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himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of night.

In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough

just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer

concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.



Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at

last showed his chest and arms.  As I live, these covered

parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face,

his back, too, was all over the same dark squares;

he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just

escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt.

Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark

green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.

It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage

or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas,

and so landed in this Christian country.  I quaked to think of it.

A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers.

He might take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!



But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went

about something that completely fascinated my attention,

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considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means

in bad taste.  Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder,

and with both hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the man-ropes,

Father Mapple cast a look upwards, and then with a truly sailor-like

but still reverential dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps

as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.



The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case

with swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds

were of wood, so that at every step there was a joint.  At my first

glimpse of the pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient

for a ship, these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary.

For I was not prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height,

slowly turn round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag

up the ladder step by step, till the whole was deposited within,

leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec.



I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.

Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,

that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere

tricks of the stage.  No, thought I, there must be some sober reason

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press upon me.  I have read ye by what murky light may be mine

the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye,

and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.

And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit

on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen,

while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson

which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God.  How being

an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things and bidden

by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a

wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise,

fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking

ship at Joppa.  But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.

As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed

him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore

him along 'into the midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths

sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped

about his head,' and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.

Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet--'out of the belly

of hell'--when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones,

even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.

Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold

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that Folio.  In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise,

being of a less rotund and jolly girth; indeed, he is of quite

a neat and gentleman-like figure.  He has no fins on his back

(most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail, and sentimental

Indian eyes of a hazel hue.  But his mealy-mouth spoils all.

Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable,

yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull,

called the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem

to stern, with two separate colors, black above and white below.

The white comprises part of his head, and the whole of his mouth,

which makes him look as if he had just escaped from a

felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and mealy aspect!

His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.





Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed,

inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales.

Above, you have all the Leviathans of note.  But there are a rabble

of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an

American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally.

I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations;

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assisted Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily,

and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher,

while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle

preliminary to scalping him.  He was naturally a very nervous,

shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward;

the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse.

And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab,

and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages,

Dough-Boy's whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly,

after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded,

he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining,

and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door,

till all was over.



It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego,

opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's; crosswise to them,

Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought

his hearse-plumed head to the low carlines; at every motion

of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake,

as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship.

But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,

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or more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail

of any sort; the inordinate length of each separate voyage;

the irregularity of the times of sailing from home; all these,

with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed

the spread through the whole world-wide whaling-fleet of the special

individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick.  It was hardly

to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have encountered,

at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,

a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale,

after doing great mischief to his assailants, has completely

escaped them; to some minds it was not an unfair presumption,

I say, that the whale in question must have been no other than

Moby Dick.  Yet as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been

marked by various and not unfrequent instances of great ferocity,

cunning, and malice in the monster attacked; therefore it was,

that those who by accident ignorantly gave battle to Moby Dick;

such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content to ascribe

the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils

of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.

In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab

and the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

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the prodigies related in old times of the inland Strello mountain

in Portugal (near whose top there was said to be a lake in which

the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface); and that still

more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse

(whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land

by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost

fully equalled by the realities of the whalemen.



Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these;

and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale

had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that

some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions;

declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal

(for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves

of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim

away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout

thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception;

for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away,

his unsullied jet would once more be seen.



But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough

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I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird

chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,

that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;

and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I

beheld the Antarctic fowl.



But how had the mystic thing been caught?  Whisper it not,

and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl

floated on the sea.  At last the Captain made a postman of it;

tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's

time and place; and then letting it escape.  But I doubt not,

that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in Heaven,

when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the invoking,

and adoring cherubim!





Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of

the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,

large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity

of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage.

He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses,

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But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly,

seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad

boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,

should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,

even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares

of Constantinople?  Yes.  For the peculiar snow-white brow of

Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.

And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself,

as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would

throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?

His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear!

And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;

till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him!

and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover

his strength.  Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man

endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.

He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody

nails in his palms.



Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably

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and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though

escaping from a bed that was on fire.  Yet these, perhaps, instead of

being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright

at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.

For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast

hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock,

was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.

The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him;

and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,

which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent,

it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the

frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it

must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts

and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer

inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind

of self-assumed, independent being of its own.  Nay, could grimly

live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined,

fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.

Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what

seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing,

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of the entire subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural

verity of the main points of this affair.



I care not to perform this part of my task methodically;

but shall be content to produce the desired impression

by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known

to me as a whaleman; and from these citations, I take it--

the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself.



First:  I have personally known three instances where a whale,

after receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape;

and, after an interval (in one instance of three years), has been

again struck by the same hand, and slain; when the two irons,

both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken from the body.

