I remember that morning as if it were yesterday. The bottom was at about eleven fathoms, rougher than any part of the lagoon that we had seen. Here and there pinnacles of coral rose to within a few yards of the surface; in the shadowy depths below, the bottom was seamed with crannies and pitted with the mouths of caves. The look of the place, in fact, was by no means reassuring, but the men sent out to survey the bottom reported that the lagoon there was fairly paved with shell. It had become my habit to take a water glass in the canoe, for by now I was expert at opening the shell, and I found it interesting, in leisure moments, to watch my companion at his work. The depth was too great to see clearly, but I watched Marama plunge feet-first into the shadows, and a moment later, a second string of bubbles told me that Maruia's nephew had followed him down. Vaguely in the depths I could see Marama moving about, a dim moving shadow when his body passed above a patch of sand. Then, before half a minute had passed, the canoe lurched suddenly and sharply--the native boy was pulling himself up the line in desperate haste. His head broke water. With a heave and a spring that nearly capsized us, he threw himself into the canoe. "Ah, the great tonu--he nearly had me!" he panted, trembling with excitement. "Aué! Teura! Where is he?" I snatched up the water glass, and side by side, with our heads close together, we gazed down into the blue water. Hearing the boy's words, Maruia had seized her own glass. Next moment a sudden sharp wail came from her lips. Then I saw the figure of her nephew, mounting his line with great heaves of both hands--and rising deliberately beneath him a monster hideous as a nightmare memory. It was a huge fish, eight or nine feet long and of enormous bulk. Its great spiny head, four feet across and set with a pair of eyes like saucers, terminated in jaws larger than a shark's; its rough body was spotted and brindled in a way that rendered it almost invisible against the coral; its pectoral fins, frilled and spiny as the fins of a sculpin, spread out like wings on either side. It had the look of an incredibly old and gigantic rock-cod--to which family, indeed, I have been told that the tonu belongs. We watched in terrible suspense, all three of us, Teura was nearing the surface; in another moment he would be safe. The tonu seemed undecided, as if it were following the man out of curiosity rather than pursuing him. I began to breathe more freely. Then when the diver was within twenty feet of us. the fish reared itself suddenly and came rushing up, huge jaws agape. In a twinkling it was beneath us, so close that the water beneath the canoes swirled with its passage. The next instant the monster flashed downward and the man was gone.