It floats in the Stygian blackness, no light or movement registering in its dinnerplate sized eyes, the biggest in the animal kingdom. The flesh on its vast, bullet-shaped body spasmodically changes colour, flushing in multi-coloured pulses, responding to chemical triggers in its primitive brain.
Framing its beak-like jaws are eight muscular tentacles, as thick as tree-trunks, their undersides studded by twin lines of round white suckers. Two longer appendages, coiled within the serpentine mass, can lash out and seize prey, encircling it like huge suction lassos.
The creature exists in reaches of the submarine limbo, unseen by mankind, accompanied by denizens almost as frightful as itself, which appear in flashes of bioluminescence. Here the sun doesn't penetrate and the water above presses down with a mass of several metric tons.
60 feet long
The giant oceanic squid (Architeuthis Dux) is no work of fiction, speculation or rumour. Few marine biologists doubt that the minute squids seen on many a restaurant table have cousins perhaps 60 feet long.
Nestling in one of the jars on a bottom-floor display cabinet in Dublin's Natural History Museum is part of a very large squid, Architeuthis Monachus, acquired by one Sergeant O'Connor off Inisbofin Island, on an undetermined date. It is composed of the creature's mouthpieces.
These are about the size of a grapefruit. The squid was probably 12 to 15 feet in length, big but no Leviathan. The largest specimen recorded in these islands, a 25-footer, was washed ashore in the Shetlands in 1959.
But the decaying remains of true monsters have also been found. The first carcase of Architeuthis Dux was washed ashore at Thimble Thickle Bay, New Zealand, in November 1878. In 1887, the largest ever recorded squid, Architeuthis Longimanus, was washed up at nearby Lyall Bay, in the Cook Strait; it was 57 feet long.
The evidence for the existence of similar or larger specimens comes from the beast's only known predator, the sperm whale, which dives to immense depths. Whales whose hides were emblazoned with disc-shaped scars, where a squid's sucker-studded tentacle had once fastened itself, have turned up in Japanese trawl nets. The sucker marks were sometimes three inches in diameter.
Sea beasts are a common theme in many countries' mythologies. They resemble the giant squid to an unsettling degree. In classical geography, Scylla was a rock in the Strait of Messina, flanking the whirlpool Charbydys, hazardous to sailors in that attempts to avoid one led to an encounter with the other. But Scylla was also represented as a sea monster.
"She has 12 splay feet and six lank, scrawny necks. Each neck bears an obscene head, toothy, with three rows of thick-set crowded fangs blackly charged with death. . ." wrote Homer in the Odyssey. "Particularly she battens on humankind, never failing to snatch up a man with each of her heads from every dark-prowed ship that comes."
Woodcuts
Scandinavian woodcuts from the 19th century show a huge pulpy creature whose "head" tapers off into a cone-shaped tail and from which ten sinuous arms radiate. It rises from the water to grasp a luckless ship, a screaming human held aloft by a curling tentacle.
The kraken (Swedish for "uprooted tree") was spoken of in shades of dread by many an ancient mariner long before Herman Melville and Jules Verne incorporated it into literary fiction.
And what of these islands? Belligerent monsters rising from the abyss are no strangers to our legends either. In an age when a flimsy fishing vessel, was cut off from the rest of humanity, once it ventured beyond the line of the horizon, when maps were unreliable and radio transmitters did not exist, the mysterious loss of a ship might have been ascribed to such a beast. An encounter between a currach and a 60foot squid in the Atlantic waters would certainly have had a grim ending.
Legendary creatures such as the Welsh Afranc or the ScotsGaelic muirdris (a.k.a. sinach) which fought Fergus Mac Leiti at Dundrum Bay might hark back to some real event. In the folklore of Western Scotland, one monster, cirein croin, is also called mia mhor a chuain, the "great beast of the ocean".
Permanent night
Of course, in all probability, the most gigantic species of oceanic squid will never leave the permanent night of the submarine trenches and canyons. Food is in abundance there.
The seafarers and bathers can put thoughts of sea monsters - at least the multi-armed variety - out of their minds.
The appearance of a shark's solitary dorsal fin, scything the frothy waters as it homes in on its prey, is one thing. But the tentacles of a vast squid, snaking their way upwards towards the sun-dappled surface, that's a different matter. Isn't it?