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it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin,

hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment,

repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy

of Jonah.  As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son

of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--

never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--

which he found a hard command.  But all the things that God

would have us do are hard for us to do--remember that--

and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.

And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this

disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.



"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further

flouts at God, by seeking to flee from Him.  He thinks

that a ship made by men, will carry him into countries

where God does not reign but only the Captains of this earth.

He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's

bound for Tarshish.  There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded

meaning here.  By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other

city than the modern Cadiz.  That's the opinion of learned men.

And where is Cadiz, shipmates?  Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water,

from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those

ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea.

Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most

easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the Syrian; and Tarshish

or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the westward from that,

just outside the Straits of Gibraltar.  See ye not then, shipmates,

that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God?  Miserable man!

Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched

hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among

the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas.

So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there

been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion

of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.

How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a hat-box, valise,

or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf with

their adieux.  At last, after much dodging search, he finds

the Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo;

and as he steps on board to see its Captain in the cabin,

all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in the goods,

to mark the stranger's evil eye.  Jonah sees this; but in vain

he tries to look all ease and confidence; in vain essays his

wretched smile.  Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners

he can be no innocent.  In their gamesome but still serious way,

one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;"

or, "Joe, do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad,

I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah,

or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom."  Another runs

to read the bill that's stuck against the spile upon the wharf

to which the ship is moored, offering five hundred gold coins

for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a description

of his person.  He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill;

while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,

prepared to lay their hands upon him.  Frighted Jonah trembles.

and summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much

the more a coward.  He will not confess himself suspected;

but that itself is strong suspicion.  So he makes the best of it;

and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is advertised,

they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin.



"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making

out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?'  Oh! how that harmless

question mangles Jonah!  For the instant he almost turns to flee again.

But he rallies.  'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish;

how soon sail ye, sir?'  Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up

to Jonah, though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does

he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance.

'We sail with the next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered,

still intently eyeing him.  'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any

honest man that goes a passenger.'  Ha!  Jonah, that's another stab.

But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent.

'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the passage money how much is that?--

I'll pay now.'  For it is particularly written, shipmates, as if it

were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, 'that he paid

the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail.  And taken with the context,

this is full of meaning.



"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects

crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel

freely and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper,

is stopped at all frontiers.  So Jonah's Captain prepares

to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he judge him openly.

He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented to.

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,

though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with

reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself,

it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung.

The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth

his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far

successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance.

But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him.

The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.

'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, "straight upward,

so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'



"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed,

still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings

of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags

into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns

in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed;

and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him,

as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound,

and there's naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestling in his berth,

Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

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

"Oh; perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way;

won't hurt him face."



"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;

but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off,

Queequeg, you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor.

Get off, Queequeg!  Look, he'll twitch you off soon.

I wonder he don't wake."



Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper,

and lighted his tomahawk pipe.  I sat at the feet.

We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the other.

Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave

me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees

and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally,

were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans;

and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only

to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers

and alcoves.  Besides, it was very convenient on an excursion;

much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into

walking sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant,

and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree,

perhaps in some damp marshy place.



While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk

from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head.



"What's that for, Queequeg?"



"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!



He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe

which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed

his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger.

The strong vapor now completely filling the contracted hole,

it began to tell upon him.  He breathed with a sort of muffledness;

then seemed troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice;

then sat up and rubbed his eyes.



"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"



"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"



"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye?  She sails to-day. The Captain

came aboard last night."



"What Captain?--Ahab?"



"Who but him indeed?"



I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab,

when we heard a noise on deck.



"Holloa!  Starbuck's astir," said the rigger.  "He's a lively chief

mate that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to."

And so saying he went on deck, and we followed.



It was now clear sunrise.  Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes;

the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively engaged;

and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various last

things on board.  Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined

within his cabin.







CHAPTER 22



Merry Christmas





At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers,

and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the

ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last gift--

a nightcap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a spare

Bible for the steward--after all this, the two Captains, Peleg and Bildad,

issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg said:



"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right?

Captain Ahab is all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more

to be got from shore, eh?  Well, call all hands, then.

Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"



"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad,

"but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."



How now!  Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage,

Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on

the quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea,

as well as to all appearances in port.  And, as for Captain Ahab,

no sign of him was yet to be seen; Only, they said he was in the cabin.

But then, the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary

in getting the ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea.

Indeed, as that was not at all his proper business, but the pilot's;

and as he was not yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore,

Captain Ahab stayed below.  And all this seemed natural enough;

especially as in the merchant service many captains never show

themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor,

but remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merry-making with

their shore friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot.



