Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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If the rational basis of legend and fable is worth exploring at all, we may well ask why the possession of electric power, the most strange, and until recently the most inexplicable, attribute of any of the inhabitants of the water, does not play a greater part in the marvellous narratives of ancient voyages? The remora, or sucking-fish, magnified a thousand times in imaginations excited by a world of strange and new experience, was the besetting foe of mariners in Northern waters. Clinging to the keel, it kept their barques for weeks in the mare pigrum, the sluggish sea of drifting ice. Whales, rising like sandbanks above the waves, tempted the weary crews to make fast to their treacherous bulk, and then plunged to the bottom, carrying with them both ships and sailors. Gigantic squids thrust their slimy arms down the hatchways, and plucked sleeping seamen from their berths and strangled them before their comrades’ eyes. But the “torpedo”—the paralyzer—though as well known then to the fishers of the Mediterranean as it is now known, under the name of the “crampfish,” or electric ray, to the trawlers of Cornwall or the Channel, seems to have appealed less to the fancies of the sailors of old, than the new though less mysterious powers of the monsters, great and small, which rushed beneath their keels in hyperborean seas. Possibly the powers of the “torpedo” were too well known to excite curiosity, though it is difficult to believe that a creature which sometimes reaches a bulk of 100 lbs. weight, and can emit an electrical discharge strong enough to kill a duck, or to cause in the human arm a “creeping sensation felt in the whole limb up to the shoulder, accompanied by a violent trembling, and sharp pain in the elbow,” followed by loss of sensation for an hour, was not as suggestive to sailors’ fancies as the tentacles of the cuttle-fish, or the sucking-discs of the remora. But if the fabulous terrors of the last were enough to deter the boldest mariners who sailed beyond Thule, it is matter for congratulation that early explorers were unacquainted with the powers and proportions of a monster of still more formidable mould, the electric eel of Southern America. Its mere aspect is lurid, sombre, and repulsive. Its belly glows like red-hot iron, as if fresh from the lake of living fire. Its back is dark and shiny, as if tinged by inky Cocytus. Around its lips and jaws are glowing spots like bubbles of hot metal. The colours meet in a line along the side; and the creature, when drawn from the water, looks as though formed of two welded portions of iron, the one hot, the other cold, just plunged into the blacksmith’s cistern. Small eyes, blue and bleared, are set in the top of a blunt ferocious head, from which the strong and muscular body tapers gradually to a point at the tail. Such, at least, is the appearance of the two electric eels at the Zoo, of whose power the writer, with curiosity stimulated by Baron Humboldt’s unique description of these creatures in the inland pools of tropical America, recently made trial. Neither the size of the fish, nor their physical condition in the small tank in which they exist at present, could reasonably be expected to produce such results as the great traveller witnessed in the stagnant pools of the llanos of Caraccas, when the Indians drove a herd of horses into the water to face the electric discharges of the fish. “These yellowish livid eels,” he writes, “resembling large aquatic snakes, swim near the surface of the water, and crowd under the bellies of the horses and mules. The struggle between animals of so different an organization affords a very interesting sight. The Indians, armed with harpoons and long slender reeds, closely surround the pool, and by their wild shouts and long reeds prevent the horses from coming to the bank. The eels seek to defend themselves by repeated discharges of their electric batteries, and for a long time it seems as if theirs would be the victory. Several horses sink under the violence of the invisible blows which they receive in the most vital parts, and, benumbed by the force and frequency of the shocks, disappear beneath the surface. Others, with mane erect and haggard eyes, raise themselves and endeavour to escape, but are driven back by the Indians. Within five minutes a couple of horses are killed. The eel, which is five feet long, presses its body against the belly of the horse, and attacks at once the heart, the viscera, and the group of abdominal nerves. It is natural,” the author adds, “that the effect which a horse experiences should be more powerful than that produced by the same fish on man, when it touches him only at one of the extremities. The horses are probably not killed, but stunned, and are drowned amid the confusion of the struggle between the other horses and eels.”