FAREWELL TO VAU VAU. 277 



first ; for while the two killers hung on the cachalot's 

 flanks, diverting his attention, the sword-fish, a giant 

 some sixteen feet long, launched himself at the most 

 vulnerable part of the whale, for all the world like a 

 Whitehead torpedo. The wary eye of the whale saw the 

 long, dark mass coming, and, like a practised pugilist, 

 coolly swerved, taking for the nonce no notice of those 

 worrying wolves astern. The shock came ; but instead 

 of the swot-d penetrating three, or maybe four feet just 

 where the neck (if a whale has any neck) encloses the 

 huge heart, it met the mighty, impenetrable mass of the 

 head, solid as a block of thirty tons of india-rubber. 



So the blow glanced, revealing a white streak 

 running diagonally across the eye, while the great 

 Xiphias rolled helplessly over the top of that black 

 bastion. With a motion so rapid that the eye could 

 scarcely follow it, the whale turned, settling withal, and, 

 catching the momentarily motionless aggressor in the 

 lethal sweep of those awful shears, crunched him in two 

 halves, which writhing sections he swallowed seriatim. 

 And the allied forces aft — what of them ? Well, they 

 had been rash — they fully realized that fact, and would 

 have fled, but one certainly found that he had lingered 

 on the scene too long. The thoroughly-roused leviathan, 

 with a reversal of his huge bulk that made the sea boil 

 like a pot, brandished his tail aloft and brought it down 

 upon the doomed " killer," making him at once the 

 ** killed." He was crushed like a shrimp under one's 

 heel. 



The survivor fled — never faster — for an avalanche of 

 living, furious flesh was behind him, and coming with 

 enormous leaps half out of the sea every time. Thus 

 they disappeared, but I have no doubts as to the 

 issue. Of one thing I am certain — that, if any of 



