I must say that the sight absolutely unmanned me for the moment, and when this extraordinary creature opened his enormous mouth in my direction, I gave myself up for lost.

It did not molest me, however, and I got back to the ship safely, but it was some little time before I recovered from the terrible fright.
Occasionally too we were troubled with sharks, but the Malays did not appear to be very much afraid of them.

Their great dread was the ground shark, which lay motionless at the bottom of the sea, and gave no indication of his presence.

The result was that occasionally the divers would sink down to their work quite unknowingly almost by the side of one of these fearful creatures, and in such cases the diver rarely escaped without injury of some kind.

With regard to the ordinary shark, however, our divers actually sought them.