- end_line
- 16486
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-23T15:41:06.394Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 16424
- text
- sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide
hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of
the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge
pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding
pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted,
curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled
away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of
the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.
Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden
hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the
watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the
fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny
features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,
and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they
narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror
told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards
out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their
front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged
forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the
ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further
and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully
champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on
all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden
with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of
darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s
soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that
interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the
madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend
shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at
last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to
that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a
midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller
smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of
sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were
open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and
mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all
this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed
but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle
lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and
then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression,
that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to
any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered
feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the
tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in
some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me?
thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was
fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In
an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying
up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her. How glad and how
grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and
the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!
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