Adventure Magazine Cover — page 61: what you’re looking at

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

They were the back-fins of killers, alias grampuses, alias orcas, the scourge of the seas, more terrible even than sharks; whales, they were, too, but carnivorous wKales, not much over twenty feet long, and heavily armed with sharp teeth. There was a whirl of flying spray as the enormous head of the sperm charged. The deep seemed to open, but it was his mouth really. One back-fin darted one way, an- other shot aloft, revealing a twenty-foot glistening, gleaming body, black above water-line, purest white below, round- headed, whale-tailed, gleaming-fanged—in fact, the killer. The whale’s lower jaw crashed to with a clash like iron gates hurled shut, barely miss- , ing the leaping killer’s tail; and in a second the brute’s companions were forty yards away with a hissing rush, even as the sperm’s tremendous “flukes” beat down with a smash like the report of a six-inch gun upon the place where they had been but were no longer. The killers were attacking, wolf fashion, skirmishing, circling, dash in, chop, dash out again, and at each chop a chunk of whale blubber as white as marble went with them. But the whale whirled upon himself in mountains of spray with amazing agility for such an—an island of flesh, and—his under jaw closed again—crash! He had touched—only touched—one of the killers, but that beast was floating away, broad- side on, out of control, still. and help- Jess, broken from end to end utterly. Somehow it resembled a ship that had struck a mine. Then at last those menacing, vertical back-fins drew off, swift, keen, and coldly business-like as they had come, hissing away to starboard, gathering into a flotilla, even more oddly like torpedo-boat destroyers than ever as they went. They had attacked and even slain and eaten whales before, but never one with a temper, with a.spice of the devil in him, like this whale. The other species of whales —among the million-ton Antarctic floes they had been—had owned a back-fin, and ‘no teeth, and no temper. ‘This whale was a surprize in respect of both. Not that they sailed quite away, these killers. That is not their habit. They had drawn off a little, nonplussed possibly by the temper of this strange giant whale; but, like wolves, they would not go quite, and The Marriage March 95 their ravening hunger—verily there can surely be few appetites in the wide world to equal the awful craving of the killer—would drive them presently, like wolves again, to return. Perhaps the stupendous sperm knew this. But he did not show it. HE DID not go—at least, not at RA once. He continued to “blow” =a@=) vastly for some twelve seconds, oe dipped and momentarily disappeared, but only to break surface again and blow for some twelve seconds more. This he con- tinued to do, with remarkably ordered regu- larity, forging ahead all the time with slow majesty, and vanishing between each blast, till he had ‘‘blown” exactly seventy-four times in all, taking over twelve minutes to complete the process. Then he was ready—ready for anything, very truly a giant refreshed. To be exact, he had completely emptied and completely refilled his lungs again, and the killers could come on now, and follow where he led, if they liked. His little eyes, so near the water-line, probably could.see, as he topped the crest of a half-mile-long swell, those dread, straight, sharp back-fins alter course at last, and steer straight toward him again in “line ahead” formation. He plunged, his head vanished in a vortex of white, his body followed. His whole vast length pointed downward at nearly a verti- cal angle, his awe-inspiring tail flung high in air, and, with one last boiling, seething flourish, he was gone, down, down, down, al- most vertically down, into the abyss of the deep. In that dive the big old “bull” sperm whale performed one of the most sensa- tional, and at the same time one of the most mysterious, actions in all Nature. The killers at first followed him, some of them, and some waited; prowling and cruis- ing about on the surface, but the former presently returned, and all together went away. Even they, wonderful deep-sea divers as they were, could not follow where - the ‘“‘bull” sperm led. The sperm, a_ stupendous, glaucous, green-and-blue, semi-luminous, pear-shaped, bubble-like form, undulated down almost perpendicularly at great speed, reeling off, fathom after fathom, long, smooth curves, EComicwooks (E@)