In 1861, to the northeast of Tenerife and fairly near the latitude where we are right now, the crew of the gunboat Alecto spotted a monstrous squid swimming in their waters.
Commander Bouguer approached the animal and attacked it with blows from harpoons and blasts from rifles, but without much success because bullets and harpoons crossed its soft flesh as if it were semiliquid jelly.
After several fruitless attempts, the crew managed to slip a noose around the mollusk's body.
This noose slid as far as the caudal fins and came to a halt.
Then they tried to haul the monster on board, but its weight was so considerable that when they tugged on the rope, the animal parted company with its tail; and deprived of this adornment, it disappeared beneath the waters."
"Finally, an actual event," Ned Land said.
"An indisputable event, my gallant Ned.
Accordingly, people have proposed naming this devilfish Bouguer's Squid."
"And how long was it?" the Canadian asked.
"Didn't it measure about six meters?" said Conseil, who was stationed at the window and examining anew the crevices in the cliff.
"Precisely," I replied.
"Wasn't its head," Conseil went on, "crowned by eight tentacles that quivered in the water like a nest of snakes?"
"Precisely."
"Weren't its eyes prominently placed and considerably enlarged?"
"Yes, Conseil."
"And wasn't its mouth a real parrot's beak but of fearsome size?"
"Correct, Conseil."
"Well, with all due respect to Master," Conseil replied serenely, "if this isn't Bouguer's Squid, it's at least one of his close relatives!"
I stared at Conseil.
Ned Land rushed to the window.
"What an awful animal!" he exclaimed.
I stared in my turn and couldn't keep back a movement of revulsion.
Before my eyes there quivered a horrible monster worthy of a place among the most farfetched teratological legends.
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long.
It was traveling backward with tremendous speed in the same direction as the Nautilus.
It gazed with enormous, staring eyes that were tinted sea green.
Its eight arms (or more accurately, feet) were rooted in its head, which has earned these animals the name cephalopod; its arms stretched a distance twice the length of its body and were writhing like the serpentine hair of the Furies.
You could plainly see its 250 suckers, arranged over the inner sides of its tentacles and shaped like semispheric capsules.
Sometimes these suckers fastened onto the lounge window by creating vacuums against it.
The monster's mouth—a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot—opened and closed vertically.
Its tongue, also of horn substance and armed with several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears.
What a freak of nature!
A bird's beak on a mollusk!
Its body was spindle–shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy mass that must have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms.
Its unstable color would change with tremendous speed as the animal grew irritated, passing successively from bluish gray to reddish brown.
What was irritating this mollusk?
No doubt the presence of the Nautilus, even more fearsome than itself, and which it couldn't grip with its mandibles or the suckers on its arms.
And yet what monsters these devilfish are, what vitality our Creator has given them, what vigor in their movements, thanks to their owning a triple heart!
Sheer chance had placed us in the presence of this squid, and I didn't want to lose this opportunity to meticulously study such a cephalopod specimen.
I overcame the horror that its appearance inspired in me, picked up a pencil, and began to sketch it.
"Perhaps this is the same as the Alecto's," Conseil said.
"Can't be," the Canadian replied, "because this one's complete while the other one lost its tail!"
"That doesn't necessarily follow," I said.
"The arms and tails of these animals grow back through regeneration, and in seven years the tail on Bouguer's Squid has surely had time to sprout again."
"Anyhow," Ned shot back, "if it isn't this fellow, maybe it's one of those!"
Indeed, other devilfish had appeared at the starboard window.
I counted seven of them.
They provided the Nautilus with an escort, and I could hear their beaks gnashing on the sheet–iron hull.
We couldn't have asked for a more devoted following.
I continued sketching.