Part 5

She swam just below the surface of the water, and looked with interest at the varied scenery of the bottom and all the unfamiliar and strange things that presented themselves. How delightful it was to let herself go and give her fins free play!

She reached a rocky reef, and swam over a group of high, wild mountains that rose steeply out of the black bottom ooze with rugged sides, wooded in parts, and in others barren and naked. The mountains were full of deep ravines, the ice of centuries of winters’ freezing of the bottom had furrowed them with crests and clefts, planed off the points of the summits, and formed rounded tops or plateaux.

Here and there in this rocky land with its numerous winding inlets and sharp corners, a conspicuous stump stuck up. Several of them had a ring at one end, and from a few waved a bit of rope. In the course of time they had dropped down from the other world. They were lost boat-hooks and anchors that had become hopelessly fixed; for the rocky reef was a good fishing-ground.

There were many crayfish in the lake, and Grim, as she swam, had a bird’s-eye view of them walking about, swarming over the bottom of the lake in all directions, laboriously measuring out the kilometres in crayfish steps.

In several places there were whole towns of them, and in the perpendicular cliffs on the deep side of the reef, there was a large crayfish population. Here she noticed certain specimens, larger than she cared about. They lay in wait among the rocks or in the depths of the primeval forest, and caught what fish they could in their deadly claws. Or they ran backwards through the water with claws and feelers extended, step by step and with a beat of the tail; if the waves they set up had not warned her in time, they might have run into her at any moment.

From the reef she passed on over a great sandy desert, where the worms lay in rings, and the fresh-water mussels in colonies. She came upon some unpretending and not very luxuriant plants with swinging stalks that could turn with the current and the waves; but what struck her most, and broke the monotony more than anything else, was the skeleton remains of animals, boats, and a few human beings, that lay scattered about.

Where the substratum of the rocky reef still extended under the sand without disappearing altogether, she saw these slowly-perishing remains of the meteors from the air-world, lying scoured and clean as on a tray. In the eyeholes of the skulls the crayfish sheltered when they rested on their long journey over these perilous wastes, and perch lurked in the shadow of the ribs.

Farther out, where current and drifting sand alternately had the mastery, things were incessantly being uncovered and reburied; and in the middle of the desert waste, where there were quicksands, sometimes an arm would project from the sand-dunes, sometimes a leg, or the frontal bone of a skull bearing a huge pair of horns, or the prow of a boat. Finally, the desert ended in a whole skeleton reef--the remains of a drove of animals that a dozen years before had lost their way in the drifting snow and the dark, taken a short cut over the ice, and fallen through.

Once beyond this, the fertile bottom, with black soil, plants and little fish, began again. Then came a new, high-lying land, not stony and rough like the first, but rich and luxuriant. It lay outside a projecting point of land, of which it formed the natural continuation under the water.

On each side of the point a long creek stretched far inland, the scenery under the water being a repetition of that above. A luxuriance and fertility was visible on all sides; the water-grass waved in stretches like corn in the fields, and the giant growths of the water-forests were like the shady trees on land.

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.

The active little pike is still too far off the big pirate’s teeth; it must be enticed nearer, so that she can be certain when she strikes.

Grim does not respond to the invitation, however, but prefers to try the other “worm,” and when that, too, with a rapidity unusual in a worm, curls up into a ball and goes to the bottom, she instinctively grows suspicious, and sets her tail-screw going, just as the cunning water-hyena throws off its mask of mud, and makes a wild dash at her.

Grim flees precipitately--so terrified that her cold blood almost stiffens--and darts out of the black cloud that Oa in her eagerness has raised.

The entire hollow seems alive now; everything is gliding and rocking, everything is moving beneath her; she seems to be swimming in black darkness with an angry, gaping, sucking mouth close behind her. She has to keep up full speed with her tail, and to paddle with all her fins, fore and aft, to avoid being drawn in.

When the water begins to clear, and daylight returns, she finds herself in the middle of a shoal of gay little fish, which, at her sudden appearance among them, scatter like a flock of starlings at the dart of a sparrow-hawk down among them. She feels the seething and boiling from the quick flapping of tiny tails; and involuntarily she goes with them, swimming away as quickly as the most nimble of the shoal, to a large, wide-spreading island of reeds.

Here Grim remained for a month, during which time she calmed down, and came to a full understanding of her own cruel, voracious nature.

One day, when she was proceeding along the border of her new beat, she came upon some precipitous cliffs, standing stone upon stone straight up from the bottom, full of holes and openings. She swam into large, slimy-green caverns and lofty grottos. It was the ruin of the old monastery she had found.

For the present she dared not venture back across the lake. The encounter with Oa had given her a feeling that dangers lurked out in the deep water, to which she was by no means equal. She turned into the nearest creek, and lost herself in a series of large reed-forests. Through them she went on into the bay until the world around her grew narrower and narrower, the surface of the water and the bottom approached one another, and the dreaded element in which she could not breathe made known its superior force by many loud sounds.