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- 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
- title
- Chapter 121