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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?"

"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
America."

"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:--a hearse and its plumes
floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers.  Ha!
Such a sight we shall not soon see."

"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man."

"And what was that saying about thyself?"

"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."

"And when thou art so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere I
can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?--Was it
not so?  Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot!  I have
here two pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."

"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted
up like fire-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee."

"The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea,"
cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--"Immortal on land and on sea!"

Both were silent again, as one man.  The grey dawn came on, and the
slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead
whale was brought to the ship.



CHAPTER 118

The Quadrant.


The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman
would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners
quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes
centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to
point the ship's prow for the equator.  In good time the order came.
It was hard upon high noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his
high-hoisted boat, was about taking his wonted daily observation of
the sun to determine his latitude.

Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
effulgences.  That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing
focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass.  The sky
looks lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this
nakedness of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of
God's throne.  Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured
glasses, through which to take sight of that solar fire.  So,
swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his
astrological-looking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in
that posture for some moments to catch the precise instant when the
sun should gain its precise meridian.  Meantime while his whole
attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling beneath him on the
ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's, was eyeing the same
sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded their orbs, and
his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness.  At length
the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon his ivory
leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that precise
instant.  Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked up
towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Thou sea-mark! thou high
and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I AM--but canst thou
cast the least hint where I SHALL be?  Or canst thou tell where some
other thing besides me is this moment living?  Where is Moby Dick?
This instant thou must be eyeing him.  These eyes of mine look into
the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye
that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown,
thither side of thee, thou sun!"

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
"Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores,
and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but
what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where
thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that
holds thee: no! not one jot more!  Thou canst not tell where one drop
of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with
thy impotence thou insultest the sun!  Science!  Curse thee, thou
vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to
that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes
are even now scorched with thy light, O sun!  Level by nature to this
earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the
crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament.
Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I
guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship's compass, and the level
deadreckoning, by log and by line; THESE shall conduct me, and show
me my place on the sea.  Aye," lighting from the boat to the deck,
"thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on
high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and
dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--these passed over
the mute, motionless Parsee's face.  Unobserved he rose and glided
away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen
clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing
the deck, shouted out--"To the braces!  Up helm!--square in!"

In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled
upon her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised
upon her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting
on one sufficient steed.

Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's
tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.

"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full
of its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down,
down, to dumbest dust.  Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of
thine, what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"

"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr.
Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal.  Well, well; I heard
Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands
of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.'  And damn me,
Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"



CHAPTER 119

The Candles.


Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.  Skies the most
effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows
tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands.  So, too, it is, that
in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst
of all storms, the Typhoon.  It will sometimes burst from out that
cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.

Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
ahead.  When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled
masts fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of
the tempest had left for its after sport.

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at
every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional
disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb
and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer
lashing of the boats.  But all their pains seemed naught.  Though
lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat
(Ahab's) did not escape.  A great rolling sea, dashing high up
against the reeling ship's high teetering side, stove in the boat's
bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a
sieve.

"Bad work, bad work!  Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
"but the sea will have its way.  Stubb, for one, can't fight it.  You
see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it
leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring!  But
as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck
here.  But never mind; it's all in fun: so the old song
says;"--(SINGS.)

Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A' flourishin' his tail,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin',
That's his flip only foamin';
When he stirs in the spicin',--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin' of this flip,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!


"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold
thy peace."

"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a
coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits.  And I tell you what it is,
Mr. Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to
cut my throat.  And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the
doxology for a wind-up."

"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."

"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else,
never mind how foolish?"

"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing
his hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale
comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby
Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat
there; where is that stove?  In the stern-sheets, man; where he is
wont to stand--his stand-point is stove, man!  Now jump overboard,
and sing away, if thou must!

"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"

"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
question.  "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn
it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home.  Yonder, to
windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see
it lightens up there; but not with the lightning."

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness,
following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at
the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.

"Who's there?"

"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by
elbowed lances of fire.

Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry
off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea
some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the
water.  But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth,
that its end may avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if
kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps,
besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more
or less impeding the vessel's way in the water; because of all this,
the lower parts of a ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard;
but are generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more
readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the
sea, as occasion may require.

"The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished
to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting
flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post.  "Are they overboard? drop them
over, fore and aft.  Quick!"

"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the
weaker side.  Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and
Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges!  Let
them be, sir."

"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck.  "The corpusants! the corpusants!

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each
of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air,
like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.

