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Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Λ

… I shadowed my scaly brothers through the endless deeps, fleeing the quick and terrible dolphins. Without warning, a leviathan came upon us, hugest of all living creatures, with a mouth as wide as the gates of Troy and teeth as tall as the pillars of Hercules, their points as sharp as the sword of Perseus.

His jaw gaped wide to swallow us, and I waited for death. I’d never make it to the city in the clouds. I’d never see the tortoise or taste a honeycake from the stack on his shell. I’d die in the cold sea, my fish bones lost in the belly of a beast. The whole school of us were swept into the cavern of its mouth, but the wickets of its enormous fangs proved too large to impale us, and we spilled past unharmed, down into its gullet.

Sloshing about inside the guts of the great monster, as though trapped inside a second sea, we zoomed over all of creation. Every time it opened its mouth, I rose to the surface and glimpsed something new: the crocodiles of Ethiopia, the palaces of Carthage, the snow thick upon the caves of the troglodytes along the girdle of the world.

Eventually I grew weary: I had traveled so far, yet was no closer to my destination than when I began. I was a fish inside a sea inside a bigger fish inside a bigger sea, and I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish, and then, tired of so much wondering, I shut my scaly eyes and slept…