In the instance where three years intervened between the flinging

of the two harpoons; and I think it may have been something more

than that; the man who darted them happening, in the interval,

to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there,

joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior,

where he travelled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered

by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other

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when the ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him,

so that it was impossible to prevent its striking against him.

We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this gigantic

creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at least

out of the water.  The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,

while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck,

concluding that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we

saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity.

Captain D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine

whether or not the vessel had received any damage from the shock,

but we found that very happily it had escaped entirely uninjured."



Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship

in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual

adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village

of Dorchester near Boston.  I have the honor of being a nephew

of his.  I have particularly questioned him concerning

this passage in Langsdorff.  He substantiates every word.

The ship, however, was by no means a large one:  a Russian

craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle

after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.

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into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.



The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more

and more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun

cloud-shadows flung upon the sea.  The jets of vapor no longer blended,

but tilted everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed

separating their wakes.  The boats were pulled more apart;

Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to leeward.

Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed along;

the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee

oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn

from the row-locks.



Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist;

neither ship nor boat to be seen.



"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet

of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.

There's white water again!--close to!  Spring!"



Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted

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"That's his hump.  There, there, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.



A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron

of Queequeg.  Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible

push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge;

the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up

near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us.

The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed

helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall.

Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale,

merely grazed by the iron, escaped.



Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed.

Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing

them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places.

There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering

every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes

the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from

the bottom of the ocean.



The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;

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Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows

of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale

largely feeds.  For leagues and leagues it undulated round us,

so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe

and golden wheat.



On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from

the attack of a Sperm-Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly

swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that

wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated

from the water that escaped at the lips.



As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance

their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads;

even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound;

and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*





*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks"

does not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do,

because of there being shallows and soundings there, but because

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for those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are

casually chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of

the boat by the line, and lost.  For, when the line is darting out,

to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst

of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play,

when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.

It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of

these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you

are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning;

and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness

of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of,

and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never

pierce you out.



Again:  as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and

prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;

for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm;

and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle

holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion;

so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines

about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play--

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Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence;

for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice.

And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now and

then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten

to jam him--still further pondering, I say, I saw that this

situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal

that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other,

has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals.

If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake

sends you poison in your pills, you die.  True, you may

say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape

these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life.

But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would,

sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard.

Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had

the management of one end of it.*





*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in

the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together.

This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less

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from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.



It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight.

The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout

before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor

fin beat his side in an agony of fright.  Now to this hand,

now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at

every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea,

or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin.

So have I seen a bird with clipped wing, making affrighted broken

circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks.

But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make

known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea,

was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice,

save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this

made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still,

in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail,

there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied.



Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's

boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game,

Derick chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually

long dart, ere the last chance would for ever escape.



But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all

three tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang

to their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed

their barbs; and darted over the head of the German harpooneer,

their three Nantucket irons entered the whale.  Blinding vapors

of foam and white-fire! The three boats, in the first fury of the

whale's headlong rush, bumped the German's aside with such force,

that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer were spilled out,

and sailed over by the three flying keels.

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Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name)

urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet,

was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body

and the whale's gastric juices.  But this objection likewise falls

to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah

must have taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale--

even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned

their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.

Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators,

that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship,

he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by,

some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add,

possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are nowadays

christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle."  Nor have

there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined

that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant

a life-preserver--an inflated bag of wind--which the endangered

prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom.

Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round.

But he had still another reason for his want of faith.

It was this, if I remember right:  Jonah was swallowed

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in his more quiet moods.  Yes, we were now in that enchanted

calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.

And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of

the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales,

eight or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied

spans of horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder,

that a Titanic circus-rider might easily have over-arched

the middle ones, and so have gone round on their backs.

Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales,

more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd,

no possible chance of escape was at present afforded us.

We must watch for a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in;

the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up.

Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally

visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children

of this routed host.



Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between

the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces

between the various pods in any one of those circles,

the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude,

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"Oars!  Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--"gripe

your oars, and clutch your souls, now!  My God, men, stand by!

Shove him off, you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him!

Stand up--stand up, and stay so!  Spring men--pull, men; never mind

their backs--scrape them!--scrape away!"



The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks,

leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths.

But by desperate endeavor we at last shot into a temporary opening;

then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching

for another outlet.  After many similar hair-breadth escapes, we at

last swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles,

but now crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre.

This lucky salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's

hat, who, while standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales,

had his hat taken clean from his head by the air-eddy made by the sudden

tossing of a pair of broad flukes close by.



Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was,

it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement;

for having clumped together at last in one dense body,

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and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waited.

The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried

by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand,

are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale,

both to mark its place on the sea, and also as token of

prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.