"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a
swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its
gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing.
"Blast it!"--but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes
caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The
corpusants have mercy on us all!"

To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance
of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate
curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a
seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common
oath when God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His
"Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the
cordage.

While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from
the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
constellation of stars.  Relieved against the ghostly light, the
gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and
seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come.  The parted
mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely
gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by
the preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic
blue flames on his body.

The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once
more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall.
A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against
some one.  It was Stubb.  "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy
cry; it was not the same in the song."

"No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I
hope they will, still.  But do they only have mercy on long
faces?--have they no bowels for a laugh?  And look ye, Mr.
Starbuck--but it's too dark to look.  Hear me, then: I take that
mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are
rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil,
d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like
sap in a tree.  Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti
candles--that's the good promise we saw."

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
to glimmer into sight.  Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and
once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed
redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.

"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the
flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head
bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging
rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number
of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung
pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig.
In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or
running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck;
but all their eyes upcast.

"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab.  "Look up at it; mark it well; the white
flame but lights the way to the White Whale!  Hand me those mainmast
links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against
it; blood against fire!  So."

Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his
foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right
arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and
I now know that thy right worship is defiance.  To neither love nor
reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill;
and all are killed.  No fearless fool now fronts thee.  I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake
life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.  In the
midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.
Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go;
yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and
feels her royal rights.  But war is pain, and hate is woe.  Come in
thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest
navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still
remains indifferent.  Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest
me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."

[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP
LENGTHWISE TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST,
CLOSES HIS EYES, HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]

"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so?  Nor was it
wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links.  Thou canst blind; but
I can then grope.  Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes.  Take
the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands.  I would not take
it.  The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and
ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some
stunning ground.  Oh, oh!  Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.
Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness
leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!  The javelins cease; open
eyes; see, or not?  There burn the flames!  Oh, thou magnanimous! now
I do glory in my genealogy.  But thou art but my fiery father; my
sweet mother, I know not.  Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?
There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.  Thou knowest not how
came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun.  I know that of me, which
thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.  There is some
unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy
eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical.  Through thee,
thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it.  Oh, thou
foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy
incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief.  Here again with
haughty agony, I read my sire.  Leap! leap up, and lick the sky!  I
leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee;
defyingly I worship thee!"

"The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"

Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly
lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his
whale-boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused
the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb
there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire.  As the silent
harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab
by the arm--"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an
ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while
we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a
better voyage than this."

Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
braces--though not a sail was left aloft.  For the moment all the
aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous
cry.  But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and
snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them;
swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a
rope's end.  Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from
the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab
again spoke:--

"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound.  And that
ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow
out the last fear!"  And with one blast of his breath he extinguished
the flame.

As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood
of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render
it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for
thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners
did run from him in a terror of dismay.



CHAPTER 120

The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.

AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM.  STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM.


We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir.  The band is working
loose and the lee lift is half-stranded.  Shall I strike it, sir?"

"Strike nothing; lash it.  If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up
now."

"Sir!--in God's name!--sir?"

"Well."

"The anchors are working, sir.  Shall I get them inboard?"

"Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything.  The wind
rises, but it has not got up to my table-lands yet.  Quick, and see
to it.--By masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper
of some coasting smack.  Send down my main-top-sail yard!  Ho,
gluepots!  Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this
brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud.  Shall I strike
that?  Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest
time.  What a hooroosh aloft there!  I would e'en take it for
sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady.  Oh, take
medicine, take medicine!"



CHAPTER 121

Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks.


STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER
THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING.


No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but
you will never pound into me what you were just now saying.  And how
long ago is it since you said the very contrary?  Didn't you once say
that whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something
extra on its insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with
powder barrels aft and boxes of lucifers forward?  Stop, now; didn't
you say so?"

"Well, suppose I did?  What then?  I've part changed my flesh since
that time, why not my mind?  Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with
powder barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the
lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here?  Why, my little man,
you have pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now.  Shake
yourself; you're Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill
pitchers at your coat collar.  Don't you see, then, that for these
extra risks the Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees?
Here are hydrants, Flask.  But hark, again, and I'll answer ye the
other thing.  First take your leg off from the crown of the anchor
here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen.  What's the mighty
difference between holding a mast's lightning-rod in the storm, and
standing close by a mast that hasn't got any lightning-rod at all in
a storm?  Don't you see, you timber-head, that no harm can come to
the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck?  What are you
talking about, then?  Not one ship in a hundred carries rods, and
Ahab,--aye, man, and all of us,--were in no more danger then, in my
poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing
the seas.  Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would have every
man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running up the
corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather, and
trailing behind like his sash.  Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's
easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can
be sensible."

