The Toilers of the Sea (38 page)

But some of the waves—those great waves that during a storm return with imperturbable periodicity—were surging over the ruin of the breakwater. They fell back into the defile and, in spite of its turns and angles, raised a swell. The water within the channel was beginning to become dangerously agitated. The obscure kiss of the waves on the rocks was growing more vigorous.

How could this agitation be prevented from reaching the paunch? It would not take long for these squalls to whip up all the water within the reef, and with a few buffets from the sea the paunch would be ripped apart and the engines would sink to the bottom.

Gilliatt pondered, shuddering. But he was unabashed. His was a soul that had no thought of defeat.

The hurricane had now found the way forward and was surging frantically between the two walls of the defile.

Suddenly there sounded and reverberated in the defile, some distance to Gilliatt's rear, a crash more terrifying than any he had yet heard.

It came from the direction of the paunch. Some dire event was taking place in that quarter. Gilliatt hurried to the spot.

From the eastern end of the channel, where he was, he could not see the paunch because of the zigzags of the defile. Coming to the last turning in its course, he paused and waited for a flash of lightning.

A flash came and illuminated the scene.

The inrush of the sea from the eastern end of the defile had been met by a squall of wind at the western end. A disaster was on the way.

There was no sign of damage on the paunch: securely anchored as she was, she afforded little hold to the tempest; but the carcass of the Durande was in distress. The ruin of the vessel offered a considerable surface to the storm. Suspended in the air, entirely out of the water, it was offered up to its violence. The hole that Gilliatt had made in the hull to extract the engines had weakened it still further. The main beam of the keel had been cut. The Durande was a skeleton whose spinal column had been broken.

The hurricane had merely blown on it; but that was enough. The deck planking had folded like an opening book, and the vessel had been dismembered. This was the crash that Gilliatt had heard over the noise of the storm.

What he saw when he came closer seemed almost irremediable. The square incision he had made in the hull had become a gaping wound. The wind had enlarged the cut into a fracture, and this transverse break had divided the wreck into two. The after part, nearer the paunch, was still solidly fixed in the rock, but the forward part, facing Gilliatt, was hanging loose. A fracture, so long as it holds together, is like a hinge. The broken mass was swinging on its fractures, as if on hinges, and was being blown about by the wind, with a fearful noise.

Fortunately, the paunch was no longer under the wreck.

But this swaying to and fro was shaking the other half of the hull, still caught tight and immobile between the two Douvres. From shaking to falling is a short step. Exposed as it was to the determined onslaught of the wind, the dislocated part might suddenly drag with it the other part, which was almost touching the paunch, and everything—the paunch containing the engines—would be swallowed up in this collapse.

Gilliatt saw it all. A catastrophe was imminent. How could it be averted?

Gilliatt was the type of man who can draw aid from the very danger with which he is faced. He thought for a moment. Then he ran to his storeroom and took his ax. The hammer had done its work well; now it was the turn of the felling ax.

Gilliatt climbed up onto the wreck. Standing on the part of the deck that still held firm, he bent over the precipice between the two Douvres and began to cut away the broken beams, severing the remaining links with the hanging section of the hull.

The object of the operation was to complete the separation of the two parts of the wreck, to save the half that was still solid and consign to the waves the section that had fallen prey to the wind—conceding partial victory to the storm. The task was not particularly difficult, but it was dangerous. The portion of the wreck that was hanging down, pulled downward by the wind and by its own weight, was held only at a few points. The wreck was like a diptych with one panel half detached and liable to beat against the other. Only five or six pieces of the structure, bent and twisted but not broken off, were still holding. The breaks creaked and widened at every gust of the north wind, and the ax had to do no more than help the wind. The few remaining joins between the two parts eased Gilliatt's work but added to its danger. The whole thing could give way at any moment under his feet.

The storm was now reaching its paroxysm. Hitherto terrible, it had become terrifying. The convulsion of the sea now reached up into the sky. Up till now the clouds had been dominant; they seemed to do whatever they wanted; they gave the main impulsion; they conveyed their fury to the waves, while preserving a strange sinister lucidity. Below was madness; above was wrath. The sky had the wind; the ocean had only foam. Hence came the authority of the wind. The hurricane was a powerful spirit. The intoxication of its own horror, however, had disturbed it. It was now only a whirlwind. It was blindness giving birth to night. In whirlwinds there is a moment of madness; for the sky it is like something going to its head. The abyss no longer knows what it is doing. It fumbles with its thunderbolts. It is a fearful situation, a moment of horror.

