Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/468

 quietly, “if yonder is not Bonguer’s cuttle-fish, it is one of the family.”

I gazed at Conseil. Ned Land rushed to the window.

“The horrible beast!” he cried.

I in my turn came to look, and could not repress a shudder of disgust. Before my eyes was a fearful monster, worthy to figure in legends of the marvellous.

It was a cuttle of enormous dimensions, eight yards long. It moved sideways with extreme velocity in the direction of the Nautilus. It gazed at us with its enormous staring sea-green eyes. Its eight arms, or rather its eight feet, were fixed to its head, which gives these animals the name of cephalopods—were double the length of its body, and turned about like the head-dress of the furies. We could distinctly see the 250 air-holes on the inner side of the “arms,” shaped like semi-spherical capsules. Sometimes these air-holes fastened against the window, and thus emptied themselves. The monster’s mouth, a horny beak like that of a parrot, opened vertically. Its horny tongue, itself armed with many ranges of sharp teeth, came quivering from out those veritable shears. What a freak of Nature this—a bird’s beak on a mollusc! Its body shaped like a spindle, and swollen in the middle, formed a fleshy mass which must have weighed 40,000 or 50,000 lbs. Its colour changed with great rapidity, according to the irritation of the animal, passing successively from a livid grey to a reddish-brown tinge.

What irritated the mollusc? No doubt the presence of the Nautilus, more formidable than itself, and on which its beak and tentacles had no effect. What monsters these cuttles are, what vitality they possess, what vigour they must have in their movements, since they have three hearts!