It is just so with the pearl; like the silk, it drinks in and is impregnated with the very life of the wearer. When it has slept so many nights upon her fair bosom, the ornament is no longer an ornament, it is a part of the person, and is no longer to be seen by an indifferent eye. One alone has a right to know it, and to surprise upon that necklace the mystery of the beloved woman.
THE SEA ROVERS (POULPE, &C.)
The Medusæ and the Molluscs are generally innocent creatures, and I have thus far dwelt, as it were, with them in their amiable and peaceful world. Thus far I have met with few carnivora; and even those few killed only in the stern necessity of hunger, and even of those part fed only on atoms, animal jelly, life unorganized, and scarcely commenced. As a consequence, pain, anger, cruelty were absent. Their little souls had, nevertheless, a ray, the aspiration towards the light alike of Heaven and of Love, revealed in the changing flame which illumines and rejoices the seas.
But, now, I have to enter into quite another world: a world of war, slaughter, fierce pursuit, and greedy devouring. I must confess that from the beginning, from the first appearance of life, death also appeared; a rapid and useful purification of the globe from the weak and slow, but prolific tribes whose fecundity would otherwise have been mischievous. In the oldest strata we find two wondrous creatures, the Devourer and the Sucker. The first is made known to us by the imprint of the Trilobite, a species no longer existing, an extinct destroyer of extinct species. The second is known to us by a frightful remnant, a beak of almost two feet pertaining to the great Sucker, the Leiche or Poulpe of Dujardin. Judging from that immense beak, this monster must have had an enormous body, and sucking-arms of twenty or thirty feet, like a prodigious spider.
Sad reflection, these murderous creatures are those which we earliest find in the depths of the earth. Are we then to suppose that death preceded life? No doubt; but the soft creatures upon which these monsters fed have perished utterly, not leaving remains or even imprint of themselves.
The devourers and the devoured, were they two nations of different origin? The contrary is more probable. From the mollusc, form undecided, matter still fit to be converted to any form, the superabundant strength of the young world, richly plethoric, abounding in alimentation, there must at an early period have proceeded two forms, contrary in appearance, but tending and qualified to the same end. Swelling and breathing, and measurelessly inflating itself, the Mollusc became an enormous balloon, an absorbing bladder, absorbing all the more as it stretched the more, ever craving and ever consuming, but toothless,—and we have the Sucker. On the other hand, by the self-same force, the Mollusc gradually developing articulated members of which each had its shell, and hardening this shelled creature everywhere, but especially at the claws and mandibles formed for gnawing and grinding, to pulp or powder, the very hardest substances became—the Devourer. Let us in the first place, in this chapter, speak of the first, the Sucker.
The Sucker of the soft gelatinous world, was himself soft and gelatinous. Warring upon and devouring the molluscs, he himself none the less, remained mollusc, that is to say, still a mere embryon. There would be something absurd, caricatural, were it not so terrible, in this sight of a mere fœtus, soft and transparent, yet cruel, raging, eager, breathing nothing but murder. For he, see you, goes not to war for the mere sake of food. He has a real passion for destroying, for destruction's sake; whenever he has gorged himself, well nigh to bursting, he will destroy still. Destitute of defensive armour, his threatening snortings disguise, but by no means quiet, his real anxiety; his real, his only safety, is an attack. He is the veritable bully of the young world; really vulnerable himself, and yet so terrible to others; he sees in everything that he meets only enemy or victim. At all risks he casts hither and thither his long arms, or rather his whip-lashes, tipped with cupping glasses, and upon enemy or victim, before the fight or the capture commences, he sends out his stupefying, paralysing effluvia.