Canto III
Now Mario sinks down
beneath the waves
And silently swims
through the dismal dark.
Here no light comes
except for groaning caves
Where unearthly
creatures glimmer and spark.
Here in the water
sheltered far from air
Live creatures
ghastly white and pale and sick
Who hide away from
day's detested glare
And long for human
flesh to bite and lick.
The sighing tears of
all earth's weeping folk
For centuries fell,
and to this ocean came,
Congealed together,
then from their mass woke
Hoards of vile
squids, and Bloobers are their name.
In swarms they come
at Mario with mind
To strip his flesh
from bones and eat their fill.
Almost to late he
sees their white forms wind
Toward him hungering
for a mighty kill.
As the mysterious
Cheep-cheep that like wind
Or lightning flits
so quickly through the sea,
Mario turns and
swims around a bend
Of coral pink to
hide most urgently.
Like ravenous swarms
of insects at a meal,
And without pause,
the Bloobers him pursue,
But Mario, as agile
as an eel
Has hidden in a
clump of sea kelp blue.
Enraged at the rude
loss of such a taste
Of most choice
flesh, the Bloobers go insane.
In mad frenzy they
lay each other waste
And gorge upon each
other's pale membrane.
Long after Mario
would never speak word
Of that horror he
saw beneath the sea,
How those bleak
animals themselves murdered
In seething, roiling
fight of savagery
He finds a pipe
jutting out from a rock
And slips inside to
see what lies beyond.
The pipe ends near a
harbor with a dock.
He swims to shore and steps out on the
land.