"I don't know that, Stubb.  You sometimes find it rather hard."

"Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be sensible,
that's a fact.  And I am about drenched with this spray.  Never mind;
catch the turn there, and pass it.  Seems to me we are lashing down
these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again.
Tying these two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands
behind him.  And what big generous hands they are, to be sure.  These
are your iron fists, hey?  What a hold they have, too!  I wonder,
Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings
with an uncommon long cable, though.  There, hammer that knot down,
and we've done.  So; next to touching land, lighting on deck is the
most satisfactory.  I say, just wring out my jacket skirts, will ye?
Thank ye.  They laugh at long-togs so, Flask; but seems to me, a
Long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat.  The
tails tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see.
Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end eave-troughs, Flask.
No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I must mount a
swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so.  Halloa! whew! there goes
my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come from
heaven should be so unmannerly!  This is a nasty night, lad."



CHAPTER 122

Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning.


THE MAIN-TOP-SAIL YARD.--TASHTEGO PASSING NEW LASHINGS AROUND IT.


"Um, um, um.  Stop that thunder!  Plenty too much thunder up here.
What's the use of thunder?  Um, um, um.  We don't want thunder; we
want rum; give us a glass of rum.  Um, um, um!"



CHAPTER 123

The Musket.


During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the
Pequod's jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to
the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had
been attached to it--for they were slack--because some play to the
tiller was indispensable.

In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed
shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the
needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round.  It was
thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not
failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon
the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some
sort of unwonted emotion.

Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through
the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--one engaged forward
and the other aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and
main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away
to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are
cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.

The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through
the water with some precision again; and the course--for the present,
East-south-east--which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
given to the helmsman.  For during the violence of the gale, he had
only steered according to its vicissitudes.  But as he was now
bringing the ship as near her course as possible, watching the
compass meanwhile, lo! a good sign! the wind seemed coming round
astern; aye, the foul breeze became fair!

Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE FAIR
WIND! OH-YE-HO, CHEERLY MEN!" the crew singing for joy, that so
promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents
preceding it.

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 tetering 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!"

But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.

"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist.  "Heading East at
this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"

Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its
very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one
glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment
he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind him Starbuck looked,
and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as
infallibly going West.

But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the
old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it!  It has happened
before.  Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses--that's all.  Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I
take it."

"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale
mate, gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more
than one case occurred to ships in violent storms.  The magnetic
energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is
not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be.  Instances
where the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite
down some of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at
times been still more fatal; all its loadstone virtue being
annihilated, so that the before magnetic steel was of no more use
than an old wife's knitting needle.  But in either case, the needle
never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or
lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate
reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the
lowermost one inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the
transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended
hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the
needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's
course to be changed accordingly.  The yards were hard up; and once
more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for
the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said
nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and
Flask--who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his
feelings--likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.  As for the men, though
some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their
fear of Fate.  But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained
almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a
certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible
Ahab's.

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries.  But
chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper
sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked
thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me.  So, so.
But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet.  Mr. Starbuck--a lance
without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's
needles.  Quick!"

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now
about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have
been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile
skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.
Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles,
though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by
superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.

"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed
him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old
Ahab's needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his
own, that will point as true as any."

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as
this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic
might follow.  But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade
him hold it upright, without its touching the deck.  Then, with the
maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he
placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly
hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as
before.  Then going through some small strange motions with
it--whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely
intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain--he called for
linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two
reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by
its middle, over one of the compass-cards.  At first, the steel went
round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last
it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching
for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing
his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look ye, for yourselves,
if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone!  The sun is East, and
that compass swears it!"

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes
could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they
slunk away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his
fatal pride.



CHAPTER 125

The Log and Line.


While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the
log and line had but very seldom been in use.  Owing to a confident
reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some
merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly
neglect to heave the log; though at the same time, and frequently
more for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon
the customary slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the
presumed average rate of progression every hour.  It had been thus
with the Pequod.  The wooden reel and angular log attached hung, long
untouched, just beneath the railing of the after bulwarks.  Rains and
spray had damped it; sun and wind had warped it; all the elements
had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.  But heedless of all
this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance upon the reel,
not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how his
quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level
log and line.  The ship was sailing plungingly; astern the billows
rolled in riots.

