Suddenly he felt himself seized by the arm.  A strange, indescribable horror thrilled through him.

Some living thing—­thin, rough, flat, cold, slimy—­had twisted itself round his naked arm.  It crept upward towards his chest.  Its pressure was like a tightening cord, its steady persistence like that of a screw.  In less than a moment some mysterious spiral form had passed round his wrist and elbow, and had reached his shoulder.  A sharp point penetrated beneath the arm-pit.

Gilliatt recoiled; but he had scarcely power to move.  He was, as it were, nailed to the place.  With his left hand, which was disengaged, he seized his knife, and made a desperate effort to withdraw his arm.  He only succeeded in disturbing his persecutor, which wound itself still tighter.  It was supple as leather, strong as steel, cold as night.

A second form—­sharp, elongated, and narrow—­issued out of the crevice, like a tongue out of monstrous jaws.  It seemed to lick his naked body; then, suddenly stretching out, it became longer and thinner, as it crept over his skin, and wound itself round him.  A terrible sense of anguish, comparable to nothing he had ever known, compelled all his muscles to contract.  He felt upon his skin a number of flat, rounded points.  It seemed as if innumerable suckers had fastened to his flesh, and were about to drink his blood.

A third long, undulating shape issued from the hole in the rock, felt about his body, lashed round his ribs like a cord, and fixed itself there.  There was sufficient light for Gilliatt to see the repulsive forms which had entangled themselves about him.  A fourth ligature, but this one swift as an arrow, darted towards his stomach.

These living things crept and glided about him; he felt the points of pressure, like sucking mouths, change their places from time to time.

Suddenly a large, round, flattened, glutinous mass shot from beneath the crevice.  It was the centre!  The thongs were attached to it like spokes to the nave of a wheel.  In the middle of this slimy mass appeared two eyes.  The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt.

He recognised the devil-fish.

Gilliatt had but one resource—­his knife.

He knew that these frightful monsters are vulnerable in only one point—­the head.  Standing half naked in the water, his body lashed by the foul antennae of the devil-fish, Gilliatt looked at the devil-fish and the devilfish looked at Gilliatt.

With the devil-fish, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment in the conflict which must be seized.  It is the instant when the bull lowers its neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its head.  The movement is rapid.  He who loses that moment is destroyed.

Suddenly it loosened another antenna from the rock, and darting it at him, seized him by the left arm.  At the same moment it advanced its head.

Rapid as was this movement, Gilliatt, by a gigantic effort, plunged the blade of his knife into the flat, slimy substance, and with a movement like the flourish of a whip, described a circle round the eyes and wrenched off the head as a man would draw a tooth.