Before my eyes there quivered a horrible monster worthy of a place among the most farfetched teratological legends.
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long.
It was traveling backward with tremendous speed in the same direction as the Nautilus. It gazed with enormous, staring eyes that were tinted sea green. Its eight arms (or more accurately, feet) were rooted in its head, which has earned these animals the name cephalopod; its arms stretched a distance twice the length of its body and were writhing like the serpentine hair of the Furies. You could plainly see its 250 suckers, arranged over the inner sides of its tentacles and shaped like semispheric capsules.
Sometimes these suckers fastened onto the lounge window by creating vacuums against it. The monster"s mouth--a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot--opened and closed vertically.
Its tongue, also of horn substance and armed with several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears.
What a freak of nature! A bird"s beak on a mollusk!
Its body was spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy ma.s.s that must have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms.
Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, pa.s.sing successively from bluish gray to reddish brown.
What was irritating this mollusk? No doubt the presence of the Nautilus, even more fearsome than itself, and which it couldn"t grip with its mandibles or the suckers on its arms.
And yet what monsters these devilfish are, what vitality our Creator has given them, what vigor in their movements, thanks to their owning a triple heart!
Sheer chance had placed us in the presence of this squid, and I didn"t want to lose this opportunity to meticulously study such a cephalopod specimen. I overcame the horror that its appearance inspired in me, picked up a pencil, and began to sketch it.
"Perhaps this is the same as the Alecto"s," Conseil said.
"Can"t be," the Canadian replied, "because this one"s complete while the other one lost its tail!"
"That doesn"t necessarily follow," I said. "The arms and tails of these animals grow back through regeneration, and in seven years the tail on Bouguer"s Squid has surely had time to sprout again."
"Anyhow," Ned shot back, "if it isn"t this fellow, maybe it"s one of those!"
Indeed, other devilfish had appeared at the starboard window.
I counted seven of them. They provided the Nautilus with an escort, and I could hear their beaks gnashing on the sheet-iron hull.
We couldn"t have asked for a more devoted following.
I continued sketching. These monsters kept pace in our waters with such precision, they seemed to be standing still, and I could have traced their outlines in miniature on the window.
But we were moving at a moderate speed.
All at once the Nautilus stopped. A jolt made it tremble through its entire framework.
"Did we strike bottom?" I asked.
"In any event we"re already clear," the Canadian replied, "because we"re afloat."
The Nautilus was certainly afloat, but it was no longer in motion.
The blades of its propeller weren"t churning the waves. A minute pa.s.sed.
Followed by his chief officer, Captain Nemo entered the lounge.
I hadn"t seen him for a good while. He looked gloomy to me.
Without speaking to us, without even seeing us perhaps, he went to the panel, stared at the devilfish, and said a few words to his chief officer.
The latter went out. Soon the panels closed. The ceiling lit up.
I went over to the captain.
"An unusual a.s.sortment of devilfish," I told him, as carefree as a collector in front of an aquarium.
"Correct, Mr. Naturalist," he answered me, "and we"re going to fight them at close quarters."
I gaped at the captain. I thought my hearing had gone bad.
"At close quarters?" I repeated.
"Yes, sir. Our propeller is jammed. I think the horn-covered mandibles of one of these squid are entangled in the blades.
That"s why we aren"t moving."
"And what are you going to do?"
"Rise to the surface and slaughter the vermin."
"A difficult undertaking."
"Correct. Our electric bullets are ineffective against such soft flesh, where they don"t meet enough resistance to go off.
But we"ll attack the beasts with axes."
"And harpoons, sir," the Canadian said, "if you don"t turn down my help."
"I accept it, Mr. Land."
"We"ll go with you," I said. And we followed Captain Nemo, heading to the central companionway.
There some ten men were standing by for the a.s.sault, armed with boarding axes. Conseil and I picked up two more axes.
Ned Land seized a harpoon.
By then the Nautilus had returned to the surface of the waves.
Stationed on the top steps, one of the seamen undid the bolts of the hatch. But he had scarcely unscrewed the nuts when the hatch flew up with tremendous violence, obviously pulled open by the suckers on a devilfish"s arm.
Instantly one of those long arms glided like a snake into the opening, and twenty others were quivering above. With a sweep of the ax, Captain Nemo chopped off this fearsome tentacle, which slid writhing down the steps.
Just as we were crowding each other to reach the platform, two more arms lashed the air, swooped on the seaman stationed in front of Captain Nemo, and carried the fellow away with irresistible violence.
Captain Nemo gave a shout and leaped outside. We rushed after him.
What a scene! Seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, the unfortunate man was swinging in the air at the mercy of this enormous appendage. He gasped, he choked, he yelled: "Help! Help!" These words, p.r.o.nounced in French, left me deeply stunned!
So I had a fellow countryman on board, perhaps several!
I"ll hear his harrowing plea the rest of my life!
The poor fellow was done for. Who could tear him from such a powerful grip? Even so, Captain Nemo rushed at the devilfish and with a sweep of the ax hewed one more of its arms.
His chief officer struggled furiously with other monsters crawling up the Nautilus"s sides. The crew battled with flailing axes.
The Canadian, Conseil, and I sank our weapons into these fleshy ma.s.ses.
An intense, musky odor filled the air. It was horrible.
For an instant I thought the poor man entwined by the devilfish might be torn loose from its powerful suction. Seven arms out of eight had been chopped off. Brandishing its victim like a feather, one lone tentacle was writhing in the air. But just as Captain Nemo and his chief officer rushed at it, the animal shot off a spout of blackish liquid, secreted by a pouch located in its abdomen.
It blinded us. When this cloud had dispersed, the squid was gone, and so was my poor fellow countryman!
What rage then drove us against these monsters! We lost all self-control.
Ten or twelve devilfish had overrun the Nautilus"s platform and sides.
We piled helter-skelter into the thick of these sawed-off snakes, which darted over the platform amid waves of blood and sepia ink.