The tumult on the reef was now at its peak. Every storm has a mysterious orientation of its own, and at a certain moment it loses its sense of direction. This is the worst phase of the tempest. At that moment “the wind,” said Thomas Fuller,
¹⁹⁷
“is a raving madman.” It is at that moment in a storm that there is the continuous discharge of electricity that Piddington
¹⁹⁸
calls a cascade of lightning. It is at that moment, too, that there appears, for no apparent reason, amid the blackest clouds, as if to spy on the universal terror, the circle of blue light known to the old Spanish navigators as the eye of the storm,
el ojo de la
tempestad.
This lugubrious eye was on Gilliatt.

Gilliatt for his part was looking at the clouds. Now he was keeping his head up. After every stroke of his ax he stood proudly erect. He was, or seemed to be, too near destruction not to feel some pride. Did he despair? No. Faced with the ocean's supreme access of fury, he was prudent as well as bold. He stood only on the parts of the wreck that were still solid. He was risking his life, but was also careful of it. He, too, was in a state of paroxysm. His vigor had multiplied tenfold. He was all intrepidity. His ax strokes rang like challenges. He seemed to have gained in lucidity what the tempest had lost. It was a dramatic conflict: on one side the inexhaustible, on the other the indefatigable. It was a contest to see which side would compel the other to give in. In the immensity of the sky the lowering clouds had the form of gorgon faces; the air was full of menace. The rain was coming from the waves, the foam from the clouds. The phantoms of the wind bent low; meteor faces flushed crimson and then disappeared, and after their disappearance there was a monstrous darkness. Everything was pouring down, coming from every side at the same time; it was all boiling up; the massed darkness was overflowing; the cumulus clouds, laden with hail, ragged and torn, ash-gray in color, seemed to be possessed by a kind of gyratory frenzy; the air was filled with a noise like dried peas being shaken in a riddle; the inverse movements of electricity observed by Volta were flashing from cloud to cloud; the continuing rolls of thunder were terrifying; the flashes of lightning came close to Gilliatt. It looked as if he had astonished the abyss. He went to and fro on the shaky wreck of the Durande, with the deck quivering under his feet— striking, hacking, cutting, slicing with his ax, a pale figure lit by the lightning, disheveled, barefoot, clad in rags, his face spattered by the sea, standing tall amid this cesspool of thunder.

Against the delirium of natural forces man's only weapon is skill. And skill brought about Gilliatt's triumph. He wanted the whole shattered mass of debris to fall in one piece. With that in mind, he was weakening the fractures that acted as hinges without cutting them right through, leaving a few fibers to sustain the rest. Suddenly he stopped, his ax held high. The operation was complete. The whole section broke away together.

The loose half of the Durande's carcass sank between the two Douvres, below Gilliatt, who, standing on the other half, bent down and watched. It fell perpendicularly into the water, splashing the rocks, and was caught in the narrow channel before reaching the bottom, standing more than twelve feet above the waves. The deck planking, now vertical, formed a wall between the two Douvres. Like the rock that had fallen across the channel higher up, it allowed only a bare trickle of foam to slip past its two ends; and so it formed the fifth barricade improvised by Gilliatt against the tempest in this street of the sea. The hurricane, blind to what it was doing, had worked on the creation of this final barricade.

It was fortunate that the narrow gap between the two walls of the defile had prevented this barrier from sinking to the bottom. This made it stand higher out of the water; and in addition it allowed the water to pass under the obstacle, which reduced the force of the waves. What passes underneath does not surge over the top. This is part of the secret of a floating breakwater.

Now, whatever the clouds did, there was nothing to fear for the paunch and the engines. The water could no longer disturb them. Lying between the barrier at the Douvres that protected them at the west end and the new barricade to the east, they were out of reach of attack by either the sea or the wind.

From the catastrophe Gilliatt had drawn salvation. At the end of the day the storm clouds had helped him.

Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: “Fooled you!”

It is a source of ironic joy for human intelligence engaged in conflict to see the boundless stupidity of the furious forces ranged against it actually rendering it a service, and Gilliatt felt the immemorial need to insult an enemy that goes back to the heroes of Homer.

