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Show HIS HEAD IN SHARK'S MOUTH Black Diver Claim to Have Had Remarkable Re-markable Experience With Sea Monster. Writing In Harper's Magazine of his visit to Thursday island in the Torres strait, Norman Duncan narrates soma astoniBhing tales of the adventures of the natives with the savage tiger-eharks tiger-eharks of these waters: "It is said that the coastal aborigine is not greatly afraid of a shark that he is a match for a shark, indeed, in fair water, when not taken unaware. He may lose a leg or an arm, or he may be carried off bodily; but in any event the damage will be due rather to the cunning approach of the shark than to the limitations of the diver. Fairly warnedhe will dive to the bottom, bot-tom, roil the water, and thus elude the attack; and If he Is pugnaciously disposed at the moment (they say) if the shark impolitely Interrupts him at a critical or deeply interested momenthe mo-menthe will give fight. It is true, of course, that the naked divers are accustomed to escape by rolling the water; such instances are common; but I have no stomach for the tale that any man will go out of his way to challenge combat with a twenty-foot twenty-foot tiger-shark even when angered by an untimely interruption. "I recall two stories of narrow escape. es-cape. The one concerns a young Japanese Jap-anese diver who was taking a crayfish to the surface, and all at once found himself in a furious engagement. It was incautious of the diver to have a crayfish; and this indiscreet diver came out of the consequent encounter with a lacerated thigh and one arm missing. The other story is hardly credible, related far from the scene; I cannot vouch or it, at any rate, having hav-ing had no means of authenticating It; but as I have not hesitated to swallow swal-low it whole, and have been pleasantly pleasant-ly moved to shudder and thrill and exclaim aghast, I will tell it for what it is worth. It seems that a black beche-de-mer boy, swimming, naked and abstracted, close to the reef In search of slugs, awoke all at once to an amazing situation. It was not that the shark was near not that it had turned and was darting; but that his head was actually In the shark's wide-open wide-open mouth. The black boy acted sharply; he withdrew his head in a flash, having at the same time 'punched' the shark (as they put it) to distract attention from the matter In hand; and he rescued himself after a brisk tussle, and lived to prove the adventure with' a scarred cheek." |