Living Silver 



him together again. He was the opposite of the connoisseur : he 

 was the opposite of intelUgent. But his appetite and his un- 

 conscious activity made him a formidable adversary. He hunted 

 fish with a combination of efficiency and mobihty unequalled 

 among sea creatures. The seine net, a more cunning strategist, 

 could outfish him any day. Hooks and lines could range further 

 over the bed of the sea and its surface. But the seine wasn't 

 nearly so mobile and hooks could not decimate a whole popula- 

 tion with such inexorable mechanical efficiency. 



But the magic cap itself, the net in which the fish were trapped, 

 of what did it consist? Of sisal thread, of course, knotted into 

 diamonds, thousands of diamonds arranged in a number of separ- 

 ate panels. Two wings went in front and formed a couple of 

 lugs. They were quite short and led back to the huge square that 

 rested on the back of his neck. This, in turn, adjoined the batings, 

 where the diamond meshes became smaller and the number of 

 rows of them fewer until the narrowest part of their lint was 

 attached to the thick double- twined small meshes of the cod-end. 

 Thus, from above, if he had been permitted to glide over it, Jan 

 would have seen a converging funnel, with outspread wings at 

 the front, square and batings in the centre and the narrow bag of 

 the cod-end trailing behind, its extremity bulging with the 

 trapped silver offish, as though it were an ornamental ball on the 

 top of a dunce's cap. 



Then again he would imagine himself buried supine in the 

 ground, and looking up at the face of the dunce. The wings were 

 now enormously elongated for the bottom rim of the net, the 

 bosom, ran across the backward part of the square, about six feet 

 below it. These wings were joined to the belly which tapered, 

 like the batings, to the cod-end. As he watched a boulder would 

 roll slowly over the thick ground-rope, lie dead in the centre of 

 the belly for a few moments until an edginess in the ground would 

 give it a dunt backwards, lie still again, then again roll over, till, 

 at the end of half an hour, it was wedged static among the thick 

 black meshes and living silver fish in the cod-end. As it lay, in 



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