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- 19728
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:49:30.774Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 19659
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- 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.
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