"Forward, there!  Heave the log!"

Two seamen came.  The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman.
"Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."

They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where
the deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping
into the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.

The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved,
so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced
to him.

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
speak.

"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
spoiled it."

"'Twill hold, old gentleman.  Long heat and wet, have they spoiled
thee?  Thou seem'st to hold.  Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee;
not thou it."

"I hold the spool, sir.  But just as my captain says.  With these
grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
superior, who'll ne'er confess."

"What's that?  There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's
granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient.  Where
wert thou born?"

"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."

"Excellent!  Thou'st hit the world by that."

"I know not, sir, but I was born there."

"In the Isle of Man, hey?  Well, the other way, it's good.  Here's a
man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of
Man; which is sucked in--by what?  Up with the reel!  The dead, blind
wall butts all inquiring heads at last.  Up with it!  So."

The log was heaved.  The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a
long dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to
whirl.  In turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows,
the towing resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger
strangely.

"Hold hard!"

Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the
tugging log was gone.

"I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad
sea parts the log-line.  But Ahab can mend all.  Haul in here,
Tahitian; reel up, Manxman.  And look ye, let the carpenter make
another log, and mend thou the line.  See to it."

"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer
seems loosening out of the middle of the world.  Haul in, haul in,
Tahitian!  These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken,
and dragging slow.  Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"

"Pip? whom call ye Pip?  Pip jumped from the whale-boat.  Pip's
missing.  Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman.
It drags hard; I guess he's holding on.  Jerk him, Tahiti!  Jerk him
off; we haul in no cowards here.  Ho! there's his arm just breaking
water.  A hatchet! a hatchet! cut it off--we haul in no cowards here.
Captain Ahab! sir, sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."

"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
"Away from the quarter-deck!"

"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.
"Hands off from that holiness!  Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?

"Astern there, sir, astern!  Lo! lo!"

"And who art thou, boy?  I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils
of thy eyes.  Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls
to sieve through!  Who art thou, boy?"

"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding!  Pip!  Pip!  Pip!  One
hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks
cowardly--quickest known by that!  Ding, dong, ding!  Who's seen Pip
the coward?"

"There can be no hearts above the snow-line.  Oh, ye frozen heavens!
look down here.  Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned
him, ye creative libertines.  Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's
home henceforth, while Ahab lives.  Thou touchest my inmost centre,
boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.  Come,
let's down."

"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's
hand, and feeling it.  "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a
thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost!  This seems to me,
sir, as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by.  Oh, sir,
let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black
one with the white, for I will not let this go."

"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
horrors than are here.  Come, then, to my cabin.  Lo! ye believers in
gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient
gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing
not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude.
Come!  I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I
grasped an Emperor's!"

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman.  "One daft
with strength, the other daft with weakness.  But here's the end of
the rotten line--all dripping, too.  Mend it, eh?  I think we had
best have a new line altogether.  I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."



CHAPTER 126

The Life-Buoy.


Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her
progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod
held on her path towards the Equator.  Making so long a passage
through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long,
sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously
mild; all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous
and desperate scene.

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before
the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch--then
headed by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and
unearthly--like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all
Herod's murdered Innocents--that one and all, they started from their
reveries, and for the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned
all transfixedly listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that
wild cry remained within hearing.  The Christian or civilized part of
the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan
harpooneers remained unappalled.  Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest
mariner of all--declared that the wild thrilling sounds that were
heard, were the voices of newly drowned men in the sea.

Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when
he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings.  He hollowly laughed, and
thus explained the wonder.

Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great
numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or
some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and
kept company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of
wail.  But this only the more affected some of them, because most
mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising
not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from
the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen
peeringly uprising from the water alongside.  In the sea, under
certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for
men.

But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning.  At
sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for
sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was
thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may,
he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard--a cry and a
rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of
the sea.

The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where
it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to
seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had
shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also
filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed
the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in
sooth but a hard one.

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look
out for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground;
that man was swallowed up in the deep.  But few, perhaps, thought of
that at the time.  Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at
this event, at least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a
foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an
evil already presaged.  They declared that now they knew the reason
of those wild shrieks they had heard the night before.  But again the
old Manxman said nay.

The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to
see to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and
as in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of
the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was
directly connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to
be; therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided
with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg
hinted a hint concerning his coffin.

"A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.

"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.

"It will make a good enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can
arrange it easily."

"Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck, after a
melancholy pause.  "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--the
coffin, I mean.  Dost thou hear me?  Rig it."

