Part 17

Armed with arquebuses, the white man established missions and trading posts on the coast with little difficulty, but the forested mountains proved impassable. The Portuguese soldiers were hard put to pitch their camps in deep jungle bush and in bug-filled marshes. Grass and bushes swarmed with little green worms—extremely nimble creatures about an inch long which subsisted on the blood of warm-blooded animals. They seemed to prefer human blood. They attacked the soldiers night and day. Clothes were no protection. The worms dropped in streams of blood from eyelids and ears. They swarmed on all sides in ever-increasing numbers as the invading forces penetrated further into the jungle. With no defense against this unanticipated enemy, the Europeans were forced to retreat long before the temples of Kandy were in sight. They made no further effort to conquer the ancient kingdom.

The Dutchmen who followed the Portuguese were content to remain in their barricaded coastal trading posts. A century later came the British East India Company with a small army of Sepoys commanded by British officers. The ruler of Kandy, quite secure within his green-worm defenses, was Raja Sinha, one of the cruelest of Oriental despots. He spurned all overtures at negotiation with officers of the trading company.

Once again his kingdom was invaded. During the march into the mountains the Sepoy soldiers suffered so badly from the attacks of the worms that some died and many others deserted. The force was so badly depleted that further advance became impossible. Only when British regulars took over the invasion years later was an armed force of white men able to reach Kandy. Previously only individuals, chiefly Portuguese Franciscans, had been able to cross the terrible green-worm barrier.

Sir Emerson Tennent, British historian of Ceylon, describes these worms as normally about an inch long, slender as needles, and able to stretch their bodies to double the ordinary length. Ceylonese natives had been able to protect themselves to some extent by smearing their bodies with lemon juice and tobacco ashes.

“On descrying the prey,” says Tennent, “they advance rapidly by semi-circular strides, fixing one end firmly and arching the other forward until by successive advances they can lay hold of the traveller’s foot, when they disengage from the ground and ascend his dress in search of an aperture. The wound they make is so skillfully punctured that the first intimation is the trickling of blood or the chill feeling of the worm as it begins to land heavily on the skin.”

These worms, hirudinae or leeches, are remotely related to earthworms with a quite similar internal structure, but highly specialized for an exclusive diet of warm blood which they take from any mammal that comes within reach. The blood-sucking species—not all species are this type—have triangular mouths with extremely sharp chitinous [of the same material as the shells of insects] teeth. The bite, so rapidly and skillfully administered that it seldom is felt, has been described as resembling the movement of a circular saw. Haemadipoa, the Ceylon species, described by Tennent, reportedly has five pairs of keen eyes and as many as 100 body segments. All the blood eaters have two suckers, one on the front and one on the rear of the body, by means of which they cling to their victims. All have the ability to contract the body to a plump, pear-like form and extend it to a wormlike form.

The green worms are as much of a terror as ever to travelers in Asian jungles. A species akin to that of the Kandy defense armies guards the thickly forested approaches to the Himalayas in Nepal It is described by Dr. George Moore, chief of the United Nations medical mission to Nepal:

“These leeches, little segmented worms about two inches long, were particularly provoking and troublesome until our team reached an altitude of 14,000 feet. Along the trails, on each ledge leading to the pass, leeches would lie in the shade and moisture until nearby footsteps vibrated their sense organs. Then they would inch from rock to rock at incredible speed, traveling their entire length toward the sound in about a second and then stopping to perch on the rock with their front ends sticking in the air. Immediately they touched a human body they would fasten themselves to it and search for warm skin. Often they would drop from trees. They could penetrate eyelets of shoes and pores of socks by lengthening the entire body. Huge clots of blood would be found on the skin where the greedy worms had fattened themselves to a fragile bursting point.”

The leech encountered by Dr. Moore’s mission long has been notorious as one of the most vicious animals on earth. It has made some areas of the Himalayan foothills uninhabitable. Travelers and hunters are terrified by it. It exists in incalculable numbers and attacks at least all warm-blooded animals. Horses are driven wild. Cattle and dogs sometimes are blinded and the young and sick killed. It has been known to attack the deadly cobra, striking at the eyes and blinding the reptiles. The respect in which it is held in indicated by its zoological name montivindictus, or “defender of the mountains.”

