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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.



"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables;

and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish,

all careening, glides to sea.  That ship, my friends,

was the first of recorded smugglers! the contraband

was Jonah.  But the sea rebels; he will not bear the wicked burden.

A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break.

But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;

when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard;

when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every

plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head;

in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep.

He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers,

and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale,

which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.

Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--

a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep.

But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear,

'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!'  Startled from his lethargy

by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling

to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea.

But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping

over the bulwarks.  Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,

and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft,

till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.

And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from

the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah

sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat

downward again towards the tormented deep.

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And yet I also felt a strange awe of him; but that sort of awe,

which I cannot at all describe, was not exactly awe; I do not

know what it was.  But I felt it; and it did not disincline

me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed like

mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then.

However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions,

so that for the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.







CHAPTER 17



The Ramadan





As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue

all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall;

for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious

obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart

to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool;

or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with

a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets,

bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely

on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented

in his name.



I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable

in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior

to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy

conceits on these subjects.  There was Queequeg, now, certainly

entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--

but what of that?  Queequeg thought he knew what he was about,

I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest.

All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say:

and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--

for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head,

and sadly need mending.



Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and

rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door;

but no answer.  I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside.

"Queequeg," said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent.

"I say, Queequeg! why don't you speak?  It's I--Ishmael."  But all

remained still as before.  I began to grow alarmed.  I had allowed him

such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit.

I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner

of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one.

I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall,

but nothing more.  I was surprised to behold resting against the wall

the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening

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

something to pry open the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a stroke;

depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs

again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and

vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.



"What's the matter with you, young man?"



"Get the axe!  For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one,

while I pry it open!"



"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down

the vinegar-cruet, so as to have one hand free; "look here;

are you talking about prying open any of my doors?"--

and with that she seized my arm.  "What's the matter with you?

What's the matter with you, shipmate?"



In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand

the whole case.  Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet

to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant;

then exclaimed--"No! I haven't seen it since I put it there."

Running to a little closet under the landing of the stairs, she glanced

in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's harpoon was missing.

"He's killed himself," she cried.  "It's unfort'nate Stiggs done

over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor mother!--

it will be the ruin of my house.  Has the poor lad a sister?

Where's that girl?--there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter,

and tell him to paint me a sign, with--"no suicides permitted here,

and no smoking in the parlor;"--might as well kill both

birds at once.  Kill?  The Lord be merciful to his ghost!

What's that noise there?  You, young man, avast there!"



And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force

open the door.



"I won't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled.

Go for the locksmith, there's one about a mile from here.  But avast!"

putting her hand in her side pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess;

let's see."  And with that, she turned it in the lock; but alas!

Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.



"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry

a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me,

again vowing I should not break down her premises; but I tore

from her, and with a sudden bodily rush dashed myself full

against the mark.



With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob

slamming against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling;

and there, good heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool

and self-collected; right in the middle of the room;

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said I to Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise,

I guess; come on!"



"Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming

close behind us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then

insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a little,

in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me.

It was Elijah.



"Going aboard?"



"Hands off, will you," said I.



"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"



"Aint going aboard, then?"



"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours?

Do you know, Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"



"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and wonderingly

looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances.



"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing.

We are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer

not to be detained."



"Ye be, be ye?  Coming back afore breakfast?"



"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."



"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed

a few paces.



"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."



But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand

on my shoulder, said--"Did ye see anything looking like men

going towards that ship a while ago?"



Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes, I

thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure."



"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah.  "Morning to ye."



Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us;

and touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find

'em now, will ye?



"Find who?"



"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;

hence I would have thought myself to have been optically deceived in

that matter, were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question.

But I beat the thing down; and again marking the sleeper,

jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we had best sit up

with the body; telling him to establish himself accordingly.

He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it

was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there.



"Gracious!  Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.



"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?"

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you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial.  But presently,

catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck,

and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,"

disappears into the cabin.



When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck,

the first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated,

then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along

the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some

touch of pleasantness, "Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle.

