“I used to dance naked, with a transparent veil tied around my hips and another floating from my head ...  I would dance for hours and hours, just like a Brahman priestess before the image of the terrible Siva, and the ‘eye of the morning’ would follow my dances with elegant undulations ...  I believe in the divine Siva.  Don’t you know who Siva is?...”

Ferragut uttered an impatient aside to the gloomy god.  What he wanted to know was the reason that had taken her to Java, the paradisiacal and mysterious island.

“My husband was a Dutch commandant,” she said.  “We were married in Amsterdam and I followed him to Asia.”

Ulysses protested at this piece of news.  Had not her husband been a great student?...  Had he not taken her to the Andes in search of prehistoric beasts?...

Freya hesitated a moment in order to be sure, but her doubts were short.

“So he was,” she said as a matter of course.  “That professor was my second husband.  I have been married twice.”

The captain had not time to express his surprise.  Over the top of the tank, on the crystalline surface silvered by the sun, passed a human shadow.  It was the, silhouette of the keeper.  Down below, the three shapeless bags began to move.  Freya was trembling with emotion like an enthusiastic and impatient spectator.

Something fell into the water, descending little by little, a bit of dead sardine that was scattering filaments of meat and yellow scales.  An odd community interest appeared to exist among these monsters:  only the one nearest the prey bestirred himself to eat.  Perhaps they voluntarily took turns; perhaps their glance only reached a little beyond their tentacles.

The one nearest to the glass suddenly unfolded itself with the violence of a spring escaping from an explosive projectile.  He gave a bound, remaining fastened to the ground by one of his radiants, and raised the others like a bundle of reptiles.  Suddenly he converted himself into a monstrous star, filling almost the entire glassy tank, swollen with rage, and coloring his outer covering with green, blue, and red.

His tentacles clutched the miserable prey, doubling it inward in order to bear it to his mouth.  The beast then contracted, and flattened himself out so as to rest on the ground.  His armed feet disappeared and there only remained visible a trembling bag through which was passing like a succession of waves, from one extreme to the other, the digestive swollen mass which became a bubbling, mucous pulpiness in a dye-pot that colored and discolored itself with contortions of assimilative fury; from time to time the agglomeration showed its stupid and ferocious eyes.

New victims continued falling down through the waters and other monsters leaped in their turn, spreading out their stars, then shrinking together in order to grind their prey in their entrails with the assimilation of a tiger.