11. A third long, undulating shape issued from the hole in the rock, seemed to feel its way about his body,

Agony when at its height is mute: Gilliatt uttered no cry. There was sufficient light for him to see the repulsive forms which had entangled themselves about him.

12. A fourth ligature — but this one swift as an arrow— darted towards his stomach, and wound around him there. It was impossible to sever or tear away the slimy bands which were twisted tightly round his body, and were adhering by a number of points. Each of the points was the focus of frightful and singular pangs. It was as if numberless small mouths were devouring him at the same time.

13. A fifth long, slimy, riband-shaped strip issued from the hole. It passed over the others, and wound itself tightly round his chest. The compression increased his sufferings; he could scarcely breathe. These living thongs were pointed at their extremities, but broadened like the blade of a sword towards its hilt. All belonged evidently to the same center. They crept and glided about him; he felt the strange points of pressure, which seemed to him like mouths, change their places from time to time.

14. Suddenly a large, round, flattened, glutinous mass issued from the crevice. It was the center; the five thongs were attached to it like spokes to the nave of a wheel. On the opposite side of this disgusting monster appeared the commencement of three other tentacles, the ends of which remained under the rock. In the middle of this slimy mass appeared two eyes. The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt. He recognized the devil-fish.

15. It is difficult for those who have not seen it to believe the existence of the devil-fish. If terror were the object of its creation, nothing could be imagined more perfect than the devil-fish. The octopus is the sea-vampire. The swimmer who, attracted by the beauty of the spot,

ventures among breakers in the open sea,- where the still waters hide the splendors of the deep, in the hollows of unfrequented rocks, in unknown caverns abounding in sea-plants, testacea, and crustacea,— under the deep portals of the ocean, runs the risk of meeting it. The monster was the inhabitant of the grotto-the terrible genius of the place a kind of somber demon of the water. All the splendors of the cavern existed for it alone. Is it possible to imagine that secret ambush? No bird would brood, no egg would burst to life, no flower would dare to open, no heart to love, no spirit to soar, under the influence of that apparition of evil watching with sinister patience in the dusk.

16. Gilliatt had thrust his arm deep into the opening; the monster had snapped at it. It held him fast, as the spider holds the fly. He was in the water up to his belt; his naked feet clutching the slippery roundness of the huge stones at the bottom; his right arm bound and rendered powerless by the flat coils of the long tentacles of the creature, and his body almost hidden under the folds and cross folds of this horrible bandage. Of the eight arms of the devil-fish, three adhered to the rock, while five encircled Gilliatt. In this way, clinging to the granite on the one hand, and on the other to its human prey, it enchained him to the rock. Two hundred and fifty suckers were upon him, tormenting him with agony and loathing. He was grasped by gigantic hands, the fingers of which were each nearly a yard long, and furnished inside with living. blisters eating into the flesh.

17. It is impossible to tear one's self from the folds of the devil-fish the attempt ends only in a firmer grasp; the monster clings with more determined force. Its effort

:

increases with that of its victim; every struggle produces

a tightening of its ligatures. source, his knife.

Gilliatt had but one reHis left hand only was free; his open knife was in this hand. The antenna of the devilfish cannot be cut; it is a leathery substance, impossible to divide with the knife, it slips under the edge. Its position in attack also is such that to cut it would be to wound the victim's own flesh. The creature is formidable, but there is a way of resisting it. The fishermen of Sark know this, as does any one who has seen them execute certain abrupt movements in the sea. The cephalopod, in fact, is only vulnerable through the head.

18. Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact. He had never seen a devil-fish of this size: another man would have been powerless with terror. With the octopus, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment in the conflict which must be seized. It is the instant when the bull lowers the neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its head. The movement is rapid. He who loses that moment is destroyed.

19. The things we have described occupied only a few moments. Gilliatt, however, felt the increasing power of its innumerable suckers. The monster is cunning; it tries first to stupefy its prey,-it seizes, and then pauses awhile. Gilliatt grasped his knife; the sucking increased. He looked at the monster, which seemed to look at him. Suddenly it loosened from the rock its sixth antenna, and, darting it at him, seized him by the left arm. At the same moment it advanced its head with a violent movement. In one second more its mouth would have fastened on his breast. Bleeding in the sides, and with his two arms entangled, he would have been a dead man.

20. But Gilliatt was watchful. He avoided the antenna, and at the moment when the monster darted forward to fasten on his breast, he struck it with the knife clenched in his left hand. There were two couvulsions in opposite directions, that of the devil-fish and that of its prey. The movement was rapid as a double flash of lightning. He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat, slimy substance, and by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would draw a tooth.

21. The struggle was ended. The folds relaxed; the monster dropped away, like the slow detaching of hands; the four hundred suckers, deprived of their sustaining power, dropped at once from the man and the rock. The mass sank to the bottom of the water. Breathless with the struggle, Gilliatt could perceive upon the stones at his feet two shapeless, slimy heaps; the head on one side, the remainder of the monster on the other. Fearing, nevertheless, some convulsive return of his agony, he recoiled to avoid the reach of the dreaded tentacles. But the monster was quite dead. Gilliatt closed his knife.

VICTOR HUGO.