The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly

shaking the main brace, to see whether it will be all right with that

important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with a rapid

"Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows after his predecessors.



But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,

seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all

sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off

his shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe

right over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous sleight,

pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down

rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,

reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music.

But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses,

ships a new face altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little

Flask enters King Ahab's presence, in the character of Abjectus,

or the Slave.



It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense

artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck

some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly

and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one,

let those very officers the next moment go down to their

customary dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway

their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him,

as he sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous,

sometimes most comical.  Wherefore this difference?  A problem?

Perhaps not.  To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon;

and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,

therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur.

But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides

over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's

unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time;

that man's royalty of state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar

was not the greatest.  Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted

what it is to be Caesar.  It is a witchery of social czarship

which there is no withstanding.  Now, if to this consideration

you super-add the official supremacy of a ship-master, then,

by inference, you will derive the cause of that peculiarity

of sea-life just mentioned.



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

the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family party.

His were the shin-bones of the saline beef; his would have been

the drumsticks.  For Flask to have presumed to help himself,

this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree.

Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would

he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world;

nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him.  And had Flask

helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it.

Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter.

Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him,

on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether

he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters,

butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern;

however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!



Another thing.  Flask was the last person down at the dinner,

and Flask is the first man up.  Consider!  For hereby Flask's

dinner was badly jammed in point of time.  Starbuck and Stubb

both had the start of him; and yet they also have the privilege

of lounging in the rear.  If Stubb even, who is but a peg higher

than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and soon shows

symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself,

he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day; for it

is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.

Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private,

that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer,

from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise

than hungry, more or less.  For what he ate did not so much relieve

his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.  Peace and satisfaction,

thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach.

I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned

beef in the fore-castle, as I used to when I was before the mast.

There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:

there's the insanity of life!  Besides, if it were so that

any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask

in Flask's official capacity, all that sailor had to do,

in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinnertime,

and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light, sitting

silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.



Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first

table in the Pequod's cabin.  After their departure, taking place

in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared,

or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward.

And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being

its residuary legatees.  They made a sort of temporary servants'

hall of the high and mighty cabin.



In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint

and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table,

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a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy

sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this

whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.



"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,

and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;

"Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?"

Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me

to understand that such things did often happen.



"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his

oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I

think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met,

our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent.

I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail

set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"



"Certain.  I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale

off Cape Horn."



"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing

close by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not.

Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery,

Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself

back-foremost into death's jaws?"



"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask.  "Yes, that's the law.

I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale

face foremost.  Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint

for squint, mind that!"



Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate

statement of the entire case.  Considering, therefore, that squalls

and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep,

were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that

at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I

must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat--

oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness

upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings;

considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat

was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale

almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck,

notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery;

considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat;

and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated,

touching the White Whale:  taking all things together, I say,

I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will.

"Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer,

executor, and legatee."



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.







CHAPTER 50



Ahab's Boat and Crew.  Fedallah





"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb;

"if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a boat,

unless maybe to stop the plug-hole with my timber toe.

Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"



"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account,"

said Flask.  "If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be

a different thing.  That would disable him; but he has one knee,

and good part of the other left, you know."



"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."





Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether,

considering the paramount importance of his life to the

success of the voyage, it is right for a whaling captain

to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase.

So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes,

whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into

the thickest of the fight.



But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect.

Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight

in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales

is always under great and extraordinary difficulties;

that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril;

under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter

a whale-boat in the hunt?  As a general thing, the joint-owners

of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.



Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think

little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless

vicissitudes of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene

of action and giving his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab

to have a boat actually apportioned to him as a regular

headsman in the hunt--above all for Captain Ahab to be supplied

with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew

that such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners

of the Pequod.  Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew

from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.

Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching

all that matter.  Until Cabaco's published discovery,

the sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when,

after being a little while out of port, all hands had concluded

the customary business of fitting the whaleboats for service;

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but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed

so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not

well withhold the rest.  Nevertheless, so potent an influence did

this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full

knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so,

were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among

themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast.

Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story

as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair

I now proceed to put on lasting record.





*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,

still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.





For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated

it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,

smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.  Of those

fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer

terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put,

and which are duly answered at the time.



"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about

rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,

was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from

the eaves of this good Golden Inn.  She was somewhere to the northward of

the Line.  One morning upon handling the pumps according to daily usage,

it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common.

They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen.  But the captain,

having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited

him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit them,

and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed,

they could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was

possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings,

the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no good

luck came; more days went by and not only was the leak yet undiscovered,

but it sensibly increased.  So much so, that now taking some alarm,

the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among

the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.



"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest

chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder

by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically

relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily

keep the ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her.

In truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very

prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect

safety at her port without the occurrence of the least fatality,

had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate,

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,

dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon

by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw;

they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals,

they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted

faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues

are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt

pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies;

those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken

creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors;

they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as

Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship,

the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe;

they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful

as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,

for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned

full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born,

and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.

And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him

down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea;

though in after life he had long followed our austere

Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite

as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman,

fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives. Yet

was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits;

and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed,

might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common

decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave's right;

thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile.

At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed

and made mad, and Steelkilt--but, gentlemen, you shall hear.



"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her prow

for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again increasing,

but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps every day.

You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our Atlantic,

for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole way

across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of the deck

happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability would be that

he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on account of all

hands gently subsiding to the bottom.  Nor in the solitary and savage

seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether unusual

for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in full chorus even

for a voyage of considerable length! that is, if it lie along a tolerably

accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them.

It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part

of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her captain begins

to feel a little anxious.



"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak

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

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man

to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.

Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois.  I myself

am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals;

and ready at any moment to rebel against him.



Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in

his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry.

An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full

multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy

of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.  For, with but a bit

of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy

of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady

years of steady application.



As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage.

With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single

shark's tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit

of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed

in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield;

and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints

of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.



Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark

slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met

with in the forecastles of American whalers.  Some of them

are done with much accuracy.



At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass

whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door.

When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best.

But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays.

On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron

whales placed there for weathercocks; but they are so elevated,

and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled

with "Hands off!" you cannot examine them closely enough to decide

upon their merit.



In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken

cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain,

you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan

partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them

in a surf of green surges.



Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is

continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there

from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses

of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges.

But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights;

and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again,

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!







CHAPTER 58



Brit





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

of this remarkable meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast

drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes,

where the Right Whale is often chased.





But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at

all reminded one of mowers.  Seen from the mast-heads, especially

when they paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black

forms looked more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else.

And as in the great hunting countries of India, the stranger

at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains recumbent

elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare,

blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him, who for

the first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea.

And even when recognized at last, their immense magnitude renders

it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth

can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort of life

that lives in a dog or a horse.



Indeed.  in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures

of the deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore.

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CHAPTER 64



Stubb's Supper







Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship.

It was a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced

the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod.  And now,

as we eighteen men with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred

and eighty thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour

upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the sea; and it seemed

hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals; good evidence

was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved.

For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call it,

in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw

a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour;

but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along, as if laden

with piglead in bulk.



Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's

main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw

Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks.

Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued

the usual orders for securing it for the night, and then

handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin,

and did not come forward again until morning.



Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab

had evinced his customary activity, to call it so;

yet now that the creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction,

or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight

of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain;

and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship,

all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object.

Very soon you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks,

that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep;

for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust

rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links,

the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored.

Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows,

the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel's,

and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured

the spars and rigging aloft, the two--ship and whale,

seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines

while the other remains standing.*





*A little item may as well be related here.  The strongest and most

reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside,

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.

Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond

of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.



"A steak, a steak, ere I sleep!  You, Daggoo! overboard you go,

and cut me one from his small!"



Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not,

as a general thing, and according to the great military maxim,

make the enemy defray the current expenses of the war (at least

before realizing the proceeds of the voyage), yet now and then

you find some of these Nantucketers who have a genuine relish

for that particular part of the Sperm Whale designated by Stubb;

comprising the tapering extremity of the body.



About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two

lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti

supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard.

Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night.

Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands

of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted

on its fatness.  The few sleepers below in their bunks were often

startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull,

within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts.  Peering over the side you

could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen,

black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out

huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head.

This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous.

How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge

out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal

problem of all things.  The mark they thus leave on the whale,

may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking

for a screw.



Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight,

sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks,

like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved,

ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though,

while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally

carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded

and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths,

are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat;

and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down,

it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say,

a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though

sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships

crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be

handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave

to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances

might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions,

when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast;

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

Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;

on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that

very place, is the thickest part of him.  Remember, also, that the surgeon

must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him

and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling,

and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea.  Bear in mind, too, that under

these untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh;

and in that subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single

peep into the ever-contracting gash thus made, he must skilfully

steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide

the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion into the skull.

Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten

minutes to behead a sperm whale?



When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there

by a cable till the body is stripped.  That done, if it belong

to a small whale it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately

disposed of.  But, with a full grown leviathan this is impossible;

for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one third of his

entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that,

even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing

as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales.



The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head

was hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea,

so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element.

And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it,

by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head,

and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over

the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's

waist like the giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.



When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen

went below to their dinner.  Silence reigned over the before

tumultuous but now deserted deck.  An intense copper calm,

like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding

its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.



A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone

from his cabin.  Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused

to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he took

Stubb's long spade still remaining there after the whale's decapitation

and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass,

placed its other end crutchwise under one arm, and so stood leaning

over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.



It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst

of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert.

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab,

"which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there

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!"



"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.



"Aye?  Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting

himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow.

"That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert

a better man.--Where away?"



"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her

breeze to us!



"Better and better, man.  Would now St. Paul would come

along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze!

O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your

linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter,

but has its cunning duplicate in mind."







CHAPTER 71



The Jeroboam's Story







Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster

than the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.



By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned

mast-heads proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far

to windward, and shooting by, apparently making a passage

to some other ground, the Pequod could not hope to reach her.

So the signal was set to see what response would be made.



Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines,

the ships of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal;

all which signals being collected in a book with the names

of the respective vessels attached, every captain is provided

with it.  Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise

each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distance,

and with no small facility.



The Pequod's signal was at last responded to by the stranger's

setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam

of Nantucket.  Squaring her yards, she bore down,

ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat;

it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged

by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain,

the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern

in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary.

It turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board,

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expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither

and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed

their distraction of panic.  This was still more strangely evinced

by those of their number, who, completely paralysed as it were,

helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the sea.

Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep,

pursued over the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not

possibly have evinced such excessive dismay.  But this occasional

timidity is characteristic of almost all herding creatures.

Though banding together in tens of thousands, the lion-maned

buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman.

Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold

of a theatre's pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire,

rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming,

and remorselessly dashing each other to death.  Best, therefore,

withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us,

for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not

infinitely outdone by the madness of men.





* To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively--

to confound with fright.  It is an old Saxon word.

It occurs once in Shakespeare:--



The wrathful skies Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make

them keep their caves.



To common language, the word is now completely obsolete.

When the polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is

apt to set it down as one of the whaleman's self-derived savageries.

Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort,

which emigrated to New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old

English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth.  Thus, some of

the best and furthest-descended English words--the etymological Howards

and Percys--are now democratised, nay, plebeianised--so to speak--

in the New World.





Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,

yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither

advanced nor retreated, but collectively remained in one place.

As is customary in those cases, the boats at once separated,

each making for some one lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal.

In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon was flung;

the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then

running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart

of the herd.  Though such a movement on the part of the whale

struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented;

and indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it

present one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.

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

a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant threatened

to swamp us.  "Hard down with your tail, there!" cried a second

to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling

himself with his own fan-like extremity.