Gilliatt went down to the paunch and took advantage of the flashes of lightning to examine it. It was fully time that help had come to the long-suffering vessel, which had been badly shaken during the past hour and was beginning to warp. At a quick glance he could see no serious damage, though he was sure that it had endured some violent shocks. Once the sea had grown calmer the hull had righted itself; the anchors had behaved well; and the engines had been well secured by their four chains.

As Gilliatt was completing his review something white passed close to him and disappeared into the darkness. It was a seagull.

No sight is more reassuring in a storm. When birds appear it means that the tempest is on the way out.

Another good sign was that the thunder was redoubling. The full violence of the tempest puts the thunder out of countenance. As all seamen know, the final stage of a storm is fierce, but brief. Particularly violent thunder is a harbinger of the end.

Suddenly the rain ceased. Then there was only a surly rumble in the clouds. The storm died down with the suddenness of a plank falling to the ground. It was as if it had broken up. The immense buildup of clouds fell apart. A chink of clear sky split the darkness. Gilliatt was astonished: it was broad daylight.

The storm had lasted almost twenty hours. The wind that had brought it had carried it away again. The horizon was obscured by scattered fragments of darkness. Broken and fleeting patches of mist gathered in tumultuous masses; from one end of the line of clouds to the other there was a movement of retreat; a long dying murmur could be heard; a few last drops of rain fell; and all the darkness with its thunders withdrew like a retreating host of war chariots. Suddenly the sky was blue.

Gilliatt realized that he was tired. Sleep swoops down on fatigue like a bird of prey. Gilliatt sank down into the boat without choosing where to lie, and fell asleep. For several hours he remained inert, barely distinguishable from the beams and joists among which he was lying.

I

NOT THE ONLY ONE TO BE HUNGRY

When he awoke he felt hungry.

The water was now becoming calmer, but there was still enough agitation out at sea to make immediate departure impossible. Moreover, it was too late in the day. With the load that the paunch now had on board, it would be necessary to leave in the morning in order to arrive in Guernsey before midnight.

In spite of his pressing hunger, Gilliatt began by stripping naked— the only way to warm himself up. His clothes had been soaked by the storm, but the rain had washed out the seawater, so that they could now dry off. He kept nothing on but his trousers, which he rolled up to the knee.

He spread out his shirt, his pea jacket, his oilskins, his leggings, and his sheepskin on the rocks around him, keeping them in place with small stones.

Then he thought about eating.

He used his knife, which he had been careful to sharpen and keep in good condition, to detach from the granite a few sea lice, of about the same species as the clams of the Mediterranean, which can be eaten raw—meager fare after all his toils. He had no biscuit left. There was now, however, no shortage of water. He had not merely had enough to quench his thirst: he was awash with it.

He took advantage of the falling tide to ferret among the rocks in quest of crayfish. There was enough exposed rock to allow him to hope for a good catch.

He did not reflect, however, that he could not cook anything. If he had taken the time to go to his storeroom he would have found it shattered by the rain. His wood and coal were under water, and of his stock of tow, which he used in place of tinder, every fragment was soaked. He had no means of lighting a fire.

Moreover, his blower was out of order; the hood over the hearth of his forge had been broken off; the storm had pillaged his laboratory. With such tools as had escaped damage Gilliatt could, at a pinch, work as a carpenter but not as a smith. At the moment, however, he had no thoughts for his workshop.

Drawn in another direction by his stomach, he had set out, without further reflection, in pursuit of his meal. He wandered about, not in the channel through the reef but outside, on the fringing rocks. It was in this quarter that the Durande, ten weeks ago, had struck the reef.

For the quest on which Gilliatt was engaged the outside of the reef offered better prospects than the interior. At low tide crabs are accustomed to take the air; they like to warm themselves in the sun. These misshapen creatures are happiest at midday. Their emergence from the water in the full light of day is a curious sight. Swarming in such numbers, they arouse a feeling almost of disgust. When you see them, with their awkward sidelong walk, clambering heavily from crevice to crevice up the lower parts of the rocks as if they were climbing a staircase, you are compelled to admit that the ocean has its own type of vermin.

For the last two months Gilliatt had been living on this vermin.

