SOURCE: "A Matter of Fact" (Tauchnitz Magazine, February 1892) by Rudyard Kipling

DESCRIPTION: "The last words died on Keller's lips, his eyes began to start from his head, and his jaw fell. Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open, revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue— as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips; white feelers like those of a barbel sprang from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless—white, in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture, was alive with rage and terror. One long white feeler touched our bulwarks. Then the face disappeared with the swiftness of a blind worm popping into its burrow...From that wide-ringed trouble a Thing came up—a gray and red Thing with a neck—a Thing that bellowed and writhed in pain. Frithiof drew in his breath and held it till the red letters of the ship's name, woven across his jersey, straggled and opened out as though they had been type badly set. Then he said with a little cluck in his throat, 'Ah, me! It is blind. Hur illa! That thing is blind,' and a murmur of pity went through us all, for we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out. The gray ooze of the undermost sea lay in the monstrous wrinkles of the back and poured away in sluices. The blind white head hung back and battered the wounds, and the body in its torment rose clear of the red and gray waves till we saw a pair of quivering shoulders streaked with weed and rough with shells, but as white in the clear spaces as the hairless, nameless, blind, toothless head." ("A Matter of Fact" by Rudyard Kipling)

NOTES: Living on the bottom of the ocean, two blind, ancient sea creatures are forced to the surface by an underwater volcano. The male of the species is wounded and dies on the deck of the Rathmines where three newspapermen see the incident. Eager to tell readers back in England about the amazing events, they quickly realize no one will believe them in the UK or America.

HISTORY: The sea serpents appear in the middle of Kipling's tale and are not the main point but the device to deliver the point, which is: newspapers in England and America are not the same. Kipling worked in the newspaper business in India and the irony of this story will have come from this experience. The sea serpents in "A Matter of Fact" are not hostile but pitiable.