31 章鱼(11)
I stared in my turn and couldn't keep back a movement of revulsion. Before my eyes there quivered a horrible monster worthy of a place among the most farfetched teratological legends.
我上前一看，忍不住感到一阵恶心。在我的眼前，游一动着一头可怕的完全配得上载入那些离奇怪诞的传说中的怪物。
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long. It was tra一veling backward with tremendous speed in the same direction as the Nautilus. It gazed with enormous, staring eyes that were tinted sea green. Its eight arms (or more accurately, feet) were rooted in its head, which has earned these animals the name cephalopod; its arms stretched a distance twice the length of its body and were writhing like the serpentine hair of the Furies. You could plainly see its 250 suckers, arranged over the inner sides of its tentacles and shaped like semispheric capsules. Sometimes these suckers fastened onto the lounge window by creating vacuums against it. The monster's mouth--a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot--opened and closed vertically. Its tongue, also of horn substance and armed with several rows of sharp teeth, would flicker out from between these genuine shears. What a freak of nature! A bird's beak on a mollusk! Its body was spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, a fleshy mass that must ha一ve weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms.
这是一条8米长的巨大的章鱼。它非常迅速地往“鹦鹉螺号”船只的同一方向倒退走。它那巨大的海绿一色一眼睛盯着我们。那八只长在头上、使它被称为头足动物的爪子，或者说八只脚，伸展时相当于身一体的两倍，像复仇三女神的头发一样扭一动着。我们清楚地看到它的两百五十个吸盘，呈半圆球状，排列在触脚的一内一侧。有时，这些吸盘一内一形成真空紧紧地吸住客厅的玻璃。这头怪物的嘴——像鹦鹉的喙一样是骨质的——垂直地一张一翕。它的骨质舌头上武装着好几排尖牙，颤一动时活像一把真正的大铁剪。大自然是多离奇怪诞啊！一只软体动物竟然长着一只鸟喙！它的身一体成棱形，中间部位鼓起，形成一块重可达20000到25000公斤的肉。