The Great Sea-Serpent(2)

　　"That is all imagination!" said the shark. "I am never sick. No fish is ever sick."

　　"Pardon me," said the whale. "The eel suffers from headache, the carp has the smallpox, and we all have intestinal worms."

　　"Nonsense!" said the shark, and refused to hear any further, and the others also would rather not; they had something else to attend to.

　　At last they came to the place where the telegraph cable lay. It has a pretty long bed on the floor of the sea from Europe to America, over sand-banks and sea-mud, rocky ground and weedy places, entire forests of coral. The currents down there, too, change, whirlpools eddy, and fishes swarm in greater masses than the countless flocks of birds that men see when birds of passage take their flight. There is a stir, a splashing there, a humming and rushing; the rushing still haunts a little the great empty conch-shells when we hold them to our ears.

　　"There lies the fellow!" cried all the great fishes and the little one with them. They saw the cable, the beginning and end of which vanished beyond the reach of their eyes. Sponges and polyps swayed from the ground, rose and fell over it, so that now it was hidden, now came to view. Sea-porcupines, snails, and worms moved over it. Gigantic crabs, that had a complete fringe of creeping things, stalked about it. Dark sea-anemones, or whatever the creature is called that eats with its entire body, lay beside it and smelled of the new creature that had stretched itself on the bottom of the sea. Flounders and codfish turned over in the water so as to get an idea about it from all sides. The star-fish, that always bores down into the mud and can keep its eyes outside, lay and stared to see what was to come of all this bustle.

　　The telegraph cable lay without stirring, but life and thought were in it. Human thought went through it. "The thing is crafty," said the whale; "it is able to strike me in the stomach, and that is my weak point."

　　"Let us grope along," said the polyps. "I have long arms and limber fingers; I have been moving by the side of it; now I'll go a little faster," and so it stretched its most flexible, longest arms down to the cable and round about it. "It has no scales!" said the polyps; "it has no skin at all. I do believe it never feeds its own young."

　　The sea-eel laid itself by the side of the telegraph cable and stretched out as far as it could. "The thing is longer than I am," it said; "but it is not length that does anything; one must have skin, stomach, and flexibility."

　　The whale dove down deeper than it ever had been. "Art thou fish or art thou plant?" it asked, "or art thou only some piece of work made up above that cannot thrive down here amongst us?"

　　The telegraph cable did not answer; it has no power for that. Yet thoughts go through it, men's thoughts, that rush in one second miles upon miles from land to land.

　　"Will you answer, or will you take a crack?" asked the fierce shark, and all the other great fishes asked the same thing.

　　The cable did not stir, but it had its private thought, and such a one it had a right to have when it was full of thoughts. "Let them only give me a crack! then I shall be hauled up and be myself again; that has happened to others of my race in shallower waters." So it gave no answer; it had something else to attend to; it telegraphed and lay in its lawful place at the bottom of the ocean.

　　Up above, the sun now went down, as men say. It became like flaming fire, and all the clouds glowed with fiery color, each more splendid than the other. "Now we shall get the red light," said the polyps, "and can see the thing better, if need be."

　　"At it! at it!" shouted the shark. "At it! at it!" said the sword-fish and the whale and the eel. They rushed forward, the shark foremost. But just as it was about to grip the wire, the sword-fish, out of pure politeness, ran his saw right into the back of the shark. It was a great mistake, and the shark lost all his strength for biting. There was a hubbub down in the mud. Great fishes and small, sea-anemones and snails rushed at one another, ate each other, mashed and squeezed in. The cable lay quietly and attended to its affairs, and that one ought to do.

　　The dark night brooded over them, but the ocean s millions upon millions of living creatures lighted it; craw-fish, not so big as a pin-head, gave out light. Some were so small that it took a thousand to make one pin-head, and yet they gave light. It certainly is wonderful, but that's the way it is.

　　These sea creatures looked at the telegraph wire. "What is that thing?" they asked, "and what isn't it?" Ay, that was the question.

　　Then there came an old sea-cow. Folks on the earth call its kind a mermaid, or else a merman. This was a she, had a tail and two short arms to splash with, hanging breasts, and sea-weed and sponges on her head, and that was what she was proud of.

　　"Will you have the society of intelligent people?" said she. "I'm the only one down here that can give it. But I ask in return for it perfectly secure pasturage on the bottom of the sea for me and mine. I am a fish, as you see, and I am also an amphibious animal-with practice. I am the wisest cow in the sea. I know about everything that goes on down here, and all that goes on above. That thing you are pondering over is from above, and whatever plumps down from up there is either dead or comes to be dead and powerless; let it lie there for what it is; it's only some invention of man."

　　"Now I think there is something more to it," said the little fish.

　　"Hold your tongue, mackerel !" said the great sea-cow.

　　"Stickleback!" said the rest, and that was even more insulting.

　　And the sea-cow explained to them that this terrible thing, which, to be sure, had not given out a single mutter, was only some invention from the dry land. And it delivered a little oration upon the rottenness of men.

　　"They want to get hold of us." said she. "That's all they live for. They stretch nets for us, and come with bait on a hook to catch us. That thing there is some kind of big string which they think we are going to bite at. They are such stupids! We are not. Only do not touch it, and it will shrivel up and all turn to dust and mud. Everything that comes down from up there is full of cracks and breaks-it's good for nothing."

　　"Good for nothing!" said all the creatures in the sea, and held fast to the sea-cow's opinion, so as to have an opinion. The little fish had its own thoughts. "That exceedingly long, thin serpent is perhaps the most wonderful fish in the ocean. I have a feeling it is."

　　"The very most wonderful," say we human folks, and say it with knowledge and assurance. It is the great sea-serpent, long ago the theme of song and story. It was born and nourished and sprang forth from men's cunning and was laid upon the bottom of the sea, stretching from the Eastern to the Western land, bearing messages, quick as light flashes to our earth. It grows in might and in length, grows year by year through all seas, round the world, beneath the stormy waves and the lucid waters, where the skipper looks down as if he sailed through the transparent air, and sees the swarming fish, brilliant fireworks of color. Down, far down, stretches the serpent, Midgard's snake, that bites its own tail as it encircles the earth. Fish and shell beat upon it with their heads-they understand not the thing-it is from above. Men's thoughts in all languages course through it noiselessly. "The serpent of science for good and evil, Midgard's snake, the most wonderful of all the ocean's wonders, our-GREAT SEA-SERPENT!"