Sub chases, films giant squid going to Pacific abyss | The Japan Times Online
Giant squids give me chills. I grew up reading illustrated stories of sea monsters like the kraken (usually depicted as a tentacled behemoth grappling with a sailing ship and threatening to sink it with its unearthly bulk), and watching adventure flicks like Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with its memorable giant squid attack on Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus. Occasionally as part of my amateur studies in cryptozoology I'd read a news story about a weird carcass washed ashore and its pondering the possibility of squids exceeding the size we'd find comfortable dining as calamari.
Although they might find us comfortable dining in turn. Just like in the supposedly true story of a torpedoed British ship and its survivors' reports of great tentacles groping over the gunwales of their lifeboats and plucking screaming sailors to their watery doom. The great staring eyes beneath the waves, the sharp beak waiting to kill and devour. An elderly man lifting his pants cuff and lowering his sock to show a documentary film crew his calf bearing round scars, lividly pink even after 50 or 60 years...
Did I dream that? Are we all dreaming in the dark depths where creatures unguessed swim and live and die savagely?
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