THE SHARKS OF NARBOROUGH 179 



a hopeless injustice to this water world. Please re- 

 member that the exigencies of my place in that 

 world, and the physical makeup of my helmet en- 

 ables me to see only the merest fraction of occur- 

 rences even in an acute-angled single direction. A 

 horse with blinders is a reasonable simile, or better 

 still, an aged, half blind old man, crippled with 

 rheumatism and palsy and dropped suddenly with- 

 out warning into the busiest of a city's streets and 

 requested to narrate the happenings about him, and 

 give to them some sort of explanation ! 



Now again, the ripples of the surface above me 

 had scarcely died away to the usual heaving, 

 opaque, moonstone appearance of my water sky, 

 when a cloud came drifting past. If I had been 

 looking behind me some time before, and had eyes 

 which could penetrate the wall of blueness in the 

 distance, this cloud might at first have seemed no 

 bigger than a man's hand. Overhead, however, it 

 was large enough to darken the whole bottom, and, 

 except along the rim, formed a solid mass. At 

 least twenty thousand slender little Galapagos 

 snappers floated over and around me. They were 

 only two to three inches in length, slender and sinu- 

 ous, greyish black above, silvery below, with seven 

 or more narrow dark stripes running parallel down 

 the head and body. This was the clear-cut vision 

 I had as the host drifted slowly, almost without 

 individual movement, toward and over me. Some 

 danger, forever unknown to me, wrought a whirl- 

 wind in this living cloud, and instantly every fish 

 vanished, — the whole becoming a mass of blurred 



