His dazzled eyes were affected with almost instantaneous blindness before becoming accustomed to the shadows of the greenish galleries....  And when the first images began to be vaguely outlined on his retina, he stepped hastily backward, so great was his surprise.

He couldn’t believe it and raised his hand to his eyes as though wishing to clarify his vision with an energetic rubbing.  Was that really Freya?...  Yes, it was she, dressed in white, leaning on the bar of iron that separated the tanks from the public, looking fixedly at the glass which covered the rocky cavern like a transparent door.  She had just opened her hand-bag, giving some coins to the guardian who was disappearing at the end of the gallery.

“Oh, is that you?” she said, on seeing Ferragut, without any surprise, as if she had left him but a short time before.

Then she explained her presence at this late hour.  She had not visited the Aquarium for a long time.  The tank of cuttlefish was to her like a cage of tropical birds, full of colors and cries that enlivened the solitude of a melancholy matron.

She always adored the monsters living on the other side of these crystals, and before going to lunch she had felt an irresistible desire to see them.  She feared that the guard had not been taking good care of them during her absence.

“Just see how beautiful they are!...”

And she pointed to a tank that appeared empty.  Neither in its quiet still waters nor on the floor of the oily sand could be seen the slightest animal motion.  Ferragut followed the direction of her eyes and after long contemplation discovered there three occupants.  With the amazing mimicry of their species, they had changed themselves to appear like minerals.  Only a pair of expert eyes would have been able to discover them, heaped together, each one huddled in a crack of the rocks, voluntarily raising his smooth skin into stone-like protuberances and ridges.  Their faculty of changing color permitted them to take on that of their hard base and, disguised in this way like three rocky excrescences, they were treacherously awaiting the passing of their victim, just as though they were in the open sea.

“Soon we shall see them in all their majesty,” continued Freya as though she were speaking of something belonging to her.  “The guardian is going to feed them....  Poor things!  Nobody pays any attention to them; everybody detests them.  To me they owe whatever they get between meals.”

As if scenting the proximity of food, one of the three stones suddenly shuddered with a polychromatic chill.  Its elastic covering began swelling.  There passed over its surface stripes of color, reddish clouds changing from crimson to green, circular spots that became inflated in the swelling, forming tremulous excrescences.  Between two cracks there appeared a yellowish eye of ferocious and stupid fixity; a darkened and malignant globe like that of serpents, was now looking toward the crystal as though seeing far beyond that diamond wall.