Adventure Magazine Cover — page 137: what you’re looking at

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

De Profundis showed that for the time being they had gone mad—berserk, blind, crazy, senseless to all but the lust of killing; unseeing, .un- heeding, maniacal—but maniacs weighing anything from three hundred to nine hun- dred or a thousand pounds; maniacs which cut the still depths with the speed of express trains; maniacs of nickel steel; satiated with food maybe, but insatiably drunk—blind drunk, blood drunk, and reeling in the smell of slaughter; living whirlwinds of death, masterless and loose upon the waters. And the sawfish, jammed in among the rocks on the floor of the sea, contented and digesting, made no sign yet, even. He knew that those hurtling, battering, insensate monsters were leaping tuna, the greatest edition of an overgrown mackerel that man ever saw or ever will see. He knew that their speed could scarce be matched, and certainly not mastered, by any living thing that swam—except, it may just be, by the thrice-dreaded killer or orca. He knew that he had himself more than once tried to steal upon stragglers of their kind, and slay horribly and anyhow with his Saw, as was his wont; and he knew that they tasted good. But—well, he knew that these same tremendous rushing bodies, these leap- ing tunas of the open seas, frequently travel in schools of many hundreds, and that at times they go mad with the lust of slaughter, so that they become blind to all things— pain, fear, or sudden death; and a few hun- dred crazy giants of that kind, utterly beyond themselves and seeing only red, were more than even he had any wish to take on. Beyond any doubt they were massacring the cuttlefish, driving the un- speakable armed devils before them to the shore, in what in those parts is called a “beat,” and—if they wanted to, why, let them. By all means let the good work go forward. All the world hated the cuttlefish, the demi-ogres of the depths, and none would shed tears at their decease. About then it was, as near as might be in the height of this madness, at the perihelion of the slaughter, when the luckless squids, whom nobody would befriend, had got themselves jammed into the most hopeless of hopeless tangles of all, in their hurry, like cattle, to get away, and the monstrous tunas were just in the zenith of their crazi- ness, mowing swathes through the writhing inferno at each blind charge, that the thing happened which taught the sawfish how a 131 fellow can break—or make—himself at the inconsistent whim of the ever enigmatical feminine, and how he will do it, too, without thought of the reckoning. It happened this way: As has been said, the sawfish had, once or twice in his life, managed to stalk a leap- ing tuna, who is the swiftest of fish; but in spite of his size he had never dared tackle a whole school worked up to the insane frenzy of the “beat.” That was reason, and masculine and consistent. Came now un- reason, and the feminine inconsistent. There was no warning, nothing—just she herself, all fourteen feet of her, lithe as a rapier, strong as a wire rope, deadly as any snake, and cruel as a fish—lash, lash, lashing with her diabolical weapon in the middle of the press at the leaping tuna. And she a female sawfish! Heaven knows where, up out of the steeply sloping bed of the sea, she had come from. The sawfish nearly had a fit—an icy, stony, soulless one. The crisis had come upon him so suddenly. But so had love. Directly he clapped his beastly, expression- less eyes upon her, and rolled over, he fell in love; and, being in love, he acted. There was no knowing what the leaping tuna would do—no precedent for such a case. They might flee like panic-stricken herring, or tackle and rend her like crazed wolves; or in their sheer, hurtling, blind, lightning-like impetuosity— Ah! Bash! The thing had happened. The third pos- sibility had occurred before any one could A tuna of several hundred pounds’ weight charging wildly at the squids, blind to the world, and with scarce an inch to spare in avoiding some of his equally headstrong fellows, had failed, in the fraction of a second allowed for the swerve, to see and avoid the female sawfish, and had struck her, nose first and at full speed—tuna speed, greater than motor-boat’s speed, perhaps—full -amidships. The mere sheer impact wad something terrible. The great armed shark crumpled up limp- ly. where she swam, and if she had been boned, like other fish, instead of merely gristle-skeletoned, the shock must have jarred every part of her body, and broken her utterly. As it was, she went down, all lank and Eomichoo CS (e (E(0) m