WHERE CURRENTS RIP 65 



ment after the first frenzy passed, the squid went for 

 it like a flash of hghtning, seized it, and hugging 

 it close to the heart of the horrid circle of arms, 

 began to devour it, always beginning at the throat. 



A passing swell, coming out of the black night, 

 would fill the lighted circle with a melee of jet- 

 sam — porpita, ocyropsis, ianthinas and salpa, 

 which, if you do not know them by these names 

 does not matter, for if you will allow your imagin- 

 ation full play, and try to think to what strange 

 and beautiful beings such names might apply, your 

 mental images will yet fall short of the strangeness 

 and beauty of the reality. 



At a critical moment of the fishing, when we 

 were keyed up for something great and weird, 

 there flew into the glare a fluttering school of the 

 little, snowy- winged, butterfly flyingfish. A vil- 

 lainous atom of a blood-red squid shot forward at 

 them and three flew straight into my net. Large 

 pelagic crabs came and went, wine-colored, with 

 purple swimming legs, eyes wavering on long 

 stalks, and long, many-toothed claws, waiting for 

 what the squids did not get. Half-beaks shot 

 across the circle, as rapidly as the squids, and half- 

 transparent fishlets showed first one, then another 

 outline as the light and waves partly revealed 

 them. The greatest surprise was when a very 

 large silver hatchet fish, Ai'gyropelecus, floated into 

 view. It was dying, as it had been badly bitten by 

 some creature, but it was the first and only time I 

 ever saw this richly luminous fish at the surface of 

 the sea. Not many miles away I was later to take 



