On the dividing-line between these fertile regions and the sterile tracts where, on stormy days when the waves ran deep, the drifting sand laid bare old, fish-gnawed skeletons, or covered up new ones, there was a big slough, which formed the beginning of a low-lying, wide-spreading bog, in which the sources of the lake had their origin.
There was always movement in the vegetation here. The mud rose and fell as if waves were passing beneath it. Now and then the surface opened, and jets of water as thick as tree-trunks shot into the air. There were high and low jets, forming, as it were, trees and bushes of water, which sometimes burst into bloom with large, strange-hued, fantastic blossoms of foam and bubbles.
In this slough lived the hermit of the lake, the giant sheat-fish Oa, a scaleless, dark, slimy monster, which only on rare occasions, generally in stormy weather, rose from her mudbed and revealed herself to human eyes. Generally, she moved about on the bottom, living her lonely life of plunder where the law of gravitation ultimately brought everything that was no longer able to swim or float about.
Centuries earlier, pious men had brought her progenitor, wrapped in wet grass, here to the lake, and planted the family of Silurus outside their cloister walls, so that its oily, digestible flesh could serve them as a good dish for fast-days.
The experiment was only moderately successful, and this hardy old fish was the last of her race.
Oa had the body of an eel, but was as long and thick as a boa constrictor. If she were ever caught, and placed upon a wagon, her tail would hang out beyond even the longest wagon-perch.
Her head was large and squat, with a huge shark’s mouth and small, blinking eyes. Six long, worm-like barbels, whose ends curled and twisted, hung from the corners of her mouth; she felt her way with them as she sedately crawled over the muddy bottom. She had neither neck nor breast, but her capacious stomach hung down immediately behind her gullet, like that of an old sow. It was always distended, and apparently so heavy that its owner’s back was quite bent.
Oa was a sinister-looking skulker in dark places, a terror to every poor fish that had been injured and could no longer swim nimbly about.
Like a moss-grown tree-stump she lies buried in the mud when the still inexperienced Grim swims in among the bottom springs, and again and again unwittingly passes over her scaleless, dull green body. She is quite invisible, only the two longest of her barbels projecting from the mud, and incessantly curling and bending like two earth-worms hastily making for the bottom at the approach of an enemy.
Grim, who is always in want of food and cannot resist delicacies, swoops down like a falcon at sight of the “worms,” without noticing the watchful gleam in the two little amber-coloured stones that lie quivering on the muddy bottom. She snaps eagerly at the nearest “worm,” but it escapes her by adroitly rolling itself up.