Freya gazed upon this horrifying digestive process with thrills of rapture.  Ulysses felt her resting instinctively upon him with a contact growing more intimate every moment.  From shoulder to ankle the captain could see the sweet reliefs of her soft flesh whose warmth made itself perceptible through her clothing and filled him with nervous tremors.

Frequently she turned her eyes away from the cruel spectacle, glancing at him quickly with an odd expression.  Her pupils appeared enlarged, and the whites of her eyes had a wateriness of morbid reflection.  Ferragut felt that thus the insane must look in their great crises.

She was speaking between her teeth, with emotional pauses, admiring the ferocity of the cuttlefish, grieving that she did not possess their vigor and their cruelty.

“If I could only be like them!...  To be able to go through the streets ... through the world, stretching out my talons!...  To devour!... to devour!  They would struggle uselessly to free themselves from the winding of my tentacles....  To absorb them!...  To eat them!...  To cause them to disappear!...”

Ulysses beheld her as on that first day near the temple of the poet, possessed with a fierce wrath against men, longing extravagantly for their extermination.

Their digestion finished, the polypi had begun to swim around, and were now horizontal skeins, fluting the tank with elegance.  They appeared like torpedo boats with a conical prow, dragging along the heavy, thick and long hair of their tentacles.  Their excited appetite made them glide through the water in all directions, seeking new victims.

Freya protested.  The guard had only brought them dead bodies.  What she wanted was the struggle, the sacrifice, the death.  The bits of sardine were a meal without substance for these bandits that had zest only for food seasoned with assassination.

As though the pulps had understood her complaints, they had fallen on the sandy bottom, flaccid, inert, breathing through their funnels.

A little crab began to descend at the end of a thread desperately moving its claws.

Freya pressed still closer to Ulysses, excited at the thought of the approaching spectacle.  One of the bags, transformed into a star, suddenly leaped forward.  Its arms writhed like serpents seeking the recent arrival.  In vain the guard pulled the thread up, wishing to prolong the chase.  The tentacles clamped their irresistible openings upon the body of the victim, pulling upon the line with such force that it broke, the octopus falling on the bottom with his prey.

Freya clapped her hands in applause.

“Bravo!...”  She was exceedingly pale, though a feverish heat was coursing through her body.

She leaned toward the crystal in order to see better the devouring activity of that pyramidal stomach which had on its sharp point a diminutive parrot head with two ferocious eyes and around its base the twisted skeins of its arms full of projecting disks.  With these it pressed the crab against its mouth, injecting under its shell the venomous output of its salivary glands, paralyzing thus every movement of existence.  Then it swallowed its prey slowly with the deglutition of a boa constrictor.