“How beautiful it is!” she said.

The other beasts also seized their live victims, paralyzed and devoured them, moving their flabby bodies in order to permit the passage of their swelling nutritive waves and clouds of various colors.

Then the guard tossed in a crab, but one without any string whatever.  Freya screamed with enthusiasm.

This was the kind of hunt that takes place in the ferocious mystery of the sea, a race with death, a destruction preceded with emotional agony and hazards.  The poor crustacean, divining its danger, was swimming towards the rocks hoping to take refuge in the nearest crevice.  A polypus came up behind it, whilst the others continued their digestion.

“It’s escaping!...  It’s escaping!” cried Freya, palpitating with interest.

The crab scrambled through the stones, sheltering itself in their windings.  The polypus was no longer swimming; it was running like a terrestrial animal, climbing over the rocks by its armed extremities, which were now serving as apparatus of locomotion.  It was the struggle of a tiger with a mouse.  When the crab had half of its body already hidden within the green lichens of a hole, one of the heavy serpents fell upon its back clutching it with the irresistible suction of his air-holes, and causing it to disappear within his skein of tentacles.

“Ah!” sighed Freya, throwing herself back as though she were going to faint on Ulysses’ breast.

He shuddered, feeling that a serpentine band of tremulous pressure had encircled his body.  The acts of that unbalanced creature were fraying his nerves.

He felt as though a monster of the same class as those in the tank but much larger—­a gigantic octopus from the oceanic depths—­must have slipped treacherously behind him and was clutching him in one of its tentacles.  He could feel the pressure of its feelers around his waist, growing closer and more ferocious.

Freya was holding him captive with one of her arms.  She had wound herself tightly around him and was clasping his waist with all her force, as though trying to break his vigorous body in two.

Then he saw the head of this woman approaching him with an aggressive swiftness as if she were going to bite him....  Her enlarged eyes, tearful and misty, appeared to be far off, very far off.  Perhaps she was not even looking at him....  Her trembling mouth, bluish with emotion, a round and protruding mouth like an absorbing duct, was seeking the sailor’s mouth, taking possession of it and devouring it with her lips.

It was the kiss of a cupping-glass, long, dominating, painful.  Ulysses realized that he had never before been kissed in this way.  The water from that mouth surging across her row of teeth, discharged itself in his like swift poison.  A shudder unfamiliar until then ran the entire length of his back, making him close his eyes.

He felt as if all his interior had turned to liquid.  He had a presentiment that his life was going to date from this kiss, that with it was going to begin a new existence, that he never would be able to free himself from these deadly and caressing lips with their faint savor of cinnamon, of incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and intrigue.