DIFFERENT WAYS OF SWIMMING 



instead of blazing light, the light is at most faint and 

 subdued. If we were able to go down and explore it, 

 our eyes would see no distance, our ears would hear no 

 sound. Yet in this obscurity, in this silence, beneath 

 the water, life exhibits an intensity of action greater 

 than anything we could have imagined. Instead of 

 being a desert, it supports a tremendous realm of 

 abundance and activity. 



Our minds may perhaps construct for us what the 

 eye cannot see. They can discern in this eternal 

 dimness a spectacle which makes no appeal to those 

 who take part in it. The plain of mud may bear, 

 here and there, tufts of dead coral like the dry sparse 

 shrubs of the desert. In it contractile soft polyps 

 implant themselves, forming clusters simulating living 

 vegetation. Shellfish which remain permanently in 

 one place or move very little, sea-urchins, and star- 

 fish, though more varied and numerous, remind us of 

 the small terrestrial animals of the surface of the soil. 

 Here and there crabs, poulps, molluscs crawl or walk. 

 The congers, and the other fishes of their group, pass 

 with their undulatory motion like serpents on the sand, 

 or hide in their lairs. Skate, lying on the bottom, rise 

 now and again to flap along with their fins, much as 

 eagles and hawks go through the air. Like them the 

 gurnards swim with their beating pectorals. Then 

 above this population of the sea bottom, at different 

 levels all the way to the surface, the open sea fishes live 

 and move in all directions, the jelly-fish, and countless 

 floating animals, alone or together, swimming, swim- 

 ming all the time, filling the sea with an intense life 

 which has no counterpart on land. 



We may well be surprised by the contrast. After 

 such a journey to the sea, the air which surrounds us, 

 the soil upon which we stand, seem poor and empty. 

 The word " fecundity " takes on a new meaning, 

 greater than that which it has around and above us. 

 Life itself acquires a new significance. This gloomy 



SS 



