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Updated: June 14, 2025
"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.
"Well," I said, "these are real devilfish caverns, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of those monsters hereabouts." "What!" Conseil put in. "Squid, ordinary squid from the class Cephalopoda?" "No," I said, "devilfish of large dimensions. But friend Land is no doubt mistaken, because I don't see a thing." "That's regrettable," Conseil answered.
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. It seemed as if these viscous tentacles grew back like the many heads of Hydra. At every thrust Ned Land's harpoon would plunge into a squid's sea-green eye and burst it.
My nerves calmed a little, but with my brain so aroused, I did a swift review of my whole existence aboard the Nautilus, every pleasant or unpleasant incident that had crossed my path since I went overboard from the Abraham Lincoln: the underwater hunting trip, the Torres Strait, our running aground, the savages of Papua, the coral cemetery, the Suez passageway, the island of Santorini, the Cretan diver, the Bay of Vigo, Atlantis, the Ice Bank, the South Pole, our imprisonment in the ice, the battle with the devilfish, the storm in the Gulf Stream, the Avenger, and that horrible scene of the vessel sinking with its crew . . . ! All these events passed before my eyes like backdrops unrolling upstage in a theater.
They had not intended to spend the afternoon, but found themselves too fascinated to turn away from the breakers bursting upon the rocks and from the many kinds of colorful sea life starfish, crabs, mussels, sea anemones, and, once, in a rock-pool, a small devilfish that chilled their blood when it cast the hooded net of its body around the small crabs they tossed to it.
There's also the story of how the Bishop of Trondheim set up an altar one day on an immense rock. After he finished saying mass, this rock started moving and went back into the sea. The rock was a devilfish." "And that's everything we know?" the Canadian asked.
I was always afraid of these huge crayfish, but C. was not. His courage might have been predatory, for he certainly liked to eat lobster. But he had a scare one night when a devilfish or tremendous ray got between him and the shore and made the water fly aloft in a geyser. It was certainly fun for me to see that dignified Englishman make tracks across the shoal.
And what a way to die! Smashed, strangled, crushed by the fearsome arms of a devilfish, ground between its iron mandibles, this friend would never rest with his companions in the placid waters of their coral cemetery! As for me, what had harrowed my heart in the thick of this struggle was the despairing yell given by this unfortunate man.
From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant sawfish or the ravening shark? from the herds of the porpoises, or from the grande-ecaille, that splendid monster whom no net may hold, all helmed and armored in argent plate-mail? or from the hideous devilfish of the Gulf, gigantic, flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat, the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors?
Here and there a neem, its delicate branches dusted with tiny white star blossoms, cast a sensuous elusive perfume to the vagrant breeze. Once a gigantic jamon stretched its gnarled arms across the roadway as if a devilfish held poised his tentacles to snatch from the brake its occupants.
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