NONSUCH 



yard. Now and then a piece of net gets into his jaws, 

 but his teeth are serrated and double-edged, and two 

 or three skillful shearings clip the net clean away 

 and it is swallowed with the fish. 



For the first fifteen minutes of our life together 

 the great blue shark attended the stern of the tug. 

 The two pilotfish, unusually large ones, over a foot 

 long, kept always one on each side of his dorsal 

 fin, swerving not an inch, but shifting with each 

 lateral swing of their master as if all three were 

 strung on the same invisible wire. They too were 

 blue, deep blue alternating with paler bands. 



While the shark swept evenly ahead, its little 

 sucking-fish slithered up and around, backward 

 and forward, over all its body. Sometimes the three- 

 inch sliver of black life would appear near the tip 

 of the high dorsal fin, then down and across the gills, 

 under the great belly and up on the opposite side. 

 What an astonishing life — to have one's whole be- 

 ing fashioned to adhere to some great shark, by 

 means of a sucking disk on top of the head. It re- 

 minded me of old geography pictures of a diminu- 

 tive earth, always showing the heathen Chinamen 

 walking upside down on the under side, while we, 

 more enlightened Nordics of sorts, stalked about 

 with our heads right side up in the air! As the three 

 planes of watery space are magicked into one by the 

 shark, so gravitation seemed non-existent to the 

 remora — up, sideways, or down were all the same 

 to him. His planet was a living one, a great elongate 

 spindle with eight slender promontories of fins ; his 



174. 



