions; and on the tail of the currents, as if they were making them, which they were, pumping them out, dimly seen, but seen quite enough, shot and jerked, convulsed and wriggled, as ghastly a company of ghostly, fantom devil shapes as ever spread terror upon a Summer day. It was, as the Jocks would say, “An awfu’ sight, mon, th’ morn.” : Men in the most vehement grips. of D.T.’s may picture such things as the cold, flabby sawfish lay and imperturbably _ be- held in the moments that followed. And yet this was only a shoal of squids, cuttle- fish, from six to sixteen feet long, saucer- eyed, chameleon-colored, arrow-tailed, ser- pent-tentacled, and unspeakable, fleeing by means of their siphons which shot them along backward in jerks, throwing out streams of ink camouflage to worry the waters as they went—fleeing in terror, which they looked much more like im- parting than feeling, before—before what? That was the rub. That was what was Adventure chiefly concerning the dull, chill brain of the great sawfish at that moment. Fleeing be- fore what? No minor horror, even his slow brain could be sure. Such fiendish inspirers . of universal loathing are not generally thrown into the panic abandon of stampeded fowls for just any ordinary, trifling death. Wherefore, this that drove them must be the very devil incarnate. Not, mind, that the big sawfish had any care much for the squids. He was not above hacking one into writhing gobbets himself at times for fun—for fun, mark you, or the sheer pleasure of inflicting torture that passes for fun in that heartless underworld of the sea. Not even the fifteen-foot squid that set- tled horribly, all asprawl and aspread, with- in an inch of his prostrate “‘saw,’’ mouthing and mumbling dumbly, and “kneading bread”’ in a ghastly and insane manner with doubled tentacles, one over the other, rolling its huge goblin eyes villainously, changing color in waves of purple, brown, red, lilac, and white, like the play of a miniature thunderstorm, all over its beastly, sack-like body, anchored to the coral with two spare tentacles, and churning the. water into a continuous maelstrom with its extraordinary large and arrow-shaped tail, or rather ex- tremity—not even this nightmare, within spring, caused the sawfish to move a fin even. Then came the cause. 2 WITH appalling suddenness, with- Pe, out the slightest hint of warning, and with a rush that practically ter- rorized every living thing into stampede, the darkened, churning, smeary gloom all about was filled with huge, dark shapes, shooting about literally like forked light- ning, and in an instant —— was let loose. The scene that followed defies all hope of description. The objectionable cuttlefish— some of them! quite big—terrified beyond expression and fleeing blindly straight ahead—or rather straight astern, as ahead is with them—and evidently quite cleverly driven, too, became crowded in, in seeking to squeeze out of the way and on, each one for itself; became, too, mixed up in! an indescribable and most vile tangle, into which the leviathan newly arrived shapes, like great torpedoes, charged headlong, again and again, with the force of enormous battering-rams, and a speed and a fury that CO LMIGLOOOKS (E@)