Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 16

The _oseznos_ (bear-cubs) and the star-fish were slowly waving the forms that had given rise to their names, secreting poisons in order to paralyze their victims, contracting themselves until they formed a ball of lances that grasped their prey in a deadly embrace or cut it with the bony knives of their radiating body. The iris of the sea balanced themselves on end, moving their members as though they were petals.

Upon the fine sandy depths or attached to the rocks, the mollusks lived in the protection of their sh.e.l.ls.

The necessity of giving themselves up to sleep with relative security, without fear of the general rapacity which is the oceanic law, is a matter of concern to all of these marine beings, making them constructive and inventive. The crustaceans live within their sh.e.l.ls or take advantage of ready-made refuges of limestone, expelling their former owners; the animal-plants exhale toxins; the _planctonic_ beings, transparent and gelatinous, burn like a crystal exposed to fire; some organisms apparently weak and flabby, have in their tails the force of a carpenter's bit, perforating the rock sufficiently to create a cavern of refuge in its hard interior.... And the timid mollusks, trembling and succulent pulp, have fabricated for their protection the strong s.h.i.+elds of their valves,--two concave walls that on opening form their door, and on closing, their house.

A bit of flesh protrudes outside these sh.e.l.ls, like a white tongue. In some it takes the form of a sole, and serves as a foot, the mollusk marching with his dwelling upon the back of this unique support. In others it is a swimmer, and the sh.e.l.l, opening and shutting its valves like a propelling mouth, ascends in a straight line to the surface, falling afterwards with the two s.h.i.+elds closed.

These herbivorous fresh-water animals live by drinking in the light,--feeling the necessity of the surface waters or the shallow depths with their limpid glades--and this light, spreading over the white interior of their dwelling, decorates it with all the fleeting colors of the iris, giving to the limestone the mysterious s.h.i.+mmer of mother-of-pearl.

Ulysses admired the odd forms of their winding pa.s.sageways. They were like the palaces of the Orient, dark and forbidding on the outside, glistening within like a lake of pearl. Some received their terrestrial names because of the special form of their sh.e.l.l--the rabbit, the helmet, triton's horn, the cask, the Mediterranean parasol.

They were grazing with bucolic tranquillity on the maritime pasture lands, contemplated from afar by the mussels, the oysters, and other bi-valves, attached to the rocks by a hard and h.o.r.n.y hank of silk that enwrapped their enclosures. Some of these sh.e.l.ls, called hams,--clams of great size, with valves in the form of a club,--had fixed themselves upright in the mire, giving the appearance of a submerged Celtic camp, with a succession of obelisks swallowed up by the depths of the sea.

The one called the date-sh.e.l.l can, a.s.sisted by its liquid acid, pierce the hardest stone with its cylindrical gimlet. The columns of h.e.l.lenic temples, submerged in the Gulf of Naples and brought to light by an earthquake, are bored from one end to the other by this diminutive perforator.

Cries of surprise and nervous laughter suddenly reached Ferragut. They came from that part of the Aquarium where the fish tanks were. In the corridor was a little trough of water and at the bottom a kind of rag, flabby and gray, with black rings on the back. This animal always attracted the immediate curiosity of the visitors. Everybody would ask for it.

Groups of countrymen, city families preceded by their offspring, pairs of soldiers, all might be seen consulting before it and experimenting, advancing their hands over the trough with a certain hesitation.

Finally they would touch the living rag at the bottom,--the gelatinous flesh of the fish-torpedo,--receiving a series of electric shocks which quickly made them loosen their prey, laughing and raising the other hand to their jerking arms.

Ulysses on reaching the fish tanks had the sensation of a traveler who, after having lived among inferior humanity, encounters beings that are almost of his own race.

There was the oceanic aristocracy, the fish free as the sea, swift, undulating and slippery, like the waves. They all had accompanied him for many years, appearing in the transparencies opened by the prow of his vessel.

They were vigorous and therefore had no neck,--the most fragile and delicate portion of terrestrial organism,--making them more like the bull, the elephant and all the battering animals. They needed to be light, and in order to be so had dispensed with the rigid and hard sh.e.l.l of the crustacean that prevents motion, preferring the coat of mail covered with scales, which expands and contracts, yields to the blow but is not injured. They wished to be free, and their body, like that of the ancient wrestlers, was covered with a slippery oil, the oceanic mucus that becomes volatilized at the slightest pressure.

The freest animals on earth cannot be compared with them. The birds need to perch and to rest during their sleep, but the fish continue floating around and moving from place to place while asleep. The entire world belongs to them. Wherever there is a ma.s.s of water,--ocean, river or lake, in whatever alt.i.tude or lat.i.tude, a mountain peak lost in the clouds, a valley boiling like a whirlpool, a sparkling and tropical sea with a forest of colors in its bosoms, or a polar sea encrusted with ice and people, with sea-lions and white bears,--there the fish always appears.

The public of the Aquarium, seeing the flat heads of the swimming animals near the gla.s.s, would scream and wave their arms as though they could be seen by the fishy eyes of stupid fixity. Then they would experience a certain dismay upon perceiving that the fish continued their course with indifference.