Its stronghold is the highly humid zone at the foot of the Himalayas between altitudes of 4,000 and 6,000 feet. Its period of activity occurs during the rainy season, when it can move freely without danger of drying out. At other times it seldom is seen except at night when grass and bushes are wet with dew.

The worm lurks at the bases of plants. It is stirred to action by the slightest movement of stems or vibration caused by footfalls. An inherent impulse, or geotropism, then impels it to climb any plant or vertical object with which it happens to be in contact. At the top it extends its body horizontally and probes the surroundings.

Once a victim is found, the hungry worm seeks a thin patch of skin richly supplied with blood capillaries. There it attaches itself by means of the cup-like sucker at the front end of its body. Immediately behind this cup are three radiating ridges, or jaws, each provided with about 70 sharp teeth. With these three rows of teeth it cuts three duplicate slits on the skin, meeting at a common center. From the star-shaped wound the warm blood is sucked. Meanwhile from its own glands the leech secretes hirudin, a substance which prevents blood coagulation, and also some as yet unknown substance which preserves blood. The blood is pumped into a storage tank in the leech’s stomach. At a single feeding the animal can store up as much as three-fold its own weight. Then it can live as long as three months without another meal.

The Complex Spider’s Web

A single strand of a spider’s web may consist of several thousand separate filaments. On the creature’s abdomen are four to six teat-like organs. Each secretes through several hundred extremely minute tubes a viscous fluid which hardens immediately when exposed to air. The spider attaches its abdomen to some solid object and pulls out the threads by moving its body forward. The hind feet are used to bring the hundreds of filaments into a single thread.

Monsters of the Deep: The Great Squids

Giants of the mollusk family and about the most loathsomely fantastic creatures on earth are the great squids. One may weigh as much as half a ton. The largest known specimen, a replica of which is among the Smithsonian Institution exhibits, was 55 feet long. It had ten arms, two of them approximately 35 feet long and two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Its eye measured seven by nine inches. Many strange sea serpent stories have been told by persons who merely saw a writhing arm of one of these creatures on the surface. In recent years, however, there has been no reliable report of an encounter with such an animal and it may be close to extinction. Normally it is a denizen of profound depths and darkness and presumably shuns light. It is associated chiefly with the North Atlantic, especially around Newfoundland.

There are not more than a dozen entirely authenticated accounts of seeing the monster. Just after the middle of the last century, Rev. Mr. Harvey of St. Johns, Newfoundland, began to gather “sea devil” reports from fishermen and these constitute a substantial portion of the literature on the subject. He reported that in 1874 two St. Johns fishermen in an open boat observed an object floating in the water which they thought to be wreckage: “When they approached it reared its parrot-like beak, big as a six-gallon keg with which it struck the bottom of the boat violently. It then shot out from around its head two huge, livid arms and began to entwine them around the boat. One of the men seized an axe and cut off both arms as they lay over the gunwale, whereupon the creature moved off and ejected an immense quantity of inky fluid which darkened the water for two or three hundred yards.

“Early in the morning of November 21, 1877,” Harvey informed Prof. Addison E. Verrill of Yale, “a big squid was seen on the beach at Trinity Bay, still alive and struggling desperately to escape. It had been carried in by the tide and a high inshore wind. In its struggles to get off it ploughed a trench or furrow 30 feet long and of considerable depth by the stream of water which it ejected with great force from its syphon. When the tide receded it died. The body was eleven feet long, with tentacle arms 33 feet long. The shorter arms were about eleven feet long.”

“In 1878,” Harvey reported, “Stephen Sherring, a fisherman residing in Thimble Tickle, was out in a boat with two other men. Not far from shore they observed some bulky object and supposing it might be part of a wreck they moved towards it. To their horror they found themselves close to a huge fish with large, glassy eyes, which was making desperate efforts to escape and churning the water into foam by the motions of its immense arms and tail. It was aground and the tide was ebbing.

