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Updated: June 20, 2025
The mermen scattered, taking cover, a move copied by the two humans. The pilot remained in hiding, but he saw one of the furred people running on as light-footedly as a shadow. Then his arm drew back, and he cast his spear. Raf fancied he could hear a faint whistle as the weapon cut the air.
Then there are the more supernatural superstitions, as of witches, ghosts, the devil, of Trolds, of mermen and mermaids, of Nissen, like your English pixey, of the three-legged horse that inhabits the churchyards, the were-wolf, the gnome that inhabits the elder tree, the nightmare, or, as we call it, Maren.
There was a cry, and the merman ran on, vanishing into the shadows, to return a second or two later wiping stains from his weapon. Out of their places of concealment, his fellows gathered about him. And the humans followed. Now they were fronted by a ramp leading up, and the mermen took it quickly, their bare, scaled feet setting up a whispering echo which was drowned by the clop of Raf's boots.
There was nothing good about that except the name, and a queer resemblance to fortifications in the quays, which one felt might at any moment be manned by dripping mermen at war with the landfolk.
One day they were becalmed near the Island of Oland, and let go the anchor in twelve-fathoms water, when soon afterwards they saw, as they supposed, two men swimming towards the ship. They soon after came alongside, and made signs for a rope to be thrown to them. On their getting on deck the crew found they were mermen.
But now he could understand the other's agitation. It was very true that Those Others might turn on the stranger's fellows in retaliation for his deeds. Together they joined the mermen. There was no talk, nothing to break the splashing sound of bodies moving against the current. As they pressed on, Raf was sure that this was not the same way they had come.
"Wal'," said the Captain, sinking his voice confidentially, and hitching his chair a little around, "mermen and maids is a kind o' people that have their world jist like our'n, only it's down in the bottom of the sea, 'cause the bottom of the sea has its mountains and its valleys, and its trees and its bushes, and it stands to reason there should be people there too."
In the middle of the commonplace town, with its straight, characterless streets, there suddenly appeared Egyptian hypogea, Norwegian chalets, cloisters, bastions, exhibition pavilions, pot-bellied houses, fakirs, buried in the ground, with expressionless faces, with only one enormous eye; dungeon gates, ponderous gates, iron hoops, golden cryptograms on the panes of grated windows, belching monsters over the front door, blue porcelain tiles plastered on in most unexpected places; variegated mosaics representing Adam and Eve; roofs covered with tiles of jarring colors; houses like citadels with castellated walls, deformed animals on the roofs, no windows on one side, and then suddenly, close to each other, gaping holes, square, red, angular, triangular, like wounds; great stretches of empty wall from which suddenly there would spring a massive balcony with one window a balcony supported by Nibelungesque Caryatides, balconies from which there peered through the stone balustrade two pointed heads of old men, bearded and long-haired, mermen of Boecklin.
At the discreet distance which one ought always to keep one could not always be sure whether these bold bathers were mermen or mermaids; for the sea costume of both sexes is the same here, as regards an absence of skirts and a presence of what are, after the first plunge, effectively tights.
We find unicorns, mermaids, and mermen; geese developed from the shell-fish known as "barnacles"; we are told that crocodiles may weep, and that sirens can sing in short, there is nothing so wonderful to be told of animals that people will not believe the tale.
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