But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg

was now all alive.  He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding,

and not Bildad.



"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered

at the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive aft."



"Strike the tent there!"--was the next order.  As I hinted before,

this whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port;

and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike

the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving

up the anchor.



"Man the capstan!  Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command,

and the crew sprang for the handspikes.



Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied

by the pilot is the forward part of the ship.  And here Bildad,

who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices,

was one of the licensed pilots of the port--he being suspected

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

thought Ahab, is sordidness.  Granting that the White Whale fully

incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round

their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism

in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick,

they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites.

For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times

were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight

for their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries,

picking pockets, and gaining other pious perquisites by the way.

Had they been strictly held to their one final and romantic object--

that final and romantic object, too many would have turned

from in disgust.  I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,

of all hopes of cash--aye, cash.  They may scorn cash now;

but let some months go by, and no perspective promise of it to them,

and then this same quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them,

this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.



Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more

related to Ahab personally.  Having impulsively, it is probable,

and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private

purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that,

in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable

charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal,

his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all

further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command.

From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible

consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground,

Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.

That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain

and heart and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention

to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his

crew to be subjected to.



For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be verbally

developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good degree

continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's voyage;

observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force himself

to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit

of his profession.



Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard

hailing the three mastheads and admonishing them to keep

a bright look-out, and not omit reporting even a porpoise.

This vigilance was not long without reward.







CHAPTER 47



The Mat-Maker





It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging

about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-colored waters.

Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,

for an additional lashing to our boat.  So still and subdued and yet

somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revelry

lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his

own invisible self.



I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat.

As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline

between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle,

and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy

oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon

the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn;

I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over

the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting

dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were

the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically

weaving and weaving away at the Fates.  There lay the fixed

threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning,

unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit

of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own.

This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own

hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into

these unalterable threads.  Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,

indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,

or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;

and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a

corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric;

this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions

both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance--

aye, chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--

all interweavingly working together.  The straight warp

of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course--

its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;

free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;

and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines

of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will,

though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either,

and has the last featuring blow at events.





Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound

so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly,

that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood

gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing.

High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego.

His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out

like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries.

To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being

heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs

perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could

that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence

as from Tashtego the Indian's.



As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly

and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought

him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate,

and by those wild cries announcing their coming.



"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"



"Where-away?"



"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"



Instantly all was commotion.



The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating

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

Explain thyself, Ishmael.  Can you land a full-grown whale on your

deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not.

A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael;

but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;

the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams;

the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making

up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,

dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.



I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far

beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been

blessed with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature.

In a ship I belonged to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once

bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to make sheaths

for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.

Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet

and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents

of that young cub?



And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan

in their gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge

I am indebted to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque,

one of the Arsacides.  For being at Tranque, years ago,

when attached to the trading-ship Dey of Algiers, I was invited

to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque,

at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not very far

distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.



Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo,

being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu,

had brought together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious

of his people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,

chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;

and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders,

the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.



Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an

unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his

head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings

seemed his verdant jet.  When the vast body had at last been stripped

of its fathomdeep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,

then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen,

where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.



The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved

with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull,

the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic

head again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from

a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees,

like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles.



It was a wondrous sight.  The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen;

the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap;

the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom,

with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils

formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures.

All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs,

and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these

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

around him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven

over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure;

but himself a skeleton.  Life folded Death; Death trellised Life;

the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.



Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale,

and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending

from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king

should regard a chapel as an object of vertu.  He laughed.

But more I marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet

of his was genuine.  To and fro I paced before this skeleton--

brushed the vines aside--broke through the ribs--and with a ball

of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding,

shaded colonnades and arbors.  But soon my line was out;

and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.

I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.



Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within

the skeleton.  From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests

perceived me taking the altitude of the final rib, "How now!"

they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure this our god!  That's for us."

"Aye, priests--well, how long do ye make him, then?"  But hereupon

a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and inches;

they cracked each other's sconces with their yard-sticks--

the great skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance,

I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.



These admeasurements I now propose to set before you.

But first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free

to utter any fancied measurements I please.  Because there are

skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy.

There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England,

one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some

fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales.  Likewise, I have

heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire,

they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen

of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States."  Moreover, at a

place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain

Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a

Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown

magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.

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

oaths that he has always been jolly!"







CHAPTER 115



The Pequod Meets The Bachelor





And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down

before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.



It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged

in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches;

and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat

vain-gloriously, sailing round among the widely-separated ships

on the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home.



