Page:Under the Sun.djvu/299

Rh on the afternoon of a fine, clear da}^, he saw, some three hundred yards off, about twenty feet of a black snakelike body, three feet in diameter, moving through the water towards his ship. As it approached, he distinctly perceived its eel-like head and its eyes; but the seaserpent, when it got so close as this, took fright and plunged with a great splash under the water, and then, turning itself round with a mighty disturbance of the sea, made off, raising its head frequently as it went. Now, here there is no extraordinary demand made upon credulity-, for the merest infant can comfortably entertain the idea, in twenty-foot lengths, at any rate, of a snake as thick as an eighteen-gallon cask. The color, too, is simple black, and the head has no features more surprising than eyes.

The great sea-serpent, therefore, is, after all, found to come within the compass of the ordinary human understanding, and we are not asked to believe in more than a somewhat magnified conger-eel. In behavior, also, the present animal differs agreeably and rationally from all preceding avatars of the great sea-worm, as the Danes call it; for except that it splashed extravagantly when it turned round in the water, it did not demean itself otherwise than might respectably be permitted to a snake of such dimensions. At the same time, however, such is the weakness of human nature, there will be vestiges of regret for the turbulent, ill-behaved monstrosity that has hitherto done duty as the sea-serpent. The present worm is perhaps just a little too tame. If it had only shown a scale or two, or sparkled slightly at the nostrils, or betrayed some tendency towards horns or claws, shaken just a little mane, — not too much, of course, — or snorted, or brayed, or even squeaked