THE IMPENETRABLE SEA 



them for a while and then permits them to have separate 

 existences from their curious parents. 



All the pipe-fishes are feeble swimmers, in fact their 

 progress through the weeds might best be described as 

 crawling rather than swimming. If greatly enlarged 

 motion-pictures of them could be taken they would 

 appear as horses, moving slowly through the jungle. 



The king of the weed jungle is most certainly the 

 Sargassum Fish — a monarch bearing the impressive 

 Latin name of Histrio histrio. This extraordinary fish is a 

 rapacious cannibal. He crawls on arm-like fins through 

 the "undergrowth" like a fearsome monster of the land- 

 surface jungles. He camouflages himself like a bunch of 

 Sargassum weed — branches, leaves, bladders and all. His 

 fore fins are modified into jointed armlike appendages 

 like crab's claws. His face is one of the most frightening 

 of all fishy countenances. He stalks his prey with the 

 cunning of a cat. If fishes are indeed terrified by horrific 

 monsters of their own element, then those which meet 

 this crab-like, cat-like bunch of weed with its ghastly 

 face must be paralysed with fright. 



One explorer captured three of these gruesome 

 creatures and kept them for a brief while in a running- 

 water aquarium. A day or so passed and (after the 

 fashion of the nigger-boys in the nursery rhyme) "then 

 there were two". Another interval and there was only 

 one. Another extraordinary fact about this fish is that it 

 actually attracts its victims, after stalking them and 

 petrifying them with its appearance, by dangling a fleshly 

 bait (the remains of a previous meal) before its victim, 

 jiggling it about to whet its victim's appetite, before 

 suddenly pouncing and swallowing it. 



Although the fishes which have been found in the 

 Sargasso suggest that the varieties are nothing like as 

 numerous as those of the open sea, yet those which do 

 inhabit the Sargasso appear to be unusually strange 

 kinds, justifying the weird legends associated with the 



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