When in pursuit of its prey or lying in wait the octopus conceals itself: it makes itself smaller, it condenses itself, it reduces itself to its simplest expression. In the half-light of the sea it is barely discernible. It looks like a furrow in the waves. It in no way resembles a living creature.
The octopus is a hypocrite. You pay no attention to it; then suddenly it opens up: a viscous mass with a will of its own: what could be more horrible? It is like birdlime imbued with hate.
In limpid water of the most brilliant blue this hideous and voracious star of the sea suddenly appears. The horrible thing is that you do not see it approach. Almost always, by the time you see it you are already caught.
At night, however, and particularly during its rutting season, it is phosphorescent. Horror though it is, it has its love affairs. It goes in quest of union. It beautifies itself, it lights up, it illuminates itself; then, standing on a rock, you can see it in the deep shadow below you, unfolding in a pallid irradiation like a spectral sun.
The octopus swims, but it can also walk. Something of a fish, it is also something of a reptile. It crawls about on the sea bottom, using its eight feet and dragging itself along like the caterpillar of a geometer moth.
It has no bones, no blood, no flesh. It is flaccid. There is nothing inside it: it is no more than a skin. Its eight tentacles can be turned inside out like the fingers of a glove.
It has only one orifice, in the center, from which the tentacles radiate. Is this single opening the anus? Is it the mouth? It is both. The same opening serves both functions. The entrance is also the exit.204
The whole creature is cold.
The sea nettle of the Mediterranean is repulsive. One is disgusted by contact with this animated mass of gelatin that envelops a swimmer, into which his hands sink, at which his nails scratch in vain, which he can tear apart without killing it, which he can pull off without getting rid of it, a fluid and tenacious creature that slips through his fingers; but no horror can equal the sudden appearance of the octopus--a Medusa served by eight serpents. No grasp is comparable in strength with the embrace of this cephalopod.
You are attacked by a pneumatic machine. You are dealing with a vacuum that has feet. What you suffer is not scratches or bites: it is an unspeakable scarification. A bite is fearful, but less so than a suction. A claw is harmless compared with a sucker. With a claw it is the beast entering into your flesh; with a sucker it is you who are entering into the beast. Your muscles swell, your fibers are twisted, your skin bursts open under this loathsome pressure, your blood spouts out and mingles horribly with the mollusc's lymph. The creature forces itself on you by a thousand foul mouths; the hydra incorporates itself in the man; the man is amalgamated with the hydra. You both become one. You are caught up in a hideous dream. The tiger can but devour you; the octopus, horrifyingly, breathes you in. It draws you to it and into it; and you feel yourself--bound, limed, powerless--slowly being emptied into the fearful sack that is the monster.
Beyond the horrific--being eaten alive--there is the unspeakable--being drunk alive.
Such strange animals as these are at first rejected by science, in accordance with her habit of excessive prudence, even when presented with the facts; then she makes up her mind to study them; she dissects them, classifies them, catalogues them, labels them; she acquires specimens; she exhibits them under glass in museums; she describes them as molluscs, invertebrates, radiates; 205 she assigns them a place among their neighbors--a little beyond the squids, a little short of the cuttlefish; she finds these saltwater hydras a freshwater counterpart, the argyroneta; she divides them into larger, medium-sized, and smaller species; she is readier to accept the smaller rather than the larger species, for that is, in all fields, her natural bent, which is microscopic rather than telescopic; she studies their structure and calls them cephalopods, counts their antennae and calls them octopods. Having done all this, she forgets about them; and when science abandons them philosophy takes them up.
Philosophy in her turn studies these beings. She goes both less far and farther than science. She does not dissect them: she meditates on them. Where the scalpel has been at work she brings the hypothesis to bear. She seeks the final cause: the profound torment of the thinker. These creatures almost cause her concern about the Creator. They are hideous surprises. They are the killjoys of the contemplator: he observes them in dismay. They are deliberately created forms of evil. In face of these blasphemies of creation against itself what can be done? Who can be blamed for them?