The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red

bunting at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended,

bottom down; and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long

lower jaw of the last whale they had slain.  Signals, ensigns,

and jacks of all colors were flying from her rigging, on every side.

Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two barrels

of sperm; above which, in her top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender

breakers of the same precious fluid; and nailed to her main truck

was a brazen lamp.



As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with

the most surprising success; all the more wonderful,

for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels

had gone entire months without securing a single fish.

Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make

room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental

casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these

were stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and officers'

state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked

into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head

of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece.

In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched

their chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the

cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it;

that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it;

that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons

and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm,

except the captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved

to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of

his entire satisfaction.



As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod,

the barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle;

and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing

round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like

poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud

roar to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew.

On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were dancing with the

olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the Polynesian Isles;

while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured aloft between

the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering

fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious jig.

Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy at

the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been removed.

You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille,

such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar

were being hurled into the sea.



Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect

on the ship's elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing

drama was full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his

own individual diversion.



And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,

with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's wakes--

one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings

as to things to come--their two captains in themselves impersonated

the whole striking contrast of the scene.



"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander,

lifting a glass and a bottle in the air.



"Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply.



"No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all,"

said the other good-humoredly. "Come aboard!"



"Thou art too damned jolly.  Sail on.  Hast lost any men?"



"Not enough to speak of--two islanders, that's all;--but come aboard,

old hearty, come along.  I'll soon take that black from your brow.

Come along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and homeward-bound."



"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art

a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayest; well, then, call me

an empty ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine.

Forward there!  Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!"



And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze,

the other stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted;

the crew of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances

towards the receding Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding

their gaze for the lively revelry they were in.  And as Ahab,

leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, he took

from his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship

to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together,

for that vial was filled with Nantucket soundings.







CHAPTER 116



The Dying Whale





Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favorites

sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat

of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out.

So seemed it with the Pequod.  For next day after encountering

the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain;

and one of them by Ahab.



It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson

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fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen

in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming

round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings.

Then it darted a thousand feet straight up into the air;

then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his head.



But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon,

Ahab seemed not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any

one else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance;

only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort

of cunning meaning in almost every sight.



"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman,

who being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab,

though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf

of air dividing them.



But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes;

the long hooked bill at his head:  with a scream, the black

hawk darted away with his prize.



An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to

replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin

would be king of Rome.  But only by the replacing of the cap

was that omen accounted good.  Ahab's hat was never restored;

the wild hawk flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow:

and at last disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance,

a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast

height into the sea.







CHAPTER 131



The Pequod Meets The Delight







The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by;

the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship,

most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried.

As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,

called shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck

at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare,

unrigged, or disabled boats.



Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs,

and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat;

but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through

the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.



"Hast seen the White Whale?"



"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail;

and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.



"Hast killed him?"



"The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever will do that,"

answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on

the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy

in sewing together.



"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch,

Ahab held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this

hand I hold his death!  Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning

are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place

behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"



"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--

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!"







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

and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex,

as it were, that distinguished them.



Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this

gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.

And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--

most seen here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust,

the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

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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,

the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him,

the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment

frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.



The harpoon dropped from his hand.



"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee!  I see

thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse

that thou didst promise.  But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word.

Where is the second hearse?  Away, mates, to the ship! those boats

are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;

if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but

offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon.

Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--

Where's the whale? gone down again?"



But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping

with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last

encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick

was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed

the ship,--which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction

to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped.

He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent

upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.



"Oh!  Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now,

the third day, to desist.  See!  Moby Dick seeks thee not.

It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"



Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was

swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas.

And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near

as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he leaned

over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about,

and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.

Glancing upwards he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo,

eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen

were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been

hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.

One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,

he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask,

busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances.

As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;

far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart.

But he rallied.  And now marking that the vane or flag

was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego,

who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag,

and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.



Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the

resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore;

or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him:

whichever was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate,

as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more;

though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one

as before.  And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying

sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat;

and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades

became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea,

at almost every dip.



"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.

Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the sharks' jaw than the yielding water."



"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"



"They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--

he muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale

or on Ahab?--But pull on!  Aye, all alive, now--we near him.

The helm! take the helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the

oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.



At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging

along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely

oblivious of its advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab

was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off

from the whale's spout, curled round his great Monadnock hump;

he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back,

and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted

his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.

As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into

a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled

his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole

in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been

for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung,

Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea.

As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the precise

instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects--

these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two

of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on

a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third

man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.



Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,

instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the

weltering sea.  But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take

new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew

to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark;

the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug,

it snapped in the empty air!



"What breaks in me?  Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!