So then the little fish told about the astonishingly long eel, or whatever the thing was, that had sunk down from above and produced such a panic amongst all the other creatures in the sea.
“Ho, ho!” said the whale, and he drew in such a rush of water that he was ready to make a prodigious spout when he came to the surface for a breath. “Ho, ho! so that was the thing that tickled me on the back when I was turning round. I thought it was a ship’s mast, that I could break up into clothes-pins. But it was not here that it was; no, a good deal farther out lies the thing. I’ll go with you and look for it, for I have nothing else to do;” and so it swam off, and the little fish behind it, not too near, because there was a tearing stream, as it were, in the wake of the whale.
They met a shark and an old saw-fish; they, too, had heard of the famous sea-eel, so long and so thin; they had not seen it, but now they would.
“I’ll go with you,” said the shark, who was on the same road; “if the great sea-serpent is no thicker than a cable, then I can bite through it in one bite,” and he opened his mouth and showed his six rows of teeth—” I can bite dents in a ship’s anchor, and certainly can bite off the shank.”
“There it is!” said the great whale ; “I see him.” He thought he saw better than the others. “See how it rises, how it bends and bows and curves!”
But it was not the sea-serpent, but an extraordinarily great eel, ever so many ells long, that drew near.
“Why, I have seen him before!” said the saw-fish. “He never has made a hullabaloo in the sea or frightened any big fish out of his wits.” And so they talked to him of the new eel, and asked him if he would go with them on their voyage of discovery.
“If that eel is longer than I am,” said the sea-eel, “there will be something disagreeable happening.”
“Ay, that there will,” said the others; “there are enough of us not to tolerate him!” and so they shot ahead. But then there came right in their way a great monster, bigger than all of them put together; it looked like a floating island, that could not stop itself. It was a venerable whale. Its head was grown over with sea-weed, its back covered with barnacles, and such innumerable oysters and mussels, that its black skin was altogether whitened.
“Come with us, old fellow!” said they. “Here is a new fish come, and we won’t stand it.”
“I would rather lie where I am lying,” said the whale. “Leave me alone; leave me alone. O ah, 0 ah! I suffer from a dreadful disease! My only relief is to get up toward the surface and get my back up higher; then the great sea-fowl can come and pick at me. That feels so good! only when they do not drive their beaks in too far; sometimes they go in too deep, quite into my blubber. You can see now how a complete skeleton of a fowl is fixed in my back; she struck her claws in too deep, and could not get them out when I went down to the bottom. And now the little fishes have picked at her. See how she looks, and how I look. I am all diseased!”
“That is all imagination!” said the shark. “I am never sick. No fish is ever sick.”
“Pardon me,” said the whale. “The eel suffers from headache, the carp has the smallpox, and we all have intestinal worms.”
“Nonsense!” said the shark, and refused to hear any further, and the others also would rather not; they had something else to attend to.
At last they came to the place where the telegraph cable lay. It has a pretty long bed on the floor of the sea from Europe to America, over sand-banks and sea-mud, rocky ground and weedy places, entire forests of coral. The currents down there, too, change, whirlpools eddy, and fishes swarm in greater masses than the countless flocks of birds that men see when birds of passage take their flight. There is a stir, a splashing there, a humming and rushing; the rushing still haunts a little the great empty conch-shells when we hold them to our ears.