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CHAPTER 128

The Pequod Meets The Rachel.


Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly
down upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men.  At
the time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as
the broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful
sails all fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all
life fled from the smitten hull.

"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman.  But ere
her commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere
he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard.

"Hast seen the White Whale?"

"Aye, yesterday.  Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?"

Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected
question; and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the
stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen
descending her side.  A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon
clinched the Pequod's main-chains, and he sprang to the deck.
Immediately he was recognised by Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew.  But
no formal salutation was exchanged.

"Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely
advancing.  "How was it?"

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous,
while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal of
whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and
while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and
head of Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very
far to leeward; whereupon, the fourth rigged boat--a reserved
one--had been instantly lowered in chase.  After a keen sail before
the wind, this fourth boat--the swiftest keeled of all--seemed to
have succeeded in fastening--at least, as well as the man at the
mast-head could tell anything about it.  In the distance he saw the
diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam of bubbling white
water; and after that nothing more; whence it was concluded that the
stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as
often happens.  There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm,
as yet.  The recall signals were placed in the rigging; darkness came
on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward boats--ere going
in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite direction--the
ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to its fate
till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance from
it.  But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded
all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing boat; kindling a
fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the
look-out.  But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance
to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though
she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and
not finding anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered
her boats; and though she had thus continued doing till daylight;
yet not the least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.

The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal
his object in boarding the Pequod.  He desired that ship to unite
with his own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five
miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as
it were.

"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some
one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap,
his watch--he's so cursed anxious to get it back.  Who ever heard of
two pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the
height of the whaling season?  See, Flask, only see how pale he
looks--pale in the very buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the
coat--it must have been the--"

"My boy, my own boy is among them.  For God's sake--I beg, I
conjure"--here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far
had but icily received his petition.  "For eight-and-forty hours let
me charter your ship--I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for
it--if there be no other way--for eight-and-forty hours only--only
that--you must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."

"His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost!  I take back the
coat and watch--what says Ahab?  We must save that boy."

"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night," said the old Manx
sailor standing behind them; "I heard; all of ye heard their
spirits."

Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the
Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was
one of the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's
crew; but among the number of the other boat's crews, at the same
time, but on the other hand, separated from the ship during the dark
vicissitudes of the chase, there had been still another son; as that
for a time, the wretched father was plunged to the bottom of the
cruellest perplexity; which was only solved for him by his chief
mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whale-ship
in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but
divided boats, always to pick up the majority first.  But the
captain, for some unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from
mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did
he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad, but twelve years
old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving hardihood of a
Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to initiate him in
the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially the destiny
of all his race.  Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket
captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a
protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their
own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be
unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely
partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.

Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of
Ahab; and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but
without the least quivering of his own.

"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me.  Do to
me as you would have me do to you in the like case.  For YOU too have
a boy, Captain Ahab--though but a child, and nestling safely at home
now--a child of your old age too--Yes, yes, you relent; I see
it--run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards."

"Avast," cried Ahab--"touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that
prolongingly moulded every word--"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
Even now I lose time.  Good-bye, good-bye.  God bless ye, man, and
may I forgive myself, but I must go.  Mr. Starbuck, look at the
binnacle watch, and in three minutes from this present instant warn
off all strangers: then brace forward again, and let the ship sail
as before."

Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and
utter rejection of his so earnest suit.  But starting from his
enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than
stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship.

Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange
vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every
dark spot, however small, on the sea.  This way and that her yards
were swung round; starboard and larboard, she continued to tack;
now she beat against a head sea; and again it pushed her before it;
while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with
men, as three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among
the boughs.

But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly
saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without
comfort.  She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were
not.



CHAPTER 129

The Cabin.


(AHAB MOVING TO GO ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE HAND TO FOLLOW.)

Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now.  The hour is
coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have
thee by him.  There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too
curing to my malady.  Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady
becomes my most desired health.  Do thou abide below here, where they
shall serve thee, as if thou wert the captain.  Aye, lad, thou shalt
sit here in my own screwed chair; another screw to it, thou must be."