Possibility is a formidable matrix. Mystery takes concrete form in monsters. Fragments of darkness emerge from the mass we call immanence, tear themselves apart, break off, roll, float, condense, borrow matter from the surrounding blackness, undergo unheard-of polarizations, take on life, compose themselves into curious forms with darkness and curious souls with miasma, and go on their way, like masks, among living and breathing beings. They are like darkness made into animals. What is the point of them? What purpose do they serve? We return to the eternal question.
These animals are phantoms as much as monsters. They are proved to exist and yet are improbable. They do in fact exist, but they might well not exist. They are the amphibians of death. Their improbability complicates their existence. They touch on the frontier of human consciousness and populate that chimerical boundary region. You deny the existence of the vampire, and the octopus appears. Their teeming numbers are a certainty that disconcerts our assured belief. Optimism, though it is itself truth, almost loses countenance in their presence. They are the visible extremity of black circles. They mark the transition from our reality to some other reality. They seem to belong to those embryos of terrible beings that the dreamer glimpses confusedly through the window of night.
These developed forms of monsters, first in the invisible and then in the possible, were suspected and perhaps actually perceived by the austere ecstasy and the sharp eye of magi and philosophers. Hence the conjectured existence of a hell. The Devil is the tiger of the invisible. The wild beast that devours souls was revealed to mankind by two visionaries, one called John and the other Dante.
For if the circles of darkness continue indefinitely, if after one ring there is yet another, if this aggravation persists in limitless progression, if this chain--the existence of which we for our part are resolved to doubt--does in fact exist, it is certain that the octopus at one extremity proves the existence of Satan at the other.
It is certain, too, that an evil thing at one end proves the existence of evil at the other.
Any evil beast, like any perverse intelligence, is a sphinx. A terrible sphinx propounding a terrible enigma: the enigma of evil.
It is this perfection of evil that has sometimes led great minds to incline toward belief in a double god, the redoubtable two-faced god of the Manichaeans.
A piece of Chinese silk, stolen from the palace of the emperor of China during the recent war, depicts a shark eating a crocodile, which is eating a snake, which is eating an eagle, which is eating a swallow, which is eating a caterpillar.
The whole of the natural world that we have under our eyes eats and is eaten. Prey bites prey.
Meanwhile, scholars who are also philosophers, and consequently are well disposed toward the created world, find, or think they have found, the explanation. Among those to whom the final end occurred was Bonnet of Geneva, that mysterious exact thinker, who was opposed to Buffon, as, later, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was opposed to Cuvier. The explanation put forward was that death, occurring everywhere, involves burial everywhere. The devourers are also gravediggers.
All beings enter into one another. Putrefaction is nutriment. A fearful cleansing of the globe. Man, being carnivorous, is also a burier. Our life is made up of death. Such is the terrifying law. We are all sepulchres.
In our crepuscular world this fatality in the ordering of life produces monsters. You say, What is the point? This is it.
Is that the explanation? Is that the answer to
the question? But then, why is there not some different order of things? And the question remains unanswered.
Let us live, by all means. But let us try to ensure that death is a progress. Let us aspire to worlds that are less dark. Let us follow the conscience that leads us there. For, let us never forget, the best is attained only by way of the better.
III
ANOTHER FORM OF COMBAT IN THE ABYSS
Such was the creature to which Gilliatt had for some moments belonged. This monster was the inhabitant of the cavern, the dreadful genius loci; a kind of somber water demon.
At the center of all these splendors was horror.
When Gilliatt had found his way into the cave for the first time a month ago the dark shape that he had glimpsed in the turbulence of the secret water had been the devilfish. This was its home.
When he entered the cave for the second time in pursuit of the crab and saw the crevice in which he thought the crab had taken refuge the devilfish was there, lying in wait for its prey.