All whale-boats carry certain curious contrivances,

originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs.

Two thick squares of wood of equal size are stoutly

clenched together, so that they cross each other's grain at

right angles; a line of considerable length is then attached

to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line

being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon.

It is chiefly among gallied whales that this drugg is used.

For then, more whales are close round you than you can

possibly chase at one time.  But sperm whales are not every

day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can.

And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them,

so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure.  Hence it is,

that at times like these the drug, comes into requisition.

Our boat was furnished with three of them.  The first and second were

successfully darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off,

fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg.

They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball.

But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard

the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat,

and in an instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the

oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from under him.

On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we

stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped

the leaks for the time.



It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons,

were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way

greatly diminished; moreover, that as we went still further

and further from the circumference of commotion, the direful

disorders seemed waning.  So that when at last the jerking

harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways vanished;

then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided

between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if

from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake.

Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales,

were heard but not felt.  In this central expanse the sea

presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek,

produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale

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,

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.

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

his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position it

had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head,

and all ready for the final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a

Tartar's bow.  The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes,

still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's

ears newly arrived from foreign parts.



"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale;

"him fast! him fast!--Who line him!  Who struck?--Two whale;

one big, one little!"



"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.



"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.



As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled

out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding,

he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line

buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now,

Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan,

by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam.

Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line,

with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one,

so that the cub is thereby trapped.  Some of the subtlest secrets

of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond.

We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep.*





*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan,

but unlike most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons;

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

and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter,

you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your arm,

as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion

of the general structure we are about to view.



In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured

seventy-two feet:  so that when fully invested and extended in life,

he must have been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton

loses about one fifth in length compared with the living body.

Of this seventy-two feet, his skull and jaw comprised some

twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone.

Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a third

of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once

enclosed his vitals.



To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,

extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled

the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some

twenty of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise,

for the time, but a long, disconnected timber.



The ribs were ten on a side.  The first, to begin from the neck,

was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each

successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth,

or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and

some inches.  From that part, the remaining ribs diminished,

till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches.

In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence

to their length.  The middle ribs were the most arched.

In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay

footpath bridges over small streams.



In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with

the circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton

of the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form.

The largest of the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones,

occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest

in depth.  Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this

particular whale must have been at least sixteen feet; whereas,

the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight feet.

So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion

of the living magnitude of that part.  Besides, for some way,

where I now saw but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped

round with tons of added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels.

Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints;

and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes,

an utter blank!



How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man

to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring

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.







CHAPTER 104



The Fossil Whale





From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme

whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate.  Would you,

you could not compress him.  By good rights he should only be

treated of in imperial folio.  Not to tell over again his furlongs

from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist;

only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines,

where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away

in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.



Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves

me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise;

not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood,

and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels.

Having already described him in most of his present habitatory

and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in

an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view.

Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--

such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.

But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered.  Fain am I to stagger

to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary.

And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult

one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge

quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose;

because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted

him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.



One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,

though it may seem but an ordinary one.  How, then, with me,

writing of this Leviathan?  Unconsciously my chirography

expands into placard capitals.  Give me a condor's quill!

Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!  Friends, hold my arms!

For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan,

they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching

comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle

of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men,

and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving

panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe,

not excluding its suburbs.  Such, and so magnifying, is the

virtue of a large and liberal theme!  We expand to its bulk.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,

though many there be who have tried it.

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

"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

fight were done; and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky,

sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and

such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air,

that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys

of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor,

had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.



Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned

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

wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm.

Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone

round again, without a lesson to me.



"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power!  Oh, high aspiring,

rainbowed jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain!

In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon

all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again.

Yet dost thou darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.

All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed

by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.



"Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild

fowl finds his only rest.  Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea;

though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"







CHAPTER 117



The Whale Watch





The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart;

one, far to windward; one less distant, to leeward; one ahead;

one astern.  These last three were brought alongside ere nightfall;

but the windward one could not be reached till morning;

and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all night;

and that boat was Ahab's.



