I frankly confess that for a moment I felt petrified with horror, for the creature was streaming with faintly luminous phosphorescence, and thus, despite the darkness, it was possible to see that it was certainly not a whale, or any other known denizen of the deep, for it had a head shaped somewhat like that of an alligator--but considerably larger than that of any alligator I had ever seen--attached to a very long and somewhat slender neck, which it carried stretched straight out before it at an angle of some thirty degrees with the surface of the water, and which it continually twisted this way and that, as though peering about in search of something.
