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Updated: September 17, 2025
The sun falls broadly over the area of the piazza, and shows the fountains in it; one a large basin with great sea-monsters, probably of Bernini's inventions, squirting very small streams of water into it; another of the fountains I do not at all remember; but the central one is an immense basin, over which is reared an old Egyptian obelisk, elevated on a rock, which is cleft into four arches.
In addition, one finds the usual Lombard grotesques two sea-monsters, biting each other; harpy-birds; a dragon with a twisted tail; little men grinning and squatting in adaptation to coigns and angles of the windows. The toothed and chevron patterns of the north are quaintly blent with rude acanthus scrolls and classical egg-mouldings. Over the western porch is a Gothic rose window.
What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity, what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No!
The strand he gained, and forward he sped like a dolphin, faring with unwetted hooves over the wide waves. And the sea, as he came, grew smooth, and the sea-monsters gambolled around, before the feet of Zeus, and the dolphin rejoiced, and rising from the deeps, he tumbled on the swell of the sea.
"These are guests of the Emir Feisul," he announced. "Send the bill to me." We were piled into the waiting autos. Mabel, Grim and I rode in the first one, with the Syrian officers up beside the driver; Jeremy, Narayan Singh and Hadad followed; and we went through the dark streets like sea-monsters splashing over shoals, unseen I think certainly unrecognized.
Great ships steer out of its path. And well they may; since the good craft Essex, and others, have been sunk by sea-monsters, as the alligator thrusts his horny snout through a Carribean canoe. Ever present to us, was the apprehension of some sudden disaster from the extraordinary zoological specimens we almost hourly passed.
Yet now and then Mister Diver-man has had to rush for his life to reach the friendly ladder when the disturbance under water to right and left has warned him that one of these sea-monsters was approaching. Oh, they are dreadful creatures, and greedy, too. They will follow vessels for miles and miles, expecting that cast-off food will be thrown into the sea, as it often is.
Now we follow the Tiber, a swollen, hurrying, turbid river, in which the mellowing Western sky reflects itself. This changeful mirror of swift waters spreads a dazzling foreground to valley, hill and lustrous heaven. There is orange on the far horizon, and a green ocean above, in which sea-monsters fashioned from the clouds are floating.
On this day Tom Miles and Ned Rodgers, two of the four seamen, suddenly sprang to their feet, and with a despairing yell plunged over the side of the raft into the sea before we were aware of or could arrest their terrible intention. There was a frightful splashing in the water astern, as the sea-monsters fought over their prey; then all was quiet again. Two of the sharks had disappeared.
Then I fell into a troubled doze, full of dreams of sea-monsters, which flapped and screamed at me from the foam of the breaking seas. I was not called for a watch that night. In the early morning, between one and two o'clock, I was awakened by a feeling that something was about to happen. I sat up, and then crept out on to the deck, and there, sure enough, something was about to happen.
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