of pen-fish, poulps, and cuttle-fish without heads.

The cephaloptera, in fact, is only vulnerable through the head.

Gilliatt was not ignorant of this fact.

He had never seen a devil-fish of this size. His first encounter was
with one of the larger species. Another would have been powerless with
terror.

With the devil-fish, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment
in the conflict which must be seized. It is the instant when the bull
lowers the neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its
head. The movement is rapid. He who loses that moment is destroyed.

The things we have described occupied only a few moments. Gilliatt,
however, felt the increasing power of its innumerable suckers.

The monster is cunning; it tries first to stupefy its prey. It seizes
and then pauses awhile.

Gilliatt grasped his knife; the sucking increased.

He looked at the monster, which seemed to look at him.

Suddenly it loosened from the rock its sixth antenna, and darting it at
him, seized him by the left arm.

At the same moment it advanced its head with a violent movement. In one
second more its mouth would have fastened on his breast. Bleeding in the
sides, and with his two arms entangled, he would have been a dead man.

But Gillian was watchful. He avoided the antenna, and at the moment when
the monster darted forward to fasten on his breast, he struck it with
the knife clenched in his left hand. There were two convulsions in
opposite directions; that of the devil-fish and that of its prey. The
movement was rapid as a double flash of lightnings.

He had plunged the blade of his knife into the flat slimy substance, and
by a rapid movement, like the flourish of a whip in the air, describing
a circle round the two eyes, he wrenched the head off as a man would
draw a tooth.

The struggle was ended. The folds relaxed. The monster dropped away,
like the slow detaching of bands. The four hundred suckers, deprived of
their sustaining power, dropped at once from the man and the rock. The
mass sank to the bottom of the water.

Breathless with the struggle, Gilliatt could perceive upon the stones at
his feet two shapeless, slimy heaps, the head on one side, the remainder
of the monster on the other.

Fearing, nevertheless, some convulsive return of his agony, he recoiled
to avoid the reach of the dreaded tentacles.

But the monster was quite dead.

Gilliatt closed his knife.

IV

NOTHING IS HIDDE