The Primitives 



were any flies buzzing at the bottom of the sea : he couldn't imag- 

 ine why a fish should have such a tail unless it was for swatting flies. 

 But it was the ventral side, the death-mask, the witch-doctor's 

 disguise, that distinguished the skates most forcibly and rather 

 horribly. Smooth, it was, of a white slimy consistency, or grey 

 sometimes, and even smoother, a rhomboid, occasionally rounded 

 at the edges, of smooth anonymity. And yet it was so distinctive. 

 The mouth was a mere slit near the centre of the mask. Thin lines 

 led up from the corners of this meagre orifice to the small nostrils 

 and the tiny gill slits were arranged almost invisibly in two arcs of 

 a circle, just behind the mouth. There was no expression, no 

 nose, no eyes, nothing but the flat white smooth rhomboid, the 

 slit of the mouth, the thin lines, and the little holes that were 

 nostrils. Simple as it was, this mask could be huge, a white slab 

 the size of a tablecloth upturned on the concrete of the market. 

 It looked, then, like a flatfish. It certainly was flat, much flatter 

 than any of the pleuronectidae, flat like a plate, a paving stone. 

 But it was not a flatfish. It was quite different. It could perhaps 

 have been better described as a flattened shark, a squashed dogfish, 

 because it too was a cartilaginous fish and that made it very remote 

 from the pleuronectids, the true flatfish. 



Jan should have known it at a glance. The position of the 

 mouth should have been enough : the little slit ran along the centre 

 of one of the diagonals of the mask-like rhomboid. Ahead of it 

 sloped the triangle that ended in the sharp projection of the snout. 

 Or the whole body of the beast would be like a triangle with a 

 tail, but even then the mouth would stay central and the pointed 

 nose or forehead would be far out in front of it. And this, of 

 course, was very different from the flatfish. Their mouths were 

 the foremost parts of their bodies, as were the mouths of the cod, 

 the salmon, the herring, the mackerel. The scientific name for 

 bony fish, Teleostei, meant, indeed, something like 'animals with 

 their mouths at the front of their bodies'. But not the dogfish, 

 not the sharks. They were like the skates, and Jan could not help 

 thinking how silly he had been not to notice it before. The mouth 



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