On this particular day, however, the hermit crabs and crayfish had made themselves scarce. The storm had driven these solitary creatures back into their hiding places, and they had not yet felt able to venture out. Gilliatt held his knife open in his hand and from time to time scraped up a shellfish from under the seaweed, eating it as he walked.

At this point he cannot have been far from the spot where Sieur Clubin had perished.

Just as Gilliatt was making up his mind to content himself with sea urchins and sea chestnuts there was a splash at his feet. A large crab, scared off by his approach, had leapt into the water. It did not go so deep as to conceal it from his sight, and he ran after it along the base of the reef. The crab continued to flee, and suddenly it disappeared: it had found its way into some crevice under the rocks.

Gilliatt clung on to some projections in the rock with one hand and bent down to look under the overhang.

There was indeed a crevice in which the crab must have taken refuge.

It was more than a crevice. It was a kind of porch. The sea made its way in through this porch, but it was not deep, and the bottom, covered with stones and shingle, could be seen. The stones were glaucous and covered with confervae, showing that they were always under water. They looked like children's heads covered with green hair.

Gilliatt took his knife between his teeth, climbed down the steep rock face, and jumped into the water. It reached almost to his shoulders. He went through the porch and found himself in a rough kind of passage with crudely shaped pointed vaulting above his head. The walls were smooth and polished. He had lost sight of the crab. He was still within his depth. As he walked on the light increasingly faded, and soon he could make out nothing in the darkness. After he had advanced for some fifteen paces the vaulting above his head came to an end. He had emerged from the passage. There was more space, and therefore more light; and the pupils of his eyes had now dilated, so that he could see quite well. Then he had a surprise.

He had entered the strange cavern that he had visited a month ago; only this time he had come in from the sea. He had just passed through the sunken arch that he had seen on his earlier visit; it could be traversed at certain particularly low tides.

His eyes gradually accustomed themselves to the dim light, and he saw better and better. He was filled with wonder. He was back in the extraordinary palace of darkness that he had discovered before, with its vaulting, its pillars, its bloodreds and purples, its vegetation of gemstones and, to the rear, the crypt that was almost a sanctuary and the stone that was almost an altar. He had little recollection of these details, but he had preserved the whole scene in his mind and he now saw it again. Facing him, at some height on the rock face, was the crevice through which he had entered the first time, and that from the point where he now was seemed inaccessible.

Near the pointed arch he saw the low, dark cavities—caves within the cavern—which he had previously seen from a distance. Now he was quite close to them. The one nearest to him was out of the water and easily accessible.

Still nearer, within reach of his hand, he noticed a horizontal fissure in the granite, above the water level. This was probably where the crab had found shelter. He thrust his hand in as far as he could and began to feel about in this hole of darkness.

Suddenly he felt something seizing hold of his arm. He was struck with undescribable horror.

Something in the dark cavity—something thin, rough, flat, ice-cold, slimy, living—had coiled around his bare arm and was creeping up toward his chest. It felt like the pressure of a belt drawn tight and the clinging grasp of a tendril. In less than a second an unseen spiral had invaded his wrist and elbow, with its tip reaching up to his armpit.

Gilliatt threw himself backward, but found that he was barely able to move. With his left hand, which remained free, he grasped the knife that he had been carrying in his teeth and with this hand holding the knife he braced himself against the rock, making a desperate effort to withdraw his arm. He succeeded only in slightly loosening the thong holding his arm, which immediately tightened again. It was as supple as leather, as hard as steel, and as cold as night.

A second thong, narrow and pointed, now emerged from the crevice in the rock, like a tongue issuing from a gaping jaw. It licked, appallingly, Gilliatt's naked chest and, suddenly becoming enormously longer and thinner, clung to his skin and coiled around his whole body. At the same time a terrible pang of pain, like nothing he had previously experienced, tensed Gilliatt's straining muscles. He felt horrible round prongs digging into his skin. It was as if innumerable lips were clinging to his flesh and seeking to drink his blood.

Then a third undulating thong emerged from the rock, felt Gilliatt's body, lashed his ribs like a whip, and settled there.

Anguish, reaching its paroxysm, is mute. Gilliatt did not utter a cry. There was enough light for him to see the repulsive forms that were latching onto him. A fourth thong, swift as an arrow, darted toward his belly and wound around it.

