of the back, and poured away in sluices. The
blind white head flung back and battered the wounds,
and the body in its torment rose clear of the red
and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders
streaked with weed and rough with shells, but as white
in the clear spaces as the hairless, maneless, blind,
toothless head. Afterwards, came a dot on the
horizon and the sound of a shrill scream, and it was
as though a shuttle shot all across the sea in one
breath, and a second head and neck tore through the
levels, driving a whispering wall of water to right
and left. The two Things met—the one
untouched and the other in its death-throe—male
and female, we said, the female coming to the male.
She circled round him bellowing, and laid her neck
across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared
under water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting
in agony while the blood ran. Once the entire
head and neck shot clear of the water and stiffened,
and I heard Keller saying, as though he was watching
a street accident, ’Give him air. For God’s
sake, give him air.’ Then the death-struggle
began, with crampings and twistings and jerkings of
the white bulk to and fro, till our little steamer
rolled again, and each gray wave coated her plates
with the gray slime. The sun was clear, there
was no wind, and we watched, the whole crew,
stokers and all, in wonder and pity, but chiefly pity.
The Thing was so helpless, and, save for his mate,
so alone. No human eye should have beheld him;
it was monstrous and indecent to exhibit him there
in trade waters between atlas degrees of latitude.
He had been spewed up, mangled and dying, from his
rest on the sea-floor, where he might have lived till
the Judgment Day, and we saw the tides of his life
go from him as an angry tide goes out across rocks
in the teeth of a landward gale. His mate lay
rocking on the water a little distance off, bellowing
continually, and the smell of musk came dawn upon
the ship making us cough.
At last the battle for life ended in a batter of coloured
seas. We saw the writhing neck fall like a flail,
the carcase turn sideways, showing the glint of a
white belly and the inset of a gigantic hind leg or
flipper. Then all sank, and sea boiled over it,
while the mate swam round and round, darting her head
in every direction. Though we might have feared
that she would attack the steamer, no power on earth
could have drawn any one of us from our places that
hour. We watched, holding our breaths. The
mate paused in her search; we could hear the wash
beating along her sides; reared her neck as high as
she could reach, blind and lonely in all that loneliness
of the sea, and sent one desperate bellow booming
across the swells as an oyster-shell skips across
a pond. Then she made off to the westward, the
sun shining on the white head and the wake behind it,
till nothing was left to see but a little pin point
of silver on the horizon. We stood on our course
again; and the Rathmines, coated with the sea-sediment
from bow to stern, looked like a ship made gray with
terror.