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whale they had so long been pursuing.  Ahab had now gained

his final perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego

standing just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast,

so that the Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel.

From this height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead,

at every roll of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump,

and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air.

To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they

had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.



"And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched

men all around him.



"I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did,

and I cried out," said Tashtego.



"Not the same instant; not the same--no, the doubloon is mine,

Fate reserved the doubloon for me.  I only; none of ye could have

raised the White Whale first.  There she blows! there she blows!--

there she blows!--there she blows!  There again!--there again!"

he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic tones, attuned to the gradual

prolongings of the whale's visible jets.  "He's going to sound!

In stunsails!  Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by three boats.

Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship.  Helm there!

Luff, luff a point!  So; steady, man, steady!  There go flukes!  No, no;

only black water!  All ready the boats there?  Stand by, stand by!

Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,--quick, quicker!" and he slid

through the air to the deck.



"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away

from us; cannot have seen the ship yet."



"Be dumb, man!  Stand by the braces!  Hard down the helm!--brace up!

Shiver her!--shiver her!--So; well that!  Boats, boats!"



Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set--

all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward;

and Ahab heading the onset.  A pale, death-glimmer lit up Fedallah's

sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.



Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;

but only slowly they neared the foe.  As they neared him, the ocean grew

still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a

noon-meadow, so serenely it spread.  At length the breathless hunter came

so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump

was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing,

and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam.

He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting

head beyond.  Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters,

went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical

rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters

interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;

and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side.

But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay

fowls softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight;

and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy,

the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white

whale's back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed

fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish,

silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers

streaming like pennons.



A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness,

invested the gliding whale.  Not the white bull Jupiter swimming

away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns;

his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid;

with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial

bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did

surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.



On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell,

that but once leaving him then flowed so wide away--on each

bright side, the whale shed off enticings.  No wonder there

had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported

and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it;

but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes.

Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all

who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same

way thou mayst have bejuggled and destroyed before.



And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea,

among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture,

Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his

submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.

But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water;

for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch,

like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered

flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded and went

out of sight.  Hoveringly halting, and dipping on the wing,

the white sea-fowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool

that he left.



With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift,

the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.



"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.

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From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;

hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained

in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments;

all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side

to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad

band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed.

Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect,

and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his

forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.

Some fell flat upon their faces.  Like dislodged trucks,

the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks.

Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents

down a flume.



"The ship!  The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;

"its wood could only be American!"



Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel;

but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off

the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time,

he lay quiescent.



"I turn my body from the sun.  What ho, Tashtego!  Let me

hear thy hammer.  Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine;

thou uncracked keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck,

and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed prow,--death--glorious ship! must

ye then perish, and without me?  Am I cut off from the last fond pride

of meanest shipwrecked captains?  Oh, lonely death on lonely life!

Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.

Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows

of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death!

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale;

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee;

for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.  Sink all coffins

and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine,

let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied

to thee, thou damned whale!  Thus, I give up the spear!"



The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward;

with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul.

Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him

round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim,

he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.

Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out

of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea,

disappeared in its depths.



For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned.

"The ship?  Great God, where is the ship?"  Soon they through dim,

bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous

Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed

by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,

the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on

the sea.  And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself,

and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole,

and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex,

carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.



But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over

the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches

of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards

of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings,

over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red

arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act

of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards

from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag,

and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept

its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood;

and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged

savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there;

and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial

beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag

of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink

to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her,

and helmeted herself with it.



Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf;

a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed,

and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five

thousand years ago.





Epilogue



       "AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"

                                            Job.



The drama's done.  Why then here does any one step forth?--

Because one did survive the wreck.





It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was

he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman,

when that bowsman assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on

the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat,

was dropped astern.  So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene,

and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship

reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex.

When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool.

Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like

black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle,

like another Ixion I did revolve.  Till, gaining that vital centre,

the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its

cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force,

the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over,

and floated by my side.  Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost

one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main.

The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on

their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search

after her missing children, only found another orphan.











  ETYMOLOGY



  (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)