Chapter Four 

 STRANGER THAN FICTION 



ON the side of the lagoon at Knysna, some miles from the sea, 

 we have a house with a laboratory, where I do not only con- 

 siderable general angling but carry out regular and periodic in- 

 vestigations on the extraordinarily rich and varied fish-life of this 

 large estuary. It is an exceedingly interesting body of water, with 

 many unique characters. 



In December 1938 we had gone from Grahamstown to Knysna. 

 I had been unwell, and was not fully recovered even in the New 

 Year. 



About midday on the 3rd January 1939 a friend brought us a 

 large batch of mail matter from the town, very much of a Christ- 

 mas-New Year accumulation, and this was sorted out between us, 

 each settling down to his or her letters. Mine were the usual 

 mixture of examination results and queries, and numbers about 

 fishes. One was from the East London Museum, in Miss Latimer's 

 well-known hand, the first page very much the usual form, as 

 will be seen on p. 30, asking for assistance in classification. Then I 

 turned the page and saw the sketch, at which I stared and 

 stared, at first in puzzlement, for I did not know any fish of our 

 own or indeed of any seas like that; it looked more like a lizard. 

 And then a bomb seemed to burst in my brain, and beyond that 

 sketch and the paper of the letter I was looking at a series of fishy 

 creatures that flashed up as on a screen, fishes no longer here, 

 fishes that had lived in dim past ages gone, and of which only 

 often fragmentary remains in rocks are known. I told myself sternly 

 not to be a fool, but there was something about that sketch that 

 seized on my imagination and told me that this was something 

 very far beyond the usual run of fishes in our seas. It was as if my 

 common sense were waging a battle with my perception, and I 

 kept on staring at that sketch, trying to read into it perhaps more 

 than it held. In this surge of violent thoughts and reactions, the 



