A Hideous Monster.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXV, Issue XV, 13 October 1900, Page 711

A Hideous Monster.

One would scarcely expect a "devil fish” to be a pleasing auinial, and, indeed, of the several wholly different species of fish which bear the name, all are more or less repulsive; but the one encountered in his boyhood by Mr. Frank T. Bullen, which he has described in a recent article, was particularly unpleasant, and represented a little known variety, found only in the Gulf of Mexico. "When I was a youngster,” he writes, "I was homeward bound from Santa Ana with a cargo of mahogany, and when off Cape Campeche I was one calm afternoon leaning over the taffrail, looking down into the blue profound, on the watch for fish. A gloomy shade came over the bright water, and up rose a fearsome monster some 18 feet across, and in general outline more like a skate or ray than anything else, all except the head. Then what appeared to be two curling horns about 3 feet apart rose one on each side of tbe most horrible pair of eyes imaginable. A shark’s eyes, as he turns sideways under your vessel's counter and looks up to see if anyone is coming, are ghastly green and cruel, but this thing’s eyes were all that and much more. I felt that the Book of Revelation was incomplete without him, and his gaze haunts me yet. Although quite sick find giddy at the sight of sueh a bogey, I could not move until the awful thing, suddenly waving what seemed like mighty wings, soared up out of the water soundlessly to a height of about 6 feet, falling again with a thunderous splash that

might have been heard for miles. I must have fainted from fright, for the next thing of which 1 was conscious was awakening under the rough doctoring of my shipmates. Since then I have never seen one leap upward in the daytime. At night, when there is no wind, the sonorous splash is constantly to be heard, although why they make that bat like leap out of their proper element is not easy to understand. it does not seem possible to believe such awe-inspiring horrors capable of playful gambolling. That is a kind of monster sufficiently hideous to form a fitting companion to that most frightful of all monsters—and one often called a devil fish—the gigantic octopus, well known and remembered by readers of Victor Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea.”