DEMONS OF THE DEEP

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LVI, 11 October 1922, Page 7

DEMONS OF THE DEEP

On the beach oi' a Breton seaside village a party of barelegged, happy trippers from Laris, each ot Uem bristling with lishing nets, slides, and iron iiuoKs, and girdled with baskets and bags, had just finished exploring the pools left by the tide on the rocks (writes a tourist in a London paper). They were excitedly and proudly discussing an unexpected prize in the shape of several large crustaceans covered with shaggy seaweed which slowly unclosed on the sand their long and slender claws. “They are too lovely. Dea amours” rapturously exclaimed an enthusiastic trl. “Lovely,” sneered a cynical youth. “They are more like giant spiders than cherubs.” 1 “But they are sea, spiders,” declared llie well-informed man, “and very good to eat too. Far better than craba. . • Had you been here last month you would have caught not ten tut hundreds. They were gathered by the cartloads from the rocks so that it became impossible either to eat or to sell them. Have you not noticed how the lanes in the village are littered with their claws and shells?” “Why this invasion?” someone asked. An old fisherman who was strolling about took his pipe from hia mouth and pointing to the west with his rugged hand: “Them beasts are running away from the picuvre over there.” “La pieuvre!” He pronounced the word solemnly and mysteriously. For devil fish, or ootopi, have ah evil name among the Breton fishing folk. And they are evil-looking, repulsive monsters, with a big pouch of a head in which are set malicious yellow eyes, and a beak like that of a parrot, surrounded by eight long, slimy tentacles, eacli with eighty suckers. Every fifteen or twenty years they make a raid upon the Breton coast. This year, tile old fisherman explained, they have ravaged the shores of Finiatere and settled in the fishing villages of the district. They have destroyed all the fish within several miles of the coast and devoured, or put to flight, The shell-fish along the coast. That is Hie reason why the sea-spiders have emigrated in such numbers. These ugly pests have brought ruin and despair to many fishermen’s families--1 remembered a picture from “Les TTavadleurs de la Mcr” of Victor Hugo, which had terrified my childhood, .showing the deadly struggle of a fisherman with a giant octopus. “Do they attack men?” I aeked the old fisherman.

“The big ones do,” he answered. “List month a man from Plouescat was caught by his leg. In a few minutes the'tentacles had reached his waist and begun to suck his heart out. Had he not managed to blind the brute with lib knife be would have been a dead

man. ... “Ik it possible to get rid of them? He spat and shrugged. “Ma foi! there is nothing much to do. Some fishermen over there kill as many as 25 a day. But there are thousands of them. Sometimes, with the hist cold days, they go back to deep waters. Sometimes, too, after a big storm, they get crashed by the wave* against the rocks- In 1905 their dead bodies were washed ashore ia such numbers that the air became foul. Dirty beasts, dead or alive; they are a plague, ma Done!”