Can we imagine such a lying in wait? Not a bird would dare to sit on her eggs, not an egg would dare to hatch, not a flower would dare to open, not a breast would dare to give suck, not a heart would dare to love, not a spirit would dare to take flight, if they thought of the sinister patience of the creatures lying in wait in the abyss.
Gilliatt had thrust his arm into the hole and the devilfish had seized it. It held him in its power. He was the fly caught by this spider.
Gilliatt was up to his waist in the water, his feet strained against round, slippery pebbles, his right arm embraced and held prisoner by the flat coils of the devilfish's tentacles and his chest almost hidden under the folds and interlacings of this horrible bandage. Of the devilfish's eight arms three were clamped on the rock and five on Gilliatt. Thus, clinging on one side to the granite and on the other to the man, it chained Gilliatt to the rock. He was held by 250 suckers, in a mingling of anguish and disgust. He was caught in the grasp of a huge fist with elastic fingers almost three feet long, the undersides of which were covered with living pustules digging into his flesh.
As we have said, you cannot break free from a devilfish. If you try to you are still more securely bound: it merely tightens its grip. As you increase your efforts it matches its effort to yours. Greater exertion leads to greater constriction.
Gilliatt had only one resource, his knife. He had free movement only of his left hand; but we have seen that he could make powerful use of it. It could be said of him that he had two right hands.
His clasp knife, open, was in that hand.
You cannot sever the antennae of a devilfish: they are of a leathery substance that is impossible to cut; the knife slips off them; and besides they have such a close hold that you cannot cut them without cutting your own flesh.
The octopus is a formidable opponent; but there is a way of tackling it. The fishermen of Sark know it, as does anyone who has seen them carrying out certain sharp movements at sea. Porpoises know it, too; they have a way of biting a cuttlefish that cuts off its head. That is why so many headless squids, cuttlefishes, and octopuses are to be seen floating at sea.
The octopus is vulnerable only in the head; and Gilliatt was well aware of this. He had never seen a devilfish of such a size before, and now that he had been caught by one it turned out to be one of the largest species. Anyone else would have been worried about this.
With a devilfish as with a bull you have to choose the right moment for the kill. It is when the bull lowers its head, it is when the devilfish thrusts its head forward--a moment that passes very quickly. If you miss your chance you are lost.
All that we have described had lasted only a few minutes; but Gilliatt felt the suction of the 250 suckers increasing.
The devilfish is a cunning creature. It tries first to stupefy its prey-- seizing it and then waiting as long as possible.
Gilliatt held his knife ready. The suction continued to increase. He looked at the devilfish, which looked at him.
Suddenly it detached its sixth antenna from the rock and, lashing it out at Gilliatt, tried to seize his left arm.
At the same time it thrust its head quickly forward. A second more and its mouth/anus would have been fastened on his chest. Bleeding from his sides, with both arms caught in a stranglehold, Gilliatt would have been a dead man.
But he was alert. Closely watched by his opponent, he, too, was watching.
He evaded the antenna, and at the moment when the devilfish was about to bite his chest his left hand, armed with the knife, struck down on it. There were two convulsions in opposite directions, the devilfish's and Gilliatt's. It was like a conflict between two flashes of lightning.
Gilliatt plunged his knife into the flat viscous mass and, with a turning movement like the coiling of a whip, cut a circle around the two eyes and drew out the head as one draws a tooth.
It was all over in an instant. The creature fell in one mass, like a piece of cloth torn off. Now that the pump sucking out the air was destroyed, the vacuum was released. The four hundred suckers released their hold both on the rock and on the man, and the rag of cloth sank to the bottom.
Gilliatt, panting with his efforts, could see on the pebbles at his feet two gelatinous heaps, the head on one side, the rest of the creature on the other. We say the rest of the creature, for it could not be called a body.
Fearing some last convulsion in its death agony, however, Gilliatt withdrew out of reach of its tentacles.
But the beast was dead all right. Gilliatt closed his knife.
