The Fight for Life in the Depths

Such was the creature whose power Gilliatt had felt for some time. The monster was the inhabitant of the grotto—the devil-fish. On the day when Gilliatt had first penetrated into the cavern, the dark outline, newly perceived by him in the ripples of the clear waters, was this monster. It was there to lie in wait for its prey. 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 base stone at the bottom; his right arm bound and rendered powerless by the flat coils of the long tentacles of the animal, and his body almost hidden under the folds and areas 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. Gilliatt had but one resource—his knife. The creature is formidable, but there is a way of resisting it. The cephaloptera, in fact, is only vulnerable through the head. Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact. Suddenly, it loosened from the rock its sixth antenna and darted it at him, seized his 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. 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. 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. The struggle was ended. The folds relaxed. The monster dropped away like the slow detaching of hands. The four hundred suckers, deprived of their exhausting power, dropped at once from the man and the rock. The mass sank to the bottom of the water.