When they could they nipped hold of us -- and awful nips they were -- or tried to steal the meat.

One enormous fellow got hold of the swan we had skinned and began to drag it off.

Instantly a score of others flung themselves upon the prey, and then began a ghastly and disgusting scene.

How the monsters foamed and screamed, and rent the flesh, and each other! It was a sickening and unnatural sight, and one that will haunt all who saw it till their dying day -- enacted as it was in the deep, oppressive gloom, and set to the unceasing music of the many-toned nerve-shaking echoes.

Strange as it may seem to say so, there was something so shockingly human about these fiendish creatures -- it was as though all the most evil passions and desires of man had got into the shell of a magnified crab and gone mad.