And indeed there was some excuse for the negro's extraordinary behaviour; for, intense as was the darkness that enveloped us, the water was faintly phosphorescent, and we were thus enabled to discern indistinctly that, less than a hundred yards distant from us, a huge creature, which, to our excited imaginations, appeared to be between two and three hundred feet long, had risen to the surface and was now slowly swimming in a direction that would carry it across the bows of the longboat at a distance of some fifty feet.
