“They know me!” exclaimed Freya joyously.  “I’m sure that they know me!...”

And she enumerated the clever traits of these monsters to whom she attributed great intelligence.  They were the ones that, like astute builders, had dappled the stones piled up on the bottom, forming bulwarks in whose shelter they had disguised themselves in order to pounce upon their victims.  In the sea, when wishing to surprise a meaty, toothsome oyster, they waited in hiding until the two valves should open to feed upon the water and the light, and had often introduced a pebble between the shells and then inserted their tentacles in the crevice.

Their love of liberty was another thing which aroused Freya’s enthusiasm.  If they should have to endure more than a year of enclosure in the Aquarium, they would become sick with sadness and would gnaw their claws until they killed themselves.

“Ah, the charming and vigorous bandits!” she continued in hysterical enthusiasm.  “I adore them.  I should like to have them in my home, as they have gold-fishes in a globe, to feed them every hour, to see how they would devour....”

Ferragut felt a recurrence of the same uneasiness that he had experienced one morning in the temple of Virgil.

“She’s crazy!” he said to himself.

But in spite of her craziness, he greatly enjoyed the faint perfume that exhaled through the opening at her throat.

He no longer saw the silent world that, sparkling with color, was swimming or paddling behind the crystal.  She was now the only creature who existed for him.  And he listened to her voice as though it were distant music as it continued explaining briefly all the particulars about those stones that were really animals, about those globes that, on distending themselves, showed their organs and again hid themselves under a gelatinous succession of waves.

They were a sac, a pocket, an elastic mask, in whose interior existed only water or air.  Between their armpits was their mouth, armed with long jaw bones, like a parrot’s beak.  When breathing, a crack of their skin would open and close alternately.  From one of their sides came forth a tube in the form of a tunnel that swallowed equally the respirable water and drew it through both entrances into its branching cavity.  Their multiple arms, fitted out with cupping glasses, functioned like high-pressure apparatus for grasping and holding prey, for paddling and for running.

The glassy eye of one of the monsters appearing and disappearing among its soft folds, stirred Freya’s memories.  She began speaking in a low tone as if to herself, without paying any attention to Ferragut who was perplexed at the incoherence of her words.  The appearance of this octopus brought to her mind “the eye of the morning.”

The sailor asked:  “What is the ’eye of the morning’?"...  And he again told himself that Freya was crazy when he learned that this was the name of a tame serpent, a reptile of checkered sides that she wore as necklace or bracelet over there in her home in the island of Java,—­an island where groves exhaled an irresistible perfume, covered in the sunlight with trembling and monstrous flowers like animals, peopled at night with phosphorescent stars that leaped from tree to tree.