t it, dropped it, thrust his shaking thumb into his
mouth and mumbled, 'The giant gooseberry and the raining frogs! Gimme
a light--gimme a light! Say, gimme a light. A little bead of blood
dropped from his thumb-joint.

I respected the motive, though the manifestation was absurd. 'Stop,
you'll bite your thumb off,' I said, and Keller laughed brokenly as
he picked up his cigar. Only Zuyland, leaning over the port bulwarks,
seemed self-possessed. He declared later that he was very sick.

'We've seen it,' he said, turning round. 'That is it.'

'What?' said Keller, chewing the unlighted cigar.

As he spoke the fog was blown into shreds, and we saw the sea, gray
with mud, rolling on every side of us and empty of all life. Then in
one spot it bubbled and became like the pot of ointment that the
Bible speaks of. From that wide-ringed trouble the Thing came up--a
gray and red Thing with a neck--a Thing that bellowed and writhed in
pain. Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of
the ship's name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as
though they had been type badly set. Then he said with a little cluck
in his throat, 'Ah me! It is blind. _Hur illa_! That thing is blind,'
and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the
thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and
cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray
ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back,
and poured away in sluices. The blind white head flung back and
battered the wounds, and the body in its torment rose clear of the
red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked
with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as
the hairless, maneless, blind, toothless head. Afterwards, came a dot
on the horizon and the sound of a shrill scream, and it was as though
a shuttle shot all across the sea in one breath, and a second head
and neck tore through the levels, driving a whispering wall of water
to right and left. The two Things met--the one untouched and the
other in its death-throe--male and female, we said, the female
coming to the male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her
neck across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared
under water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony
while the blood ran. Once the entire head and neck shot clear of the
water and stiffened, and I