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- 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.
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