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sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every

shore the round globe over.



There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted

by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea;

by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.  But while

this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch;

slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.

Over Descartian vortices you hover.  And perhaps, at midday,

in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through

that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.

Heed it well, ye Pantheists!







CHAPTER 36



The Quarter-Deck





(Enter Ahab:  Then, all)

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Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still

held on her way north-eastward towards the island of Java;

a gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding

serenity her three tall tapering masts mildly waved

to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a plain.

And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,

alluring jet would be seen.



But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost

preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any

stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters

seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secrecy;

when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on;

in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre

was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.



In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher

and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed

before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills.

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Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh.

They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying

stranger can hardly keep his hands off.



But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish,

is his exceeding richness.  He is the great prize ox of the sea,

too fat to be delicately good.  Look at his hump, which would

be as fine eating as the buffalo's (which is esteemed

a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat.

But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is;

like the transparent, half jellied, white meat of a cocoanut

in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply

a substitute for butter.  Nevertheless, many whalemen

have a method of absorbing it into some other substance,

and then partaking of it.  In the long try watches of the night

it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their ship-biscuit

into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile.

Many a good supper have I thus made.



In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.

The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,

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more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve

and fifteen inches in thickness.



Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's

skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point

of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you

cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body

but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal,

if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin?  True, from the

unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an

infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest

shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin;

that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens,

but becomes rather hard and brittle.  I have several such dried bits,

which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I

said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes

pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence.

At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their

own spectacles, as you may say.  But what I am driving at here is this.

That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit,

invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded

as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it

were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous

whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child.

But no more of this.

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seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.

Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs

with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time

refrained from darting it.



But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and

still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side.

For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms

of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their

enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.  The lake, as I

have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent;

and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze

away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time;

and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually

feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the young

of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us,

as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.

Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.

One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed

hardly a day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length,

and some six feet in girth.  He was a little frisky; though as yet

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Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an

article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin

was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject.

For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,

the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself,

a problem to the learned.  Though the word ambergris is but the French

compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct.

For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some

far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea.

Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance,

used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris

is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used

in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.

The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same

purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome.  Some wine

merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.



Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should

regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels

of a sick whale!  Yet so it is.  By some, ambergris is supposed to be

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CHAPTER 132



The Symphony





It was a clear steel-blue day.  The firmaments of air and sea were

hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air

was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust

and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,

as Samson's chest in his sleep.



Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,

unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;

but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue,

rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were

the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.



But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades

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in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.

Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant

like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,

leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble

trunk of the whale.



"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to

the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,

Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell

from heaven.  The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad

white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;

as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more

flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates'

boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,

but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.



While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks;

and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed

one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment

a quick cry went up.  Lashed round and round to the fish's back;

pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night,