"No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I
remain a part of ye."

"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
fidelity of man!--and a black! and crazy!--but methinks
like-cures-like applies to him too; he grows so sane again."

"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living
skin.  But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him.  Sir, I
must go with ye."

"If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in
him.  I tell thee no; it cannot be."

"Oh good master, master, master!

"Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and
still know that I am there.  And now I quit thee.  Thy hand!--Met!
True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre.  So: God for
ever bless thee; and if it come to that,--God for ever save thee, let
what will befall."

(AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS ONE STEP FORWARD.)


"Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,--but I'm alone.
Now were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he's missing.
Pip!  Pip!  Ding, dong, ding!  Who's seen Pip?  He must be up here;
let's try the door.  What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet
there's no opening it.  It must be the spell; he told me to stay
here: Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine.  Here, then, I'll
seat me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel
and her three masts before me.  Here, our old sailors say, in their
black seventy-fours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord
it over rows of captains and lieutenants.  Ha! what's this? epaulets!
epaulets! the epaulets all come crowding!  Pass round the decanters;
glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!  What an odd feeling, now, when a
black boy's host to white men with gold lace upon their
coats!--Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?--a little negro lad, five
feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly!  Jumped from a whale-boat
once;--seen him?  No!  Well then, fill up again, captains, and let's
drink shame upon all cowards!  I name no names.  Shame upon them!
Put one foot upon the table.  Shame upon all cowards.--Hist! above
there, I hear ivory--Oh, master! master!  I am indeed down-hearted
when you walk over me.  But here I'll stay, though this stern
strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me."



CHAPTER 130

The Hat.


And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to
have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a
vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with
various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac
indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether
sinning or sinned against; now it was that there lurked a something
in the old man's eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble
souls to see.  As the unsetting polar star, which through the
livelong, arctic, six months' night sustains its piercing, steady,
central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the
constant midnight of the gloomy crew.  It domineered above them so,
that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain to hide
beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf.

In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
vanished.  Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more
strove to check one.  Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed
ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped
mortar of Ahab's iron soul.  Like machines, they dumbly moved about
the deck, ever conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours;
when he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have
seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable
Parsee's glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at
times affected it.  Such an added, gliding strangeness began to
invest the thin Fedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him;
that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain, as it seemed,
whether indeed he were a mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow
cast upon the deck by some unseen being's body.  And that shadow was
always hovering there.  For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever
certainly been known to slumber, or go below.  He would stand still
for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did
plainly say--We two watchmen never rest.

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon
the deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his
pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating
limits,--the main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing
in the cabin-scuttle,--his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if
to step; his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however
motionless he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that
he had not swung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching
hat, they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes
were really closed at times; or whether he was still intently
scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttle for a
whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp gathered in
beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat.  The clothes that
the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him; and so,
day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath the
planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.

He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,--breakfast
and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which
darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over,
which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper
verdure.  But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck;
and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without intermission as his
own; yet these two never seemed to speak--one man to the
other--unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made
it necessary.  Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the
twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like
asunder.  If by day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb
men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange.
At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far
parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the
mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the
Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his
abandoned substance.

And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab
seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave.  Still again
both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the
lean shade siding the solid rib.  For be this Parsee what he may, all
rib and keel was solid Ahab.

At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was
heard from aft,--"Man the mast-heads!"--and all through the day,
till after sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at
the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard--"What d'ye
see?--sharp! sharp!"

But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the
monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at
least, of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to
doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the
sight he sought.  But if these suspicions were really his, he
sagaciously refrained from verbally expressing them, however his
actions might seem to hint them.

"I will have the first sight of the whale myself,"--he said.  "Aye!
Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest
of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved
block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of
the downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a
pin for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail.  This done,
with that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked
round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his
glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah;
and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate,
said,--"Take the rope, sir--I give it into thy hands, Starbuck."
Then arranging his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to
hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope
at last; and afterwards stood near it.  And thus, with one hand
clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for
miles and miles,--ahead, astern, this side, and that,--within the
wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.

