And so he spent hours watching that wonderful roaring cauldron on the
south stack where his water pools were. Other hours in study of the
social and domestic economies of gulls and cormorants. He saw families
of awkward little fawn-coloured squawkers force their way out of their
shells under his very eves, while indignant mothers told him what they
thought of him from a safe distance.
He bathed regularly in the heat of the day, but always after careful
inspection of his chosen pool, and one day fled in haste up the black
rocks at sight of the tip of a long, quivering, flesh-coloured tentacle
coming curling round a rock in the close neighbourhood of the pool in
which he was basking.
That monster under the rock gave him many a bad dream. It seemed to him
the incarnation of evil, and those horrible, bulging, merciless eyes
stuck like burrs in his memory.
One day, when he had been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin
dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall
leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy.
Down below, on the edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly
young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with
something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its head in search of
understanding.
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