NIGHT BENEATH THE SEA 373 



schools that must be winding in the moonhght and in the 

 shadows along the slopes of the oceans all over the world. Off 

 Inagua alone the pulsing masses of life creeping in and out of 

 the coral forests must be stupendous. Whenever I stand on the 

 seashore at night I will think, not of the waves lapping at my 

 feet, but of the winding serpents of individual fishes crawling 

 in and out of the sea, all unseen, unnoticed and unknown. When 

 I think again of these milhons of lives going on miUions of er- 

 rands, with millions of hopes and millions of failures, with mil- 

 lions of problems, millions of ways of solving them, pursuing 

 millions of meals, escaping millions of enemies, giving life to 

 milHons of spawn and dying millions of deaths, I can only be 

 silent with awe. 



Then, when the snappers were gone, I turned away and 

 crept down into the valley as it had become my custom to do 

 at the end of each trip. At the bottom I stood motionless while 

 all around phantom shapes resolved and dissolved with the 

 shadows. For a long time I paused. Then, when a group of large 

 fishes went hurrying by, and I recognized them by their forms 

 and by their gleaming horselike teeth as parrotfish, and saw 

 that they were scurrying frantically for the upper corals, I 

 knew that this was not my world and that I had stayed long 

 enough. 



