s body, lashed round his ribs like a cord, and fixed itself
there. There was sufficient light for Gilliatt to see the repulsive
forms which had entangled themselves about him. A fourth ligature, but
this one swift as an arrow, darted towards his stomach.

These living things crept and glided about him; he felt the points of
pressure, like sucking mouths, change their places from time to time.

Suddenly a large, round, flattened, glutinous mass shot from beneath the
crevice. It was the centre! The thongs were attached to it like spokes
to the nave of a wheel. In the middle of this slimy mass appeared two
eyes. The eyes were fixed on Gilliatt.

He recognised the devil-fish.

Gilliatt had but one resource--his knife.

He knew that these frightful monsters are vulnerable in only one
point--the head. Standing half naked in the water, his body lashed by
the foul antennae of the devil-fish, Gilliatt looked at the devil-fish
and the devilfish looked at Gilliatt.

With the devil-fish, as with a furious bull, there is a certain moment
in the conflict which must be seized. It is the instant when the bull
lowers its neck; it is the instant when the devil-fish advances its
head. The movement is rapid. He who loses that moment is destroyed.

Suddenly it loosened another antenna from the rock, and darting it at
him, seized him by the left arm. At the same moment it advanced its
head.

Rapid as was this movement, Gilliatt, by a gigantic effort, plunged the
blade of his knife into the flat, slimy substance, and with a movement
like the flourish of a whip, described a circle round the eyes and
wrenched off the head as a man would draw a tooth.

The four hundred suckers dropped at once from the man and the rock. The
mass sank to the bottom of the water.

Nearly exhausted, Gilliatt plunged into the water to heal by friction
the numberless purple swellings which were pricking all over his body.
He advanced up the recess. Something caught his eye. He approached
nearer. The thing was a bleached skeleton; nothing was left but the
white bones. Yes, something else. A leather belt and a tobacco-tin. On
the belt Gilliatt read the name of Clubin; in the tobacco-tin, which he
opened with his knife, he found three thousand pounds.

When Gilliatt reached his sloop, with this belt and box in his
possession, he found, to his unspeakable horror, that she had been
making water fast. Had he come an hour later he would have found nothing
above