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THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT.
87
head and the extreme folds were visible, then more than
half of the tail end had gone. Why, then, have neither
geologists nor fishermen found any fossil or recent
remains of this creature ? Simply because they have not
properly sought for them: the petrifactions exist
abundantly. They may be found hereabouts—in the form of
low rocky ridges, stretching in long lines, with spaces
of sea between them, like the Hestmann’s messengers.
Some start abruptly out of the water, and rise to fifty,
a hundred, or more feet in height; these are the heads,
the low ridges are the coils of the body, of the Kraken.
Towards the end of a long, clear, glaring summer’s day,
after the sun’s rays (which here are powerful to a degree
incredible to those who have not felt them) have been for
eighteen or twenty hours continually pouring upon these
rocks, which from the nature of their surface are
excellent absorbers of heat, they become considerably hotter
than the surrounding sea, and are covered with a
layer of rarefied air, continually ascending and waving
about, and refracting the light very differently from
the denser air over the intermediate sea. Now let us
suppose a line of these low rocks just visible above
the horizon, and between them and the spectator’s eye
a number of other low rocks, which he, raised on a
ship’s deck, looks over. It is evident that as he moves
along he will see a particular point on the horizon
sometimes over an unbroken line of sea, or sometimes over
one or more of these low, warm rocks, with a rarefied
atmosphere above them. Any one who is acquainted
with the rudimentary principles of optics will perceive
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