Ferragut smiled before this deception. The crystal that separated the water from the atmosphere had the density of millions of leagues,--an insuperable obstacle interposed between two worlds that do not know each other.

The sailor recalled the imperfect vision of the ocean inhabitants. In spite of their bulging and movable eyes that enable them to see before and behind them, their visual power extends but a short distance. The splendors with which Nature clothes the b.u.t.terfly cannot be appreciated by them. Absolutely color-blind, they can appreciate only the difference between light and darkness.

Complete silence accompanies their incomplete vision. All the aquatic animals are deaf, or rather they completely lack the organs of hearing, because they are unnecessary to them. Atmospheric agitations, thunder-bolts and hurricanes do not penetrate the water. Only the cracking sh.e.l.l of certain crabs and the dolorous moaning near the surface of certain fishes, called snorers, alter this silence.

Since the ocean lacks acoustic waves, their inhabitants have never needed to form the organs that transform them into sound. They feel impetuously the primal necessities of animal life,--hunger and love.

They suffer madly the cruelty of sickness and pain; among themselves they fight to the death for a meal or a mate. But all in absolute silence, without the howl of triumph or agony with which terrestrial animals accompany the same manifestations of their existence.

Their princ.i.p.al sense is that of smell, as is that of sight in the bird. In the twilight world of the ocean, streaked with phosph.o.r.escent and deceptive splendors, the big fish trust only to their sense of smell and at times to that of touch.

Sometimes buried in the mud, they will ascend hundreds of yards, attracted by the odor of the fish that are swimming on the surface.

This prodigious faculty renders useless, in part, the colors in which the timid species clothe themselves in order to confound themselves with lights or shadows. The greatest flesh-eaters see badly, but they sc.r.a.pe the bottom with a divining touch and scent their prey at astonis.h.i.+ng distances.

Only the Mediterranean fishes, especially those of the Gulf of Naples, were living in the tanks of this Aquarium. Some were lacking,--the dolphin, of nervous movement, and the tunny, so impetuous in its career. The captain smiled upon thinking of the mischievous pranks of these ungovernable guests whose presence had been declined.

The voracious shark (_cabeza de olla_), the persecuting wolf of the Mediterranean herds, was not here either. In his place were swimming other animals of the same species, whitish and long, with great fins, with eyes always open for lack of movable eyelids, and a mouth split like a half-moon, under the head at the beginning of the stomach.

Ferragut sought on the bottom of the tanks the fishes of the deep,--flattened animals that pa.s.s the greater part of their time sunk in the sand under a coverlet of algae. The dark _uranoscopo_, with its eyes almost united on the peak of its enormous head and its body in the form of a club, leaves visible only a long thread coming from its lower jaw, waving it in all directions in order to attract its prey.

Believing it a worm, the victims usually chase the moving bait until pounced upon by the teeth of the hunter who then springs from his bed, floats around for a few moments, and falls heavily to the bottom, opening a new pit with his pectoral, shovel-shaped swimming bladders.

The toad fish, the most hideous animal of the Mediterranean, goes hunting in the same way. Three-fourths of his flattened body is made up of head, mostly mouth, armed with hooks and curved knives. Guided by his yellowish eyes fixed on top, he waves his pointed little beard, cut like leaves, and a pair of dorsal appendages like feathers. This false bait attracts the unwary ones and soon the cavernous mandibles close upon them.

The plane fishes swim quickly over these monsters of the mire, that are always horizontally flat resting upon their bellies, whilst the flatness of the soles and others of the same species is vertical. The two sides of the bodies of the soles, compressed laterally, have different colorings. In this way, when lying down, they are able to merge themselves at the same time with the light of the surface and the shadow of the bottom, thus getting rid of their persecutors.

All the infinite varieties of the Mediterranean fauna were moving in the other tanks.

There pa.s.sed by the greenish plates of gla.s.s the giltheads, the cackerels, and the sea roaches, clad in vivid silver with bands of gold on their sides. There also flashed past the purple of the salmonoids, the brilliant majesty of the gold fish, the bluish belly of the sea bream, the striped back of the sheep's head, the trumpet-mouthed marine sun-fish, the immovable sneer of the so-called "joker," the dorsal pinnacle of the peac.o.c.k-fish which appears made of feathers, the restless and deeply bifurcated tail of the horse mackerel, the fluttering of the mullet with its triple wings, the grotesque rotundity of the boar-fish and the pig-fish, the dark smoothness of the sting-ray, floating like a fringe, the long snout of the woodc.o.c.k-fish, the slenderness of the haddock, agile and swift as a torpedo, the red gurnard all thorns, the angel of the sea with its fleshy wings, the gudgeon, bristling with swimming angularities, the notary, red and white, with black bands similar to the flourishes on signatures, the modest _esmarrido_, the little sand fish, the superb turbot almost round with fan tail and a swimming fringe spotted with circles, and the gloomy conger-eel whose skin is as bluish black as that of the ravens.

