Adventure Magazine Cover — page 63: what you’re looking at

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

_ The Marriage March difficult to understand how they could “carry on” as they do at great depths in the utter dark. However, the giant bull sperm swerved, and for a space swam along over the bed of the ocean, above the strange crawling and motionless stalked creatures, crustaceans and others, whose long legs enabled them to move in that sucking, soft, sickening, ele- mental ooze, in and out among the fairy lights, till suddenly, just as he had begun to explore down a long, gentle slope, like the side of a hill, he*came to a place where all the lights had gone out, or were very much lowered and only turned on, as it were, at half power. And that, in the grim black underworld of the sea, spells only one word —F-e-a-r. The bull sperm seemed, in some strange, uncanny fashion of his own, to become aware of the fact almost at once, and hur- ried and bustled along with quicker up and down strokes of his tail, looking the less, not the more, graceful; for nothing can make the swimming of the whale people graceful. It is too much like a man in a sack, giving the impression of hind limbs imprisoned under the skin and struggling for freedom. Soon it was possible to feel a commotion in that still place where everything is always motionless unless torn by some great up- heaval. That all the inhabitants of the place could feel it was evident by the fact that all had put their lights out, or lowered them to extreme dimness. That the whale felt it. was evident by the way he hurried toward it. Then suddenly he swerved. He had to. Else he would have banged, nose first, into a thirty-foot female sperm whale struggling and thrashing like a wild locomotive, ap- parently in the meshes of a wire cable. As it was, he missed the whale by inches, but not the cable. It did not stop him though. Seventy tons of living bone and flesh, reeling off a good fourteen knots an hour, is not so easily stopped, but it checked his impetus momentarily, and he slid on at reduced, though still considerable, speed into—oh, horror!—a waving forest of giant cables—no, by the gods, tentacles!—tenta- cles, waving house-high. The bull sperm had charged full tilt into a herd of the unimaginably horrible, the in- describably abominable, giant cuttlefish of the floor of the ocean. Such cuttles never see the day. Their true dimensions even are o7 not known. They can only be guessed from specimens hurled ashore by typhoon or sub- marine earthquake, rarely beheld by white man, and quickly decomposing; but from preserved pieces of tentacles, it is estimated that they reach at least a length of sixty feet, and probably a good deal more. And into a herd of such things had the bull sperm charged headlong. Nevertheless, it was with the express purpose of finding a herd of such loathly beings he had come there! Yet nothing could be seen—absolutely nothing. Only was there the darkness—the pitch blackness of the pit. But a great deal could be felt. The cuttlefish were pumping the water into a maelstrom with their syphons, and lashing it continuously with their extraor- dinary arrow-head tails, and in case the complete dark should not be dark enough, were filling all about them with clouds of sepia ink. Nevertheless, if it had been light enough, there would have been revealed, a very for- est of gigantic, waving, tree-like tentacles twining and untwining, beneath which, half covered in the brown slime, the enormous sack-like bodies lay pulsating with waves of color, brown, purple, red, lilac, white, and brown again. As anger shows colors to the blind, their rage played over them visibly and devilishly like a thunder-storm; and everywhere huge saucer-like, staring eyes, of unspeakable malignity and hate, stared upward glassily. Lucky it was, perhaps, that such a sight was mercifully eclipsed by the pall of the deep. It was too horrible, too unshamedly de- moniacal, for exposure in any light. In a flash, too, three tentacles had thrown themselves about the bull sperm like haw- sers pulled taut, and began to strain down terrifically. Others leaped, anaconda-like, to help them. More followed those. And there were feelings, the unspeakably ghastly eddyings of things moving and closing in all about. In three seconds the scene was a vortex of leviathan, fiendish strife, and the under- world rocked and swayed and eddied as in a tornado to it. It was as if the spirits of the deep had risen in strife against each other and had chosen the battle-ground—here. But it seemed to have been written that few could withstand the sperm whale’s jaws. _ He let his under-jaw down at right anglés, COMMICLOOOKS ~ (E@)