海底兩萬里 第504期 第31章 章魚(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，忍不住感到一陣惡心。在我的眼前，游動著一頭可怕的完全配得上載入那些離奇怪誕的傳說中的怪物。
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long. It was traveling 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 have weighed 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms.
這是一條8米長的巨大的章魚。它非常迅速地往“鸚鵡螺號”船只的同一方向倒退走。它那巨大的海綠色眼睛盯著我們。那八只長在頭上、使它被稱為頭足動物的爪子，或者說八只腳，伸展時相當(dāng)于身體的兩倍，像復(fù)仇三女神的頭發(fā)一樣扭動著。我們清楚地看到它的兩百五十個吸盤，呈半圓球狀，排列在觸腳的內(nèi)側(cè)。有時，這些吸盤內(nèi)形成真空緊緊地吸住客廳的玻璃。這頭怪物的嘴——像鸚鵡的喙一樣是骨質(zhì)的——垂直地一張一翕。它的骨質(zhì)舌頭上武裝著好幾排尖牙，顫動時活像一把真正的大鐵剪。大自然是多離奇怪誕??！一只軟體動物竟然長著一只鳥喙！它的身體成棱形，中間部位鼓起，形成一塊重可達20000到25000公斤的肉。
