“There lies the fellow!” cried all the great fishes and the little one with them. They saw the cable, the beginning and end of which vanished beyond the reach of their eyes. Sponges and polyps swayed from the ground, rose and fell over it, so that now it was hidden, now came to view. Sea-porcupines, snails, and worms moved over it. Gigantic crabs, that had a complete fringe of creeping things, stalked about it. Dark sea-anemones, or whatever the creature is called that eats with its entire body, lay beside it and smelled of the new creature that had stretched itself on the bottom of the sea. Flounders and codfish turned over in the water so as to get an idea about it from all sides. The star-fish, that always bores down into the mud and can keep its eyes outside, lay and stared to see what was to come of all this bustle.
The telegraph cable lay without stirring, but life and thought were in it. Human thought went through it. “The thing is crafty,” said the whale; “it is able to strike me in the stomach, and that is my weak point.”
“Let us grope along,” said the polyps. “I have long arms and limber fingers; I have been moving by the side of it; now I’ll go a little faster,” and so it stretched its most flexible, longest arms down to the cable and round about it. “It has no scales!” said the polyps; “it has no skin at all. I do believe it never feeds its own young.”
The sea-eel laid itself by the side of the telegraph cable and stretched out as far as it could. “The thing is longer than I am,” it said; “but it is not length that does anything; one must have skin, stomach, and flexibility.”
The whale dove down deeper than it ever had been. “Art thou fish or art thou plant?” it asked, “or art thou only some piece of work made up above that cannot thrive down here amongst us?”
The telegraph cable did not answer; it has no power for that. Yet thoughts go through it, men’s thoughts, that rush in one second miles upon miles from land to land.
“Will you answer, or will you take a crack?” asked the fierce shark, and all the other great fishes asked the same thing.
The cable did not stir, but it had its private thought, and such a one it had a right to have when it was full of thoughts. “Let them only give me a crack! then I shall be hauled up and be myself again; that has happened to others of my race in shallower waters.” So it gave no answer; it had something else to attend to; it telegraphed and lay in its lawful place at the bottom of the ocean.
Up above, the sun now went down, as men say. It became like flaming fire, and all the clouds glowed with fiery color, each more splendid than the other. “Now we shall get the red light,” said the polyps, “and can see the thing better, if need be.”
“At it! at it!” shouted the shark. “At it! at it!” said the sword-fish and the whale and the eel. They rushed forward, the shark foremost. But just as it was about to grip the wire, the sword-fish, out of pure politeness, ran his saw right into the back of the shark. It was a great mistake, and the shark lost all his strength for biting. There was a hubbub down in the mud. Great fishes and small, sea-anemones and snails rushed at one another, ate each other, mashed and squeezed in. The cable lay quietly and attended to its affairs, and that one ought to do.
The dark night brooded over them, but the ocean s millions upon millions of living creatures lighted it; craw-fish, not so big as a pin-head, gave out light. Some were so small that it took a thousand to make one pin-head, and yet they gave light. It certainly is wonderful, but that’s the way it is.
These sea creatures looked at the telegraph wire. “What is that thing?” they asked, “and what isn’t it?” Ay, that was the question.
Then there came an old sea-cow. Folks on the earth call its kind a mermaid, or else a merman. This was a she, had a tail and two short arms to splash with, hanging breasts, and sea-weed and sponges on her head, and that was what she was proud of.