When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea
is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under
these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in
strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it.
Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various
different relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by
what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of these
ropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings, it
would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with a constant
watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the crew
be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea.  So Ahab's
proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only strange thing
about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who
had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the slightest degree
approaching to decision--one of those too, whose faithfulness on the
look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;--it was strange, that this
was the very man he should select for his watchman; freely giving his
whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's hands.

Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his
head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings.  Then it darted a
thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards,
and went eddying again round his head.

But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have
marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost
the least heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in
almost every sight.

"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab,
though somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air
dividing them.

But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long
hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away
with his prize.

An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to
replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin
would be king of Rome.  But only by the replacing of the cap was that
omen accounted good.  Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk
flew on and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last
disappeared; while from the point of that disappearance, a minute
black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into
the sea.



CHAPTER 131

The Pequod Meets The Delight.


The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most
miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried.  As she drew nigh, all
eyes were fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some
whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine
feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.

Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but
you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the
peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.

"Hast seen the White Whale?"

"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and
with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.

"Hast killed him?"

"The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the
other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose
gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.

"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch,
Ahab held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this
hand I hold his death!  Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning
are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place
behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"

"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--pointing to the
hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
yesterday; but were dead ere night.  Only THAT one I bury; the rest
were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb."  Then
turning to his crew--"Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the
rail, and lift the body; so, then--Oh!  God"--advancing towards the
hammock with uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life--"

"Brace forward!  Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.

But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the
sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea;
not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have
sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.

As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.

"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.
"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us
your taffrail to show us your coffin!"



CHAPTER 132

The Symphony.


It was a clear steel-blue day.  The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air
was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust
and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as
Samson's chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades
and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it
were, that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom.  And at the
girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--most seen
here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly
firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in
the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of
the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's
forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure!  Invisible winged
creatures that frolic all round us!  Sweet childhood of air and sky!
how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe!  But so have I
seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol
around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which
grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side
and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze,
the more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity.  But
the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel,
for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul.  That glad, happy air,
that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother
world, so long cruel--forbidding--now threw affectionate arms round
his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over
one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her
heart to save and to bless.  From beneath his slouched hat Ahab
dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such
wealth as that one wee drop.

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the
side; and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless
sobbing that stole out of the centre of the serenity around.  Careful
not to touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and
stood there.

Ahab turned.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir."

"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky.  On
such a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck my first
whale--a boy-harpooneer of eighteen!  Forty--forty--forty years
ago!--ago!  Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of
privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless
sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty
years to make war on the horrors of the deep!  Aye and yes, Starbuck,
out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore.  When I think
of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the
masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but
small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without--oh,
weariness! heaviness!  Guinea-coast slavery of solitary
command!--when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so
keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon
dry salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!--when
the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and
broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole
oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my
marriage pillow--wife? wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive!
Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and
then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking
brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously,
foamingly chased his prey--more a demon than a man!--aye, aye! what a
forty years' fool--fool--old fool, has old Ahab been!  Why this
strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the
iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?  Behold.
Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one
poor leg should have been snatched from under me?  Here, brush this
old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.  Locks so grey did
never grow but from out some ashes!  But do I look very old, so very,
very old, Starbuck?  I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as
though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since
Paradise.  God!  God!  God!--crack my heart!--stave my
brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have
I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably
old?  Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human
eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze
upon God.  By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the
magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye.  No, no;
stay on board, on board!--lower not when I do; when branded Ahab
gives chase to Moby Dick.  That hazard shall not be thine.  No, no!
not with the far away home I see in that eye!"

"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!
why should any one give chase to that hated fish!  Away with me! let
us fly these deadly waters! let us home!  Wife and child, too, are
Starbuck's--wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,
longing, paternal old age!  Away! let us away!--this instant let me
alter the course!  How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would
we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again!  I think, sir, they
have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."

"They have, they have.  I have seen them--some summer days in the
morning.  About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the boy
vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come
back to dance him again."

