Adventure Magazine Cover — page 60: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LDe Marriage March — ~ F STMARS Nes oo — La eee. a 3 fe eee zo ne tg ON z af mx - — 7 ¢ ¢ ns Ly Author of “Chivalry of the Wild,” “Union Is Strength,” etc HE deep boiled. A back-fin, sharp and straight and ominous as a shark’s, cut the all-streaky glare of the water like a knife, hissing asit came. Then veered and “put about.” The deep boiled again. Another back-fin, same shape as the first, a back-fin black and six feet high, appeared and disappeared with violence. The deep boiled like a devil’s caldron once more. Foam appeared, all creaming, and spread, and in the middle of the foam a shape, dark gray, almost black, immense, enormous, and growing. Up and up it came, yard upon yard, oblong, blunt, like some stupendous tank turned upside down— a tank of the gods. Nevertheless, it was simply a head. A gigantic, weird, square-ended head. Then it blew a blast of oily vapor from an S- shaped cavity a little to the left of the top of the front of itself—and three miles away that diagonal upward and forward blast could be seen like a jet of steam. Had there been a whaler present, even among the passengers upon a liner, he must have given one yell—‘“‘A blow!”’ Then have added aloud: “‘Sperm!”’ And he would have been right. Only the sperm whale, the leviathan cachalot of the limitless tropic seas, makes a diagonal for- ward blast like that. All the others “blow” straight up or backward. Up and up that head came still, till it seemed it would never end—till it became clear it was all head, all upper jaw—till at 54 last the under-jaw was exposed, long, nar- row, flat, and hinged, like the lid of a box, which alone had teeth. Enormous teeth they were, too, and glistening, the largest ten inches long, over nine and a half inches in girth, weighing three and a half pounds. There were on either side of that lower jaw twenty-five such teeth. But there was more than that. The wet and glistening skin like silk; the little, kind eyes—something like the little eyes of an ele- phant but more gentle—the flippers, which looked like fins, but were really flesh-mit- tened hands, just like human hands, with four fingers; the immense body joining the gigantic head without a neck; the hump be- hind the head; the startling length and breadth of the back without a back-fin, the enormous flukes of the tail, set on horizon- tally—not vertically as with all fish—over fifteen feet in diameter; the reserve power, the mountainous reservoirs of strength, the calm immensity—seventy-five to “eigh ty- five feet long. Certainly no less. A giant “bull” sperm, a record monster of a monster race, such as whaling captains dream of, and none have slain for many a voyage. For a space the tremendous beast moved forward at a speed of about three knots, then turned suddenly, with a plunge of rage that sent a great wave foaming off side- wise in his wake. The long, upright, knife- blade back-fins accompanying him had ap- peared again as suddenly silent as they had gone, racing along with a little curl of foam at their base, like destroyers. (C@) .OO (E@)