"And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a
hammer.

"Aye."

"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as with a
caulking-iron.

"Aye."

"And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his hand
as with a pitch-pot.

"Away! what possesses thee to this?  Make a life-buoy of the coffin,
and no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."

"He goes off in a huff.  The whole he can endure; at the parts he
baulks.  Now I don't like this.  I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and
he wears it like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and
he won't put his head into it.  Are all my pains to go for nothing
with that coffin?  And now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it.
It's like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other
side now.  I don't like this cobbling sort of business--I don't like
it at all; it's undignified; it's not my place.  Let tinkers' brats
do tinkerings; we are their betters.  I like to take in hand none but
clean, virgin, fair-and-square mathematical jobs, something that
regularly begins at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway,
and comes to an end at the conclusion; not a cobbler's job, that's at
an end in the middle, and at the beginning at the end.  It's the old
woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs.  Lord! what an affection
all old women have for tinkers.  I know an old woman of sixty-five
who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once.  And that's the
reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when I
kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their
lonely old heads to run off with me.  But heigh-ho! there are no caps
at sea but snow-caps.  Let me see.  Nail down the lid; caulk the
seams; pay over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang
it with the snap-spring over the ship's stern.  Were ever such things
done before with a coffin?  Some superstitious old carpenters, now,
would be tied up in the rigging, ere they would do the job.  But I'm
made of knotty Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge.  Cruppered with a
coffin!  Sailing about with a grave-yard tray!  But never mind.  We
workers in woods make bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as
coffins and hearses.  We work by the month, or by the job, or by the
profit; not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless
it be too confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can.  Hem!
I'll do the job, now, tenderly.  I'll have me--let's see--how many in
the ship's company, all told?  But I've forgotten.  Any way, I'll
have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed life-lines, each three feet
long hanging all round to the coffin.  Then, if the hull go down,
there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a
sight not seen very often beneath the sun!  Come hammer,
caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike!  Let's to it."



CHAPTER 127

The Deck.


THE COFFIN LAID UPON TWO LINE-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE
OPEN HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE STRING OF
TWISTED OAKUM SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE ROLL OF IT PLACED IN THE
BOSOM OF HIS FROCK.--AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND
HEARS PIP FOLLOWING HIM.


Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently.  He goes!  Not this
hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy.--Middle
aisle of a church!  What's here?"

"Life-buoy, sir.  Mr. Starbuck's orders.  Oh, look, sir!  Beware the
hatchway!"

"Thank ye, man.  Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."

"Sir?  The hatchway? oh!  So it does, sir, so it does."

"Art not thou the leg-maker?  Look, did not this stump come from thy
shop?"

"I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?"

"Well enough.  But art thou not also the undertaker?"

"Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
they've set me now to turning it into something else."

"Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and
the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of
those same coffins?  Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as
much of a jack-of-all-trades."

"But I do not mean anything, sir.  I do as I do."

"The gods again.  Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a
coffin?  The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade
in hand.  Dost thou never?"

"Sing, sir?  Do I sing?  Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that;
but the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because
there was none in his spade, sir.  But the caulking mallet is full of
it.  Hark to it."

"Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what
in all things makes the sounding-board is this--there's naught
beneath.  And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the
same, Carpenter.  Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the
coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?

"Faith, sir, I've--"

"Faith?  What's that?"

"Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like--that's all,
sir."

"Um, um; go on."

"I was about to say, sir, that--"

"Art thou a silk-worm?  Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
Look at thy bosom!  Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."

"He goes aft.  That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
latitudes.  I've heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the
Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the middle.  Seems to me
some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle.
He's always under the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye!  He's looking this
way--come, oakum; quick.  Here we go again.  This wooden mallet is
the cork, and I'm the professor of musical glasses--tap, tap!"

(AHAB TO HIMSELF.)

"There's a sight!  There's a sound!  The grey-headed woodpecker
tapping the hollow tree!  Blind and dumb might well be envied now.
See! that thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines.  A most
malicious wag, that fellow.  Rat-tat!  So man's seconds tick!  Oh!
how immaterial are all materials!  What things real are there, but
imponderable thoughts?  Here now's the very dreaded symbol of grim
death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope
of most endangered life.  A life-buoy of a coffin!  Does it go
further?  Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after
all, but an immortality-preserver!  I'll think of that.  But no.  So
far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the
theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.  Will ye
never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed sound?  I go below;
let me not see that thing here when I return again.  Now, then, Pip,
we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!
Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must empty into thee!"

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