Adventure Magazine Cover — page 134: what you’re looking at

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

sy Spek ee a ng! ve ae Y Ft Te 128 the whale, struck it with their tails, that resembled nothing somuchas gigantic razors, and, with a whack that could be heard for miles, and a force that would have cut a man in two—yes, like a cracked egg, smash! For those tails were sharp natural razors, strong and horny. A spurt of raw crimson followed, and the sharks—thresher sharks they were, and very evil—fell back into the tortured waters with a crash as of forty broken plate-glass win- dows, only barely avoiding—as if by black magic—the flying flukes of the great whale’s tail, that whirled like a battle-ship’s broken piston-rod. For a moment all was smothered, mad- dened chaos. ‘Then the sharks showed fifty yards away, agile, alert, and skirmishing, circling like wolves. ° The whale, knowing his strong card, which was ability to withstand cold and pressure of the uttermost depths more than could be withstood by any fish almost, and feeling his gashed back keenly, promptly “sounded,” that is, nose-dived head first and at speed. Under the water, it seemed, the sharks could not slash him about with the wonderful, long, razor-like upper lobe of their tails in so fearful a fashion as they could when leaping upon him on the surface; and this was another reason for going down. Then, like an evil dream, and as if the scent of combat had called it, which per- haps it had, there merged upward, out of the bottomless blue toward the whale, a ‘great, long, sinister, misty shadow, growing plainer and clearer every moment, till it was re- © vealed by its wriggling, jerking tail, by its eel-like flexibility, by its hateful papery eye, and by its receding chin, as if, not a shark, then the next worst thing to one. But, above all, it was remarkable for the long, flat bone, studded with villainous ivory teeth on either side from end to end, pro- jecting straight outward from his nose—an abominable weapon not made for any innocent purpose, on the face of it. This, too, would have been a monster if the whale had not been by, for he was six- teen feet long. . And, if he had been a little flatter, he might have been a skate. And if a little narrower, he might have been ashark. As it was, it was hard to say what he was, except that he was sort of half-way between ‘the two, and a devilish proposition in the bargain. Men knew him as the saw- PE ral OO SL i A tte, Se En . *~ Te Ls b * -¥ - Adventure fish—not the swordfish—and. the anlernen folk knew him as an affliction without a soul, a calamity abroad upon the face of the waters. The whale’s little eyes—one of his little eyes—spotted this new member of the un- holy alliance against him, and tried to ‘dodge, but, though his agility in the water was amazing, he had some length of him to dodge with. In a flash—not as mere ordinary fish shoot about, but with the hateful, wriggling, jerking, side-to-side motion of all the sharks—the sawfish was beneath him before he could dive clear. The whale tried to turn and abolish him with his steam-hammer-like tail, but the sawfish evidently knew that tail, and hugged the ponderous belly. Then, rising literally ‘as a prone man would rise and wield a two-handed sword, and with a power and force too awful to write about, he hacked and slashed, and wrenched and tore with his unspeakable “weapon upward at the whale’s underside. The tremendous animal shot bodily up- ward in the blue sea, as if he had been lifted by an exploding volcano, and the sawfish was hurled to one side by the current the latter’s departure had set up like the blast from a marine geyser. But his unfor- gettable, expressionless, paper-like eyes saw the blaze and flash as the whale broke through the white-gold, immense, inverted shield which represented the surface, and he apparently knew that the _ threshers, or fox sharks as they are called, would deal with him there effectually. In a minute or so he was certain of it. Down came the whale again like a torpedoed ship, and the sawfish promptly got to work as before. And the devilish maneuver was repeated, sawfish helping thresher, each in his own particular sphere, mercilessly, brutally, soullessly, till the great whale lay out along the surface like unto a scuppered ship, and every shark which wasn’t too busy eating somebody or avoiding being eaten, evolved itself ghost-like from nowhere— from a mile or two really—and Joined 1 in the feast. But there is no need to linger here. Sharks are not educated to Hotel Waldorf manners anyway. There must have been a couple of dozen of them there—hammerhead, bonito, thresher, ground, and sawfish—a regular family party, and only sharks admitted. — They varied in length from five to sixteen GOMIGE 9)(0)(6) (E@) S| Ss