It was impossible to cut or to tear off the viscous bands that were adhering to Gilliatt's body so closely and at so many points. Each of these points was a source of strange and fearful pain. He had the feeling that he was being swallowed by a host of mouths that were too small for the task.

A fifth tentacle now came out of the hole. It settled on top of the others and then coiled over Gilliatt's diaphragm. This compression increased his anxiety: now he could scarcely breathe.

The thongs were pointed at the tip and widened toward the base as a sword does toward the hilt. All five evidently came from a common center. They kept moving and crawling all over Gilliatt. He felt these obscure pressures, which seemed to him like mouths, shifting from place to place.

Suddenly a large round, flat, viscous mass emerged from below the crevice. This was the center from which the five tentacles radiated like spokes from the hub of a wheel. On the opposite side of this foul disc were the beginnings of three other tentacles that were still under the rock. From the middle of the viscous mass two eyes looked out. They were looking at Gilliatt.

Gilliatt recognized the devilfish.
¹⁹⁹

II

THE MONSTER

To believe in the existence of the devilfish, you must have seen one. Compared with the devilfish, the hydras of old bring a smile to the lips.

At some moments we may be tempted to believe that the intangible forms that haunt our dreams encounter, in the world of the possible, magnets on which their lineaments are caught, and that these obscure dream images become living creatures. The Unknown has the power to produce marvels, and uses it to create monsters. Orpheus, Hesiod, and Homer could create only the chimera; God has created the devilfish.

When God so wills it, He excels in the creation of the execrable. Why He should have such a will is a question that troubles religious thinkers.

All ideals being admitted as valid, if causing terror is an objective, then the devilfish is a masterpiece. The whale is enormous, the devilfish is small; the hippopotamus is armor-plated, the devilfish is naked; the jararaca
²⁰⁰
has a whistling call, the devilfish is mute; the rhinoceros has a horn, the devilfish has none; the scorpion has a sting, the devilfish has none; the buthus
²⁰¹
has pincers, the devilfish has none; the howler monkey has a prehensile tail, the devilfish has no tail; the shark has sharp-edged fins, the devilfish has no fins; the vampire bat has clawed wings, the devilfish has no wings; the hedgehog has spines, the devilfish has none; the swordfish has a sword, the devilfish has none; the torpedo fish emits an electric discharge, the devilfish emits nothing; the toad has a virus, the devilfish has none; the viper has poison, the devilfish has none; the lion has claws, the devilfish has none; the lammergeyer has a beak, the devilfish has none; the crocodile has jaws, the devilfish has no teeth.

The devilfish has no mass of muscle, no threatening cry, no armor, no horn, no sting, no pincers, no tail to seize or batter its enemies, no sharp-edged fins, no clawed fins, no spines, no sword, no electric discharge, no virus, no poison, no claws, no beak, no teeth. And yet of all animals the devilfish is the one that is most formidably armed.

What, then,
is
the devilfish? It is a suction pad.

On reefs in the open sea, where the water displays and conceals all its splendors, in hollows among unvisited rocks, in unknown caverns with an abundance of vegetation, crustaceans, and shellfish, under the deep portals of the ocean, a swimmer who ventures in, attracted by the beauty of the scene, runs the risk of an encounter. If you have such an encounter, do not give way to curiosity but make your escape at once. Those who enter there bedazzled emerge terrified.

This is the encounter that you may have at any time among rocks in the open sea. A grayish form the thickness of a man's arm and about half an ell
²⁰²
long can be seen quivering in the water. It looks like a rag of cloth, like a rolled-up umbrella without a handle. This rag gradually draws closer to you. Suddenly it opens up, and eight rays dart out around a face containing two eyes. These rays are alive; undulating, they flash like fire. It is like a wheel; fully deployed, it has a diameter of four or five feet: a terrifying expansion. Then it launches itself at you. It is a case of a hydra harpooning a man.

The creature curls itself around its prey, covering it and knotting its long tentacles around it. Its underside is yellowish, its upper side earth-colored. It is impossible to render this color, the hue of dust; this sea creature looks as if it were made of ashes. It is spiderlike in form and chameleon-like in coloring. When disturbed it becomes purple. And, horrifyingly, it is soft and yielding.

The knots it ties strangle its prey, which is paralyzed by its very contact.

It has something of the aspect of scurvy and of gangrene. It is disease shaped into a monstrosity.