The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole;

and the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare

upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves,

which gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.



Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching

in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round

the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails.

A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven

ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.



Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee;

and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men

in a flooded world.  "I have dreamed it again," said he.



"Of the hearses?  Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse

nor coffin can be thine?"



"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"

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In compliance with the standing order of his commander--

to report immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours,

any decided change in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had

no sooner trimmed the yards to the breeze--however reluctantly

and gloomily,--than he mechanically went below to apprise

Captain Ahab of the circumstance.



Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it

a moment.  The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--

was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old

man's bolted door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted,

in place of upper panels.  The isolated subterraneousness

of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there,

though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements.

The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed,

as they stood upright against the forward bulkhead.

Starbuck was an honest, upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart,

at that instant when he saw the muskets, there strangely

evolved an evil thought; but so blent with its neutral or good

accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for itself.



"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very

musket that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock;

let me touch it--lift it.  Strange, that I, who have

handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake

so now.  Loaded?  I must see.  Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;--

that's not good.  Best spill it?--wait.  I'll cure myself of this.

I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come to report

a fair wind to him.  But how fair?  Fair for death and doom,--

that's fair for Moby Dick.  It's a fair wind that's only fair for

that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the very one;

this one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very

thing I handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew.

Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale?

Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same

perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning

of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not

swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed

old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down

to doom with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer

of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm;

and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will,

if Ahab have his way.  If, then, he were this instant--

put aside, that crime would not be his.  Ha! is he muttering

in his sleep?  Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping.

Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again.

I can't withstand thee, then, old man.  Not reasoning;

not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to;

all this thou scornest.  Flat obedience to thy own flat commands,

this is all thou breathest.  Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd

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.--

Oh Mary!  Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death,

old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day

week may sink, with all the crew!  Great God, where art Thou?  Shall I?

shall I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main

topsails are reefed and set! she heads her course."



"Stern all!  Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"



Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's

tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb

dream to speak.



The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;

Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel, but turning from the door,

he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.



"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him,

and tell him.  I must see to the deck here.  Thou know'st

what to say."







CHAPTER 124



The Needle





Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow

billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's

gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread.

The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air

seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before

the wind.  Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible

sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks.  Emblazonings, as of

crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything.

The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps

with light and heat.



Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every

time the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit,

he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced ahead;

and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind,

and saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays

were blending with his undeviating wake.



"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of

the sun.  Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!

Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"

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"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed

beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing

vacancies to leeward.  It was only an instant; for again his eyes

seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle.

The breeze now freshened; the sea began to swell.



"The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego.



In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds

were now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few

yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round

and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was

keener than man's; Ahab could discover no sign in the sea.

But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly

saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful

celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned,

and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white,

glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.

It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,

shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea.

The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored

marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar,

Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous apparition.

Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went forward

to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew

to grasp their oars and stand by to stern.



Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis,

its bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head

while yet under water.  But as if perceiving this stratagem,

Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him,

sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant,

shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.



Through and through; through every plank and each rib,

it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back,

in the manner of a biting shark slowly and feelingly taking

its bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow,

scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air, and one

of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish pearl-white

of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head,

and reached higher than that.  In this attitude the White Whale

now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse.

With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms;

but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads

to gain the uttermost stern.



And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out,

as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way;

and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be

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

sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw;

spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell

flat-faced upon the sea.



Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a

little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up

and down in the billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his

whole spindled body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--

some twenty or more feet out of the water--the now rising swells,

with all their confluent waves, dazzlingly broke against it;

vindictively tossing their shivered spray still higher into

the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel billows only

recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap

its summit with their scud.





*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale.  It receives its designation

(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down

poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling,

previously described.  By this motion the whale must best and most

comprehensively view whatever objects may be encircling him.





But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly

round and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his

vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more

deadly assault.  The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him,

as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's

elephants in the book of Maccabees.  Meanwhile Ahab half smothered

in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple

to swim,--though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart

of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen,

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