Adventure Magazine Cover — page 64: what you’re looking at

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

58 so that the enormous cavity of the roof of his mouth was disclosed, as it were the hold of a ship, but as white and shining as a marble cave. For some reason that cavity seemed to have an extraordinary fascination for those writhing, snake-like tentacles, so that they crept, feeling deliberately, inside—so that they wrapped themselves about the upper jaw—so that—— & THE bull sperm’s lower jaw shut with a snap and the scene that fol- lowed beggars description. All the as ocean seemed to go mad, and rise and lash itself in fury, but nothing, not even this in- ferno, troubled the bull sperm. Again and again he was lashed by tentacles, as by haw- sers, from bow to stern. Again and again, backed by his huge weight, he burst himself free. Again and again he was bound by the mighty nose of him and hauled head down, and again and again that steam-saw under- jaw of his shut, shearing through everything and set him free. Twice he charged down into that seething caldron of animated, hate-possessed sacks, and each time rose with an enormous cuttle- fish in his jaws—writhing like a tree in a storm—shaking it dog-fashion. And once he charged, at tremendous speed, beneath the female sperm, cutting her adrift from tentacles that sought to restrain her, as a battle-ship cuts through a _ chain-Boom. And each time, and every time, and all the time, he fed—upon cuttlefish. That was what he was there for. And all the while the tormented chameleon devils beneath him wrapped and writhed and wrenched, and tore and tugged and hugged, seeking to enmesh and pull him down to their ten-times-terrifying, parrot-like beaks, or yammering horribly to draw themselves up to him, which twice they did, and he shot away, spinning, with a huge-eyed form stuck to him like a leech, only to cut it adrift in the end and dart after it, with won- derful agility for so colossal a beast, as it shot backward, expelling great jets of water and ink as it went. Nevertheless, save that his head was marked all over with round lines where the suckers upon the tentacles had stuck, and with scrawly lines, like Oriental writing, on his sides, left by the horrible beaks, the sperm whale showed no scars for all his battling. Adventure It seemed, however, nothing in all earth or sea or sky could survive long against - these monster devil shapes of the ocean’s floor—nothing, that is, except perhaps the whales. But they might live after all! Their enormous bulk, their specially con- structed jaws, the thick coating of blubber beneath their soft, yielding skin—a pneu- matic diving suit, as it were, at once against the tremendous pressure of the water and the sucking devils’ tentacles—all these things suggested a gleam of hope. And so it was. At last, when for the third time the bull sperm cut her free from those awful living cables—it is doubtful if she could ever have escaped the united embrace of the herd of cuttlefish herself alone—the cow sperm began to rise. The bull himself, with one last fearful rending, chopping, swirling, reel- ing, rocking charge, cleared his body, and followed her. For this there were two reasons. She had gone, and somehow he had no further interest in food without her. Sec- ondly, even his wonderful lungs could-not keep him under water forever without breath- ing. And in that lay the cuttles’ chance. If, combining, they could have held him down for just so much too long, they could have drowned him—he being not a fish— and had their revenge; but his weight and his peculiar jaws beat them, and he removed as he had come, undulating. Up and up and up in the track of her, his new guiding star; up to the clean, sane world of air and sky and the glorious light at last, the two swam. The bull sperm had no idea where she had come from. As a matter of fact, she had separated from a herd or “school’’ of whales that had been swimming not many miles from where he had dived. But ap- parently he had failen in love with her, and that was enough. Back upward he hurried, while the lit sea, peopled and teeming, boiled all about him. Back to the regions of ultra-violet rays; back to the dim, violet light, where sharks began to appear, and the lights of the under- world people to become scarce and fade out. Back to green and blue light, and ordinary fish; back to red and orange and yellow gleams, where bonito and other fish shot like shooting stars; and back at last to the great green and golden light shining down from the surface. He saw her, the young cow sperm, break 0)(\) ANG SS (C@ (C@