It cannot be shaken off; it clings firmly to its prey. How does it do this? By the power of a vacuum. The eight antennae are broad at the root but taper to a sharp point. On their undersides are two parallel rows of pustules, decreasing in size from the base to the point. There are twenty-five in each row; thus there are fifty on each antenna, and a total of four hundred in all.

These pustules are suckers: cartilaginous substances, cylindrical in shape, horny, pallid in color. In the largest species they range in size from a five-franc piece to a split pea. These short tubes can be thrust out and withdrawn at will. They can penetrate their prey to a depth of over an inch.

This suction apparatus has all the delicacy of a keyboard. It rises up and then disappears. It obeys the creature's least intention. The most exquisite sensibility cannot match the contractility of these suckers, which are always proportioned to the internal movements of the creature and to circumstances outside it. This dragon is a sensitive plant.

This monster is the creature that seamen call the octopus, scientists call a cephalopod, and which in legend is known as a kraken. English sailors call it the devilfish or the bloodsucker. In the Channel Islands it is called the
pieuvre.
It is rarely found on Guernsey; it is quite small on Jersey, and of great size and fairly common on Sark.

A print in Sonnini's edition of Buffon depicts a cephalopod grappling a frigate; and Denys Montfort believes that the octopus found in high latitudes is capable of sinking a ship. Bory de Saint-Vincent doubts this, but notes that in our waters it will attack a man. If you go to Sark they will show you, near Brecqhou, a hollow in the rocks where some years ago an octopus seized, held on to, and drowned a lobster fisher. Péron and Lamarck
²⁰³
are in error in their belief that an octopus, having no fins, cannot swim. The writer of these lines has seen with his own eyes, in the sea cave on Sark known as the Boutiques, an octopus swimming in pursuit of a bather. It was killed and when measured was found to be four English feet across. Its four hundred suckers could be counted; they were thrust out of the creature's arms in the convulsions of its death agony.

According to Denys Montfort, one of these observers whose powerful intuition leads him to descend, or to ascend, into Magism, the octopus has almost human passions: it can hate. And indeed, in the absolute, to be hideous is to hate.

Misshapen creatures struggle under a necessity of elimination that makes them hostile. When swimming the octopus stays, as it were, within its sheath. It swims with all its parts tucked up under it. It resembles a sleeve containing a closed fist. This fist, which is the head, cleaves through the water and advances with a vague undulating movement. Its two eyes, though large, are difficult to distinguish, being of the same color as the water.

When in pursuit of its prey or lying in wait the octopus conceals itself: it makes itself smaller, it condenses itself, it reduces itself to its simplest expression. In the half-light of the sea it is barely discernible. It looks like a furrow in the waves. It in no way resembles a living creature.

The octopus is a hypocrite. You pay no attention to it; then suddenly it opens up: a viscous mass with a will of its own: what could be more horrible? It is like birdlime imbued with hate.

In limpid water of the most brilliant blue this hideous and voracious star of the sea suddenly appears. The horrible thing is that you do not see it approach. Almost always, by the time you see it you are already caught.

At night, however, and particularly during its rutting season, it is phosphorescent. Horror though it is, it has its love affairs. It goes in quest of union. It beautifies itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; then, standing on a rock, you can see it in the deep shadow below you, unfolding in a pallid irradiation like a spectral sun.

The octopus swims, but it can also walk. Something of a fish, it is also something of a reptile. It crawls about on the sea bottom, using its eight feet and dragging itself along like the caterpillar of a geometer moth.

It has no bones, no blood, no flesh. It is flaccid. There is nothing inside it: it is no more than a skin. Its eight tentacles can be turned inside out like the fingers of a glove.

It has only one orifice, in the center, from which the tentacles radiate. Is this single opening the anus? Is it the mouth? It is both. The same opening serves both functions. The entrance is also the exit.
²⁰⁴

The whole creature is cold.

The sea nettle of the Mediterranean is repulsive. One is disgusted by contact with this animated mass of gelatin that envelops a swimmer, into which his hands sink, at which his nails scratch in vain, which he can tear apart without killing it, which he can pull off without getting rid of it, a fluid and tenacious creature that slips through his fingers; but no horror can equal the sudden appearance of the octopus—a Medusa served by eight serpents. No grasp is comparable in strength with the embrace of this cephalopod.