The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that

sagacious saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish.

Of all the drugged whales only one was captured.

The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only to be taken,

as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.









CHAPTER 88



Schools and Schoolmasters

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Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish





The allusion to the waifs and waif-poles in the last chapter

but one, necessitates some account of the laws and regulations

of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand

symbol and badge.



It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,

a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed

and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised

many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature.

For example,--after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,

the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm;

and drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who,

in a calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line.

Thus the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between

the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,

undisputed law applicable to all cases.

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Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then the

evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies,

looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell.  But let

us to the story.



It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman

chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;

and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.



The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;

but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale;

and therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb

observing him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his

courageousness to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.



Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale;

and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap,

which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat.

The involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap,

paddle in hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack

whale line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him,

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There's a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark!  By Jove, I have it!

Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one

round chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book.

Come, Almanack!  To begin:  there's Aries, or the Ram--

lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--

he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--

that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue,

when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here,

going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--

he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw;

we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love;

we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra,

or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we

are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio,

or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound,

when whang comes the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer,

is amusing himself.  As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside!

here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt,

he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius,

or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us;

and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.

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look you, sir--hearts and souls alive, man--the next instant,

in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both eyes out--all befogged

and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail looming straight

up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble steeple.

No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday,

with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say,

after the second iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail

like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half

in splinters; and, flukes first, the white hump backed through

the wreck, as though it was all chips.  We all struck out.

To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole

sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking fish.

But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant,

the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash;

and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me

caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder);

"yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to

Hell's flames, I was thinking; when, when, all of a sudden,

thank the good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh--

clear along the whole length of my arm--came out nigh my wrist,

and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell you the rest

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unceasingly were active.  Through the lacings of the leaves,

the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.

Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--

whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore

all these ceaseless toilings?  Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--

but one single word with thee!  Nay--the shuttle flies--

the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing

carpet for ever slides away.  The weaver-god, he weaves;

and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice;

and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;

and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that

speak through it.  For even so it is in all material factories.

The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles;

those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from

the opened casements.  Thereby have villainies been detected.

Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great

world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.



Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood,

the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler!

Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed

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whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters,

and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe,

and then himself evaporate in the final puff.



Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,

which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies

of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with

their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,

where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch;

in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished,

to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.



But you must look at this matter in every light.  Though so short

a period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois

exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present

day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region;

and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear

of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily

forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.  Forty men in one

ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they

have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home

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that showed the disabled mast fluttering here and there

with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left

for its after sport.



Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck;

at every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see

what additional disaster might have befallen the intricate

hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were directing the men

in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats.

But all their pains seemed naught.  Though lifted to the very top

of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.

A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's

high teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern,

and left it again, all dripping through like a sieve.



"Bad work, bad work!  Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,

"but the sea will have its way.  Stubb, for one, can't fight it.

You see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps,

all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring!  But as for me,

all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here.

But never mind; it's all in fun:  so the old song says;"--(sings.)

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But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards

the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.



"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.



"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist.

"Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"



Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just

then observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else;

but its very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.



Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught

one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell;

for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind

him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two compasses pointed East,

and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.



But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old

man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it!  It has happened before.

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pointing to the hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men,

who were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night.

Only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died;

you sail upon their tomb."  Then turning to his crew--"Are

ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and lift

the body; so, then--Oh!  God"--advancing towards the hammock

with uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life-"



"Brace forward!  Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.



But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape

the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea;

not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have

sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.



As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy

hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.



"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.

"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us

your taffrail to show us your coffin!"

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like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst.

From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly

eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not

succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.

For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect,

and so planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles

he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them.

And though the other boats, unharmed, still hovered hard by;

still they dared not pull into the eddy to strike, lest that should be

the signal for the instant destruction of the jeopardized castaways,

Ahab and all; nor in that case could they themselves hope to escape.

With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge of

the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.



Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's

mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;

and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on the"--

but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed

him for the time.  But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise

on a towering crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him off!"

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"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck

creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart.  This ship and I

are two brave fellows!--Ha, ha!  Some one take me up, and launch me,

spine-wise, on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel.

Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!"



"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!"

was now the mast-head cry.



"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and split

your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trump--

blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts

his watergate upon the stream!"



And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew.

The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them

bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.  Whatever pale

fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before;

these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing

awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,

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the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his flukes;

dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surf-beaten beach,

and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom,

in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced

round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred

bowl of punch.



While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out

after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture,

while aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial,

twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks;

and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up;

and while the old man's line--now parting--admitted of his

pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;--

in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,--

Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by

invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea,

the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom,

and sent it turning over and over, into the air; till it fell again--

gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it,

like seals from a sea-side cave.