IV
NOTHING CAN BE HIDDEN AND NOTHING GETS LOST
Gilliatt had killed the devilfish just in time. He was almost suffocated; his right arm and his chest were purple; more than two hundred swellings were beginning to appear on his skin, and some of them were bleeding. The best cure for such wounds is salt water, and Gilliatt plunged into it. At the same time he rubbed himself with the palms of his hands, and under this treatment the swellings began to die down.
Drawing back, farther into the water, he had, without realizing it, come closer to the kind of vault that he had noticed before near the crevice where he had been harpooned by the devilfish. This vault continued obliquely, out of the water, under the high walls of the cavern. The pebbles that had accumulated in it had raised its floor above the level of normal tides. It had a low vaulted roof, and a man could enter it by stooping. The green light of the underwater cavern reached into it, giving weak illumination.
While rubbing his swollen skin Gilliatt raised his eyes mechanically and looked into the vault. He shuddered: he thought he saw, in the darkness at the far end of the cavity, what looked like a grinning face.
Gilliatt had never heard the word hallucination, but he had had experience of the thing itself. The mysterious encounters with the improbable that for want of a better name we call hallucinations occur in nature. Whether illusion or reality, visions do appear, and anyone who happens to be there may see them. As we have said, Gilliatt was a dreamer. He had the greatness of soul to be on occasion hallucinated like a prophet. This commonly happens to those accustomed to dream in solitary places.
He thought this was one of the mirages by which, as a man of nocturnal habits, he had sometimes been bewildered.
The cavity had all the appearance of a limekiln. It was a low recess with a rounded roof, whose steep sides grew steadily lower toward the far end, where the pebble-covered floor and the roof came together, closing off the passage.
Gilliatt entered the vault and, keeping his head down, walked toward what he had seen at the far end.
There was indeed something grinning there. It was a skull.
There was not only a skull, but a whole skeleton. The occupant of the vault was the skeleton of a man.
In such encounters as this a bold man seeks for an explanation. Gilliatt looked around him.
He was surrounded by a multitude of crabs. There was no movement in the multitude. It was like a dead anthill. All the crabs w
ere inert. They were empty.
Groups of the crabs, scattered about on the pebbles that littered the floor of the vault, formed misshapen constellations. Gilliatt, his eyes fixed elsewhere, had walked over them without noticing.
At the end of the crypt, which Gilliatt had now reached, the crabs lay thicker on the ground, bristling in their immobility with antennae, feet, and mandibles. Open pincers stuck up, never to close again. Shells, under their crust of spines, did not move; some lay upside down, showing their livid interior. This accumulation of bodies resembled a host of enemies besieging a castle, with the appearance of a tangle of brushwood.
The skeleton lay under this pile. Under the confusion of tentacles and scales could be seen the skull with its striations, the vertebrae, the femurs, the tibias, the long knotted fingers with their nails. The rib cage was full of crabs. In there someone's heart had once beaten. The eye sockets were covered with marine molds. Limpets had left their slime in the nasal cavities. Within this recess in the rocks, however, there were no seaweeds, no vegetation of any kind, not a breath of air. No movement anywhere. The teeth were set in a grin.
What is disturbing about laughter is the imitation of it by a death's head.
This marvelous palace of the abyss, embroidered and encrusted with all the gemstones of the sea, was now at last revealing itself and giving up its secret. It was a den, the habitation of the devilfish; and it was a tomb, in which there lay a man.
The spectral immobility of the skeleton and the crabs quivered gently under the impact of the subterranean waters on this petrifaction. The horrible mass of crabs looked as if they were finishing their meal. Their carapaces seemed to be eating the carcass. It was a strange sight, the dead vermin on their dead prey. A somber sequence of death.
Gilliatt had under his eyes the devilfish's food store. A lugubrious vision, revealing the profound horror of what had happened, caught in the act. The crabs had eaten the man and the devilfish had eaten the crabs.