App-PigLatin

 view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same

time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold.

Yet when Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still

molest the Captain.  He rings every coin to find a counterfeit.

Not a forger, any way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage.

'Point out my state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary;

I need sleep."  "Thou look'st like it,' says the Captain,

'there's thy room.'  Jonah enters, and would lock the door,

but the lock contains no key.  Hearing him foolishly fumbling there,

the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about

the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within.

All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth,

and finds the little state-room ceiling almost resting on his forehead.

The air is close, and Jonah gasps.  Then, in that contracted hole,

sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah feels the heralding

presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale shall hold him

in the smallest of his bowels' wards.



"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly

oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf

with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber.

That's strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon

stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it,

therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.



"Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still.  Something must

have happened.  Apoplexy!  I tried to burst open the door;

but it stubbornly resisted.  Running down stairs, I quickly

stated my suspicions to the first person I met--the chamber-maid.

"La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must be the matter.

I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was locked;

and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever since.

But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your

baggage in for safe keeping.  La!  La, ma'am!--Mistress! murder!

Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these cries she ran towards

the kitchen, I following.



Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand

and a vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away

from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding

her little black boy meantime.



"Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it?  Run for God's sake, and fetch

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

"Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off.

"Oh!  I was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--

it's all one, all in the family too;--sharp frost this morning,

ain't it?  Good-bye to ye.  Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess;

unless it's before the Grand Jury."  And with these cracked words

he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small

wonderment at his frantic impudence.



At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in

profound quiet, not a soul moving.  The cabin entrance was locked within;

the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.

Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open.

Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there,

wrapped in a tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon

two chests, his face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms.

The profoundest slumber slept upon him.



"Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?"

said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper.  But it seemed that,

when on the wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to;

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion

on the white coral beach, surrounded by his war-like but still

deferential cubs.  In his own proper turn, each officer waited

to be served.  They were as little children before Ahab; and yet,

in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance.

With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife,

as he carved the chief dish before him.  I do not suppose that for the

world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation,

even upon so neutral a topic as the weather.  No!  And when reaching

out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked,

Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate

received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly;

and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate;

and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection.

For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor

profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin

meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at

table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb.

What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden

racket in the hold below.  And poor little Flask, he was

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering

at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people

in the world more fond of that diversion.  This was the fourth

time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing.

After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion,

I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart.

Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days

that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary

clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be.

I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.

I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet

ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a

snug family vault.



Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,

here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction,

and the devil fetch the hindmost.

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt,

a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.



"'Lakeman!--Buffalo!  Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'

said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.



"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave

your courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that.

Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships,

well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your

old Callao to far Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart

of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian

freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas

of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--

possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's

noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and

of climes.  They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,

even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two

great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long

maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude

and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like

are such observations of the hills, that your precise,

previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery;

like the Solomon islands, which still remain incognita, though once

high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.



Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail

to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats

in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war

the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds.

Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole

with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me.

And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded

the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus

far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.



With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons

for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies,

to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really

lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part

is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its

flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface;

so that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put

the chain round it.  But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome:

a small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end,

and a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship.

By adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other

side of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain

is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body,

is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point

of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.





If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could

be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest,

betrayed an unusual but still good-natured excitement.

Such an unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck,

his official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time

the sole management of affairs.  One small, helping cause of all

this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest.

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us

the secret thing that is in thee.  Of all divers, thou hast dived

the deepest.  That head upon which the upper sun now gleams,

has moved amid this world's foundations.  Where unrecorded

names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot;

where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted

with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful

water-land, there was thy most familiar home.  Thou hast been

where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side,

where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down.

Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship;

heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave;

true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them.

Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from

the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight

of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--

while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would

have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.

O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make

an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the

frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist

in a delirious throb.



As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power

of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him;

as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced

as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us;

our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest,

and striving to steer through their complicated channels and straits,

knowing not at what moment it may be locked in and crushed.



But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering

off from this monster directly across our route in advance;

now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead,

while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand,

pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts,

for there was no time to make long ones.  Nor were the oarsmen

quite idle, though their wonted duty was now altogether dispensed with.

They chiefly attended to the shouting part of the business.

"Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one, to a great dromedary that of

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

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,

must have contained at least two or three square miles.

At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might

be deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low boat

that seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon.

I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and

calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold;

and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them

from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly,

being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent

and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales--

now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake--

evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still

becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at.

Like household dogs they came snuffling round us,

right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost

seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.

No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within

the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea,

can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.



But the spine.  For that, the best way we can consider it is,

with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end.  No speedy enterprise.

But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.



There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton

are not locked together.  They mostly lie like the great knobbed

blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry.

The largest, a middle one, is in width something less than three feet,

and in depth more than four.  The smallest, where the spine tapers

away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something

like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still

smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins,

the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.

Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things

tapers off at last into simple child's play.

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from

the now tranquil boat.  For that strange spectacle observable in all

sperm whales dying--the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring--

that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab

conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.



"He turns and turns him to it,--how slowly, but how steadfastly,

his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions.

He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!--

Oh that these too-favoring eyes should see these too-favoring sights.

Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;

in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks

furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still

rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon

the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith,

but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it

heads some other way.



"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded

thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;

thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

thy vow; say'st all of us are Ahabs.  Great God forbid!--

But is there no other way? no lawful way?--Make him a prisoner

to be taken home?  What! hope to wrest this old man's living

power from his own living hands?  Only a fool would try it.

Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes

and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor;

he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then.  I could

not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings;

all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me

on the long intolerable voyage.  What, then, remains?  The land

is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest.

I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a

whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--

Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be

murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?--

And would I be a murderer, then, if"--and slowly, stealthily,

and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end

against the door.



"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way.

A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--

t/files/moby11.txt  view on Meta::CPAN

darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him,

as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused,

as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that

monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe,

which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated;

frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his

naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.

As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him;

the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped,

as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft,

bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast

again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.

These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at

the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold

fast to the oars to lash them across.



At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first

to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head,

a movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his

hand had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite.

But only slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over