"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!  She promised that my boy, every
morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of
his father's sail!  Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for
Nantucket!  Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away!
See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand on the
hill!"

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook,
and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst
not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who, that
lifts this arm?  But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an
errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some
invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one
small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that
thinking, does that living, and not I.  By heaven, man, we are turned
round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the
handspike.  And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this
unsounded sea!  Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase
and fang that flying-fish?  Where do murderers go, man!  Who's to
doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?  But it is a
mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as
if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay
somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are
sleeping among the new-mown hay.  Sleeping?  Aye, toil we how we may,
we all sleep at last on the field.  Sleep?  Aye, and rust amid
greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
swaths--Starbuck!"

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen
away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there.  Fedallah was
motionlessly leaning over the same rail.



CHAPTER 133

The Chase--First Day.


That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man--as his wont at
intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and
went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely,
snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing
nigh to some barbarous isle.  He declared that a whale must be near.
Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by
the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any
mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the
dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as
nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be
slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently
vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea
directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the
pleated watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like
marks of some swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

"Man the mast-heads!  Call all hands!"

Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the
forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps
that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did
they appear with their clothes in their hands.

"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

"Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.

"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"

All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they
were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way
aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between
the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in
the air.  "There she blows!--there she blows!  A hump like a
snow-hill!  It is Moby Dick!"

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
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 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 fowl 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 may'st 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.

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 him for the time.  But struggling out of
it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he
shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him off!"

The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle,
she effectually parted the white whale from his victim.  As he
sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.

Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white
brine caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for
a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one
trodden under foot of herds of elephants.  Far inland, nameless wails
came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the
more abbreviate it.  In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes
condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains
kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives.  And so, such
hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods
decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly
made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless
centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of
inferior souls.

"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on
one bended arm--"is it safe?"

"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing
it.

"Lay it before me;--any missing men?"

"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here
are five men."

"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand.  So, so, I see him!
there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--Hands
off from me!  The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again!  Set the
sail; out oars; the helm!"

It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being
picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the
chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars.  It
was thus now.  But the added power of the boat did not equal the
added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his
every fin; swimming with a velocity which plainly showed, that if
now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an
indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew
endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining
at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief
vicissitude.  The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered
the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase.
Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to
their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having been
previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her side,
and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with
stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the Pequod
bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick.  At the well known,
methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly
announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported
as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the
deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the
allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.--"Whose is the doubloon
now?  D'ye see him?" and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he
commanded them to lift him to his perch.  In this way the day wore
on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the
planks.

As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men
aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to
a still greater breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched
hat, at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been
dropped upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to
shattered stern.  At last he paused before it; and as in an already
over-clouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across,
so over the old man's face there now stole some such added gloom as
this.

Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place
in his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck
exclaimed--"The thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too
keenly, sir; ha! ha!"

"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck?  Man, man!
did I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I
could swear thou wert a poltroon.  Groan nor laugh should be heard
before a wreck."

"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight; an
omen, and an ill one."

"Omen? omen?--the dictionary!  If the gods think to speak outright to
man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
give an old wives' darkling hint.--Begone!  Ye two are the opposite
poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is
Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the
millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!  Cold,
cold--I shiver!--How now?  Aloft there!  D'ye see him?  Sing out for
every spout, though he spout ten times a second!"

The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was
rustling.  Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still
remained unset.

"Can't see the spout now, sir;--too dark"--cried a voice from the
air.

"How heading when last seen?"

"As before, sir,--straight to leeward."

"Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night.  Down royals and
top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck.  We must not run over him
before morning; he's making a passage now, and may heave-to a while.
Helm there! keep her full before the wind!--Aloft! come down!--Mr.
Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned
till morning."--Then advancing towards the doubloon in the
main-mast--"Men, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let
it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye
first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that
man's; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times
its sum shall be divided among all of ye!  Away now!--the deck is
thine, sir!"

And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
rousing himself to see how the night wore on.

}
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