“Finding the monster partially disabled, the fishermen plucked up courage and ventured near enough to throw the grapnel of their boat, the sharp flukes of which, having sharp points, sunk into the soft body. To the grapnel they had attached a long rope which they carried ashore and tied to a tree to prevent the fish going out with the tide. His struggles were terrific as he flung his ten arms about in dying agony. Ever and anon the long tentacles darted out like great tongues from the central mass. At length it became exhausted and when the water receded it expired. The body measured twenty feet from the beak to the extremity of the tail. The fishermen, knowing no better, proceeded to convert it to dog meat.”

At about the same time H. T. Bennett of English Harbor, Newfoundland, wrote a newspaper account quoted by Prof. Verrill: “A giant cephalopod was run ashore at Coomb’s Cove whose body measured ten feet in length and was as big around as a hogshead. One arm 42 feet long and about the size of a man’s wrist. The other arms were only six feet long but nine inches in diameter and very stout and strong. The skin and flesh were 2.25 inches thick and reddish inside as well as out. The suction cups were all clustered together near the extremity of the long arm and each cup was surrounded by a serrated edge, almost like the teeth of a handsaw. I presume it made use of this arm for a cable and the cups for anchors when it wanted to come to as well as to secure its prey. This individual, finding a heavy sea was driving it ashore tail first seized hold of a rock and moored itself quite safely until the men pulled it ashore. It was probably a female.”

The monstrous ten-tentacled mollusk fights terrible battles with whales and sometimes large parts of tentacles are spewed by leviathan in its death agonies. So far as known only one such battle ever has been witnessed and described. The British author Frank T. Bullen in the Cruise of the Cachelot tells of seeing in the South Indian ocean “a very large sperm whale locked in deadly conflict with a cuttlefish almost as large as himself whose interminable tentacles seemed to enlace the whole of his body. The head of the whale seemed a perfect network of writhing arms. It appeared as if the whale had the tail part of the mollusk in his jaws and in a businesslike, methodical way was sawing through it. By the side of the black, columnar head of the whale appeared the head of the great squid, as awful a sight as one could well imagine in a feverish dream. I established it to be as large at least as one of our pipes which contained 350 gallons. The eyes were very remarkable from their size and blackness contrasted with the livid whiteness of the head. They were at least a foot in diameter. All around the combatants were numerous sharks, like jackals round a lion, apparently assisting in the destruction of the huge cephalopod.

“The occasions when these big cuttlefish appear on the surface must be very rare. From their construction they appear fitted only to grope among rocks at the bottom of the ocean. Their normal position is head downward, with tentacles spread like ribs of an umbrella. The two long ones, like the antennae of an insect, rove unceasingly around seeking prey. In the center of the network of living traps is a chasm-like mouth with an enormous parrot-like beak.”

“Insatiable nightmares of the sea,” the French philosopher Michelet called the creatures. Nothing is known, of course, of their numbers or of their ways of life in the dark depths. The few seen or captured probably have been sick or badly injured. It has been estimated that one female may lay as many 40,000 eggs in a season, but the mortality of eggs and young must be enormous. It is doubtful if one in a million ever becomes a mature animal.

A scarcely less fantastic animal, but more familiar and far less fearsome, is the eight-tentacled octopus. Some of the largest are found off the coast of Alaska. The largest known had arms 16 feet long and a radial spread of 28 feet, but the central body itself was not more than six inches wide and a foot long.

Most familiar of the race is the Mediterranean octopus; its tentacles often are sold for food in Sicilian markets. The largest known was nine feet long and weighed about 50 pounds. This animal reportedly was captured by a fisherman with his bare hands. One specimen found dead on a beach near Nassau had tentacles five feet long and weighed more than 200 pounds.

It is a rather sluggish, timid animal which seeks shelter in holes and crevasses among offshore rocks. It feeds mainly on clams and oysters. When frightened it surrounds itself with a cloud of ink-like fluid. There is no reliable reason to believe it ever attacks man.

The Vanishing Whippoorwill