- end_line
- 21905
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-23T15:41:07.811Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 21841
- text
- not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his
drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;—cherries!
cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
“Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope
my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will
now come to her, for the voyage is up.”
From the ship’s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their
hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all
their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side
strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of
overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution,
swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of
all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead
smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell
flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the
harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach,
they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.
“The ship! The hearse!—the second hearse!” cried Ahab from the boat;
“its wood could only be American!”
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a
time, he lay quiescent.
“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy
hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel;
and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and
Pole-pointed prow,—death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and
without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel
my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your
furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone
life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll,
thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with
thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last
breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! _Thus_, I give up
the spear!”
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
velocity the line ran through the grooves;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to
clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the
neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the
heavy eye-splice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty
tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. “The
ship? Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering
mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata
Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by
infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the
pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its
crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning,
animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the
smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
- title
- Chunk 6