Hidden between two rocks like the hunting crustaceans was the _rascaza_,--the scorpion of the Valencian sea that Ferragut had known in his childhood, the animal beloved by his uncle, the _Triton_, because of its substantial flesh which thickened the seamen's soup, the precious component sought by Uncle Caragol for the broth of his succulent rice dishes. The enormous head had a pair of eyes entirely red. Its great swimming bladders stung venomously. The heavy body with its dark bands and stripes was covered with singular appendages in the form of leaves and could easily take the color of the deep where, in the semi-obscurity, it looked like a stone covered with plants. With this mimicry it was accustomed to escape its enemies and could better detect its prey.

A gloomy creature, in Ferragut's opinion like a beadle of the Holy Office, was parading through the upper part of the tanks, pa.s.sing from gla.s.s to gla.s.s, reflected like a double animal when it approached the surface. It was the ray-fish with a flat head, ferocious eyes, and thong-like tail, moving the black mantle of its fleshy wings with a deliberation that rippled the edges.

From the sandy bottom was struggling forth a convex s.h.i.+eld that, when floating, showed its lower face smooth and yellow. The four wrinkled paws and the serpent-like head of the turtle were emerging from its cuira.s.s of tortoise-sh.e.l.l. The little sea horses, slender and graceful as chess-pieces, were rising and descending in the bluish environment, wiggling their tails and twisting themselves in the form of interrogation points.

When the captain approached the end of the four galleries of the Aquarium without having seen more than the maritime animals behind the glistening gla.s.ses and a few uninteresting people in the greenish semi-light, he felt all the discouragement of a day lost.

"She won't come now!..."

In pa.s.sing from this damp, cellar-like atmosphere to the sunlit garden, the report of the midday gun struck him like an atmospheric blow. Lunch hour!... And surely Freya was not going to lunch in the hotel!

During the afternoon his footsteps strayed instinctively toward the hill streets of the district of Chiaja. All old buildings of manorial aspect invariably attracted his attention. These were great, reddish houses of the time of the Spanish viceroys, or palaces of the reign of Charles III. Their broad staircases were adorned with polychrome busts brought from the first excavations in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Ulysses had faint hopes of running across the widow while pa.s.sing in front of one of these mansions, now rented in floors and displaying little metal door-plates indicative of office and warehouse. In one of these undoubtedly must be living the family that was so friendly to Freya.

Then, noticing the whiteness of the showy constructions rising up around the old districts, he became dubious. The doctor would dwell only in a modern and hygienic edifice. But not daring to ask questions, he pa.s.sed on, fearing to be seen from a window.

Finally he gave it up. Chiaja had many streets and he was wandering aimlessly, since the concierge of the hotel had not been able to give him any precise directions. The _signora_ Talberg was evidently bent on outwitting all his finesse, trying to keep from him the address of her friends.

The following morning the captain took up his usual watch in the promenade near the white Virgil. It was all in vain. After ten o'clock he again wandered into the Aquarium, animated by a vague hope.

"Perhaps she may come to-day...."

With the superst.i.tion of the enamored and all those who wait, he kept hunting certain places preferred by the widow, believing that in this way he would attract her from her distant preoccupation, obliging her to come to him.

The tanks of the molluscas had always been especially interesting to her. He recalled that Freya had several times spoken to him of this section.

Among its aquatic cases she always preferred the one marked number fifteen, the exclusive dominion of the polypi (cuttlefish). A vague presentiment warned him that something very important in his life was going to be unrolled in that particular spot. Whenever Freya visited the Aquarium, it was to see these repulsive and gluttonous animals eat.

There was nothing to do but to await her before this cavern of horrors.

And while she was making her way thither, the captain had to amuse himself like any landlubber, contemplating the ferocious chase and laborious digestion of these monsters.

He had seen them much larger in the deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng grounds; but by curtailing his imaginative powers he could pretend that the blue sheet of the tank was the entire ma.s.s of the ocean--the rough bits of stone on the bottom its submarine mountains, and by contracting his own personality, he could reduce himself to the same scale as the little victims that were falling under the devouring tentacles. In this manner he could fancy of gigantic dimensions these cuttlefish of the Aquarium, just as the monstrous oceanic octopi must be that, thousands of yards down, were illuminating the gloom of the waters with the greenish star of their phosph.o.r.escent nuclei.

From prehistoric times the men of the sea had known this great, ropy beast of the abysses. The geographers of antiquity used to speak of it, giving the measurement of its terrible arms.

Pliny used to recount the destruction accomplished by a gigantic octopus in the vivarium of the Mediterranean. When some sailors succeeded in killing it they carried it to the epicure, Lucullus,--the head as big as a barrel, and some of its tentacles so huge that one person could hardly reach around them. The chroniclers of the Middle Ages had also spoken of the gigantic cuttlefish that on more than one occasion had, with its serpentine arms, s.n.a.t.c.hed men from the decks of the s.h.i.+ps.

The Scandinavian navigators, who had never encountered it in their fjords, nicknamed it the _kraken_, exaggerating its proportions and even converting it into a fabulous being. If it came to the surface, they confounded it with an island; if it remained between the two waters, the captains, on making their soundings, became confused in their calculations, finding the depth less than that marked on their charts. In such cases they had to escape before the _kraken_ should awake and sink the vessel as though it were a fragile skiff among its whirlpools of foam.