view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

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

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,

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

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;