Meaning of the two bold-faced sentence

Meaning of the two bold-faced sentence

The passage below is from Fathoms: The World in the Whale Hardcover by Rebecca Giggs.

I had tried to make eye contact with the stranded whale in Perth, but, behind the smokiness of its eye, whatever message it had brought with it slipped from my grasp. Off the coast of Eden, there I had seen the humpback’s eye click from left to right, scanning the length of the Cat Balou whale-watching boat. The moment passed. The whale went under, and it looked away. The whale’s eye remained within my mental space, and I was carrying it around with me every place I went. This was not the sheath eye of a fish; a thin eye you could see all the way through to the silvered backing behind. The whale’s eye had no resemblance to the shiny black eye of a bird, or the jerky, conical eye of a shark. How much it had appeared like a gigantic human eye — though what emotion was funnelled there, I had no words to put to. In the merest sense, the humpback’s eye seemed human in the way of having an iris and a pupil, and in the white that surrounded it when it widened (it had widened). Surfacing on a more cogent arrangement of features, the expression might have been taken for one of startled recognition. But the flare of attention in the whale’s dilated eye fought any easy familiarity. Something else I later realised: the whale hadn’t blinked.

In this passage the two bold-faced sentences are beyond my grasp.

First, about the 3rd sentence from the last.

This sentence focuses on the expression of whales. Here ‘the expression’ seems to mean ‘a look on the face’. (Am I right?)

Then let me explain this sentence on my own. If there’s any nonsense, please check it out for me.

1. It is discovered that whales have the facial expression. (Right?) 2. And it gets people’s attention. 3. Because it is ‘a more cogent arrangement’ of whale’s many known features.

(Here ‘features’ means whale’s ‘strengths’. (Right?) And ‘cogent’ means ‘powerful’. (Right?) And ‘arrangement’ is the hardest. It seems to mean ‘feature’ in the sense of context. (Seems to be a wrong answer, but that’s all I can get.)

1. So whale’s facial expression seems to show their ability to ‘recognition(consciousness)’. (Right?) And that fact startles people. (Am I Right?)

Last, about ‘the flare of attention in the whale’s dilated eye fought any easy familiarity’. 1. Whale’s dilated eye gets tremendous attention. (Right?) 2. It fought any easy familiarity. Here ‘fought’ can be replaced with ‘denied’. (Right?)

1. So this sentence seems to mean that people are interested in whale’s eye, but for all their interests it isn’t easy for the author to get familiar with people’s excessive attention. She is uneasy with this attention. (Am I right?)

Thanks a million for all your replies.