You are attacked by a pneumatic machine. You are dealing with a vacuum that has feet. What you suffer is not scratches or bites: it is an unspeakable scarification. A bite is fearful, but less so than a suction. A claw is harmless compared with a sucker. With a claw it is the beast entering into your flesh; with a sucker it is you who are entering into the beast. Your muscles swell, your fibers are twisted, your skin bursts open under this loathsome pressure, your blood spouts out and mingles horribly with the mollusc's lymph. The creature forces itself on you by a thousand foul mouths; the hydra incorporates itself in the man; the man is amalgamated with the hydra. You both become one. You are caught up in a hideous dream. The tiger can but devour you; the octopus, horrifyingly, breathes you in. It draws you to it and into it; and you feel yourself—bound, limed, powerless—slowly being emptied into the fearful sack that is the monster.

Beyond the horrific—being eaten alive—there is the unspeakable—being drunk alive.

Such strange animals as these are at first rejected by science, in accordance with her habit of excessive prudence, even when presented with the facts; then she makes up her mind to study them; she dissects them, classifies them, catalogues them, labels them; she acquires specimens; she exhibits them under glass in museums; she describes them as molluscs, invertebrates, radiates;
²⁰⁵
she assigns them a place among their neighbors—a little beyond the squids, a little short of the cuttlefish; she finds these saltwater hydras a freshwater counterpart, the argyroneta; she divides them into larger, medium-sized, and smaller species; she is readier to accept the smaller rather than the larger species, for that is, in all fields, her natural bent, which is microscopic rather than telescopic; she studies their structure and calls them cephalopods, counts their antennae and calls them octopods. Having done all this, she forgets about them; and when science abandons them philosophy takes them up.

Philosophy in her turn studies these beings. She goes both less far and farther than science. She does not dissect them: she meditates on them. Where the scalpel has been at work she brings the hypothesis to bear. She seeks the final cause: the profound torment of the thinker. These creatures almost cause her concern about the Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the killjoys of the contemplator: he observes them in dismay. They are deliberately created forms of evil. In face of these blasphemies of creation against itself what can be done? Who can be blamed for them?

Possibility is a formidable matrix. Mystery takes concrete form in monsters. Fragments of darkness emerge from the mass we call immanence, tear themselves apart, break off, roll, float, condense, borrow matter from the surrounding blackness, undergo unheard-of polarizations, take on life, compose themselves into curious forms with darkness and curious souls with miasma, and go on their way, like masks, among living and breathing beings. They are like darkness made into animals. What is the point of them? What purpose do they serve? We return to the eternal question.

These animals are phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved to exist and yet are improbable. They do in fact exist, but they might well not exist. They are the amphibians of death. Their improbability complicates their existence. They touch on the frontier of human consciousness and populate that chimerical boundary region. You deny the existence of the vampire, and the octopus appears. Their teeming numbers are a certainty that disconcerts our assured belief. Optimism, though it is itself truth, almost loses countenance in their presence. They are the visible extremity of black circles. They mark the transition from our reality to some other reality. They seem to belong to those embryos of terrible beings that the dreamer glimpses confusedly through the window of night.

These developed forms of monsters, first in the invisible and then in the possible, were suspected and perhaps actually perceived by the austere ecstasy and the sharp eye of magi and philosophers. Hence the conjectured existence of a hell. The Devil is the tiger of the invisible. The wild beast that devours souls was revealed to mankind by two visionaries, one called John and the other Dante.

For if the circles of darkness continue indefinitely, if after one ring there is yet another, if this aggravation persists in limitless progression, if this chain—the existence of which we for our part are resolved to doubt—does in fact exist, it is certain that the octopus at one extremity proves the existence of Satan at the other.

It is certain, too, that an evil thing at one end proves the existence of evil at the other.

Any evil beast, like any perverse intelligence, is a sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible enigma: the enigma of evil.

It is this perfection of evil that has sometimes led great minds to incline toward belief in a double god, the redoubtable two-faced god of the Manichaeans.

A piece of Chinese silk, stolen from the palace of the emperor of China during the recent war, depicts a shark eating a crocodile, which is eating a snake, which is eating an eagle, which is eating a swallow, which is eating a caterpillar.

The whole of the natural world that we have under our eyes eats and is eaten. Prey bites prey.