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- hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
his prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace
it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be
king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen
accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on
and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared;
while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was
dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some
whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine
feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.
Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you
now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with
his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
“Hast killed him?”
“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the
other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose
gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.
“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold
his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these
barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the
fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”
“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the
hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only _that_ one I bury; the rest
were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning
to his crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and
lift the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock with
uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”
“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the
sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not
so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have
sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.
As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.
“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake.
“In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your
taffrail to show us your coffin!”
CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.
It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and
man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s
chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.
But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
that distinguished them.
Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the
girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion—most seen
here at the equator—denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.
Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the
ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s
forehead of heaven.
Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
oblivious were ye of old Ahab’s close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.
Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side
and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the
more and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the
lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a
moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that
winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world,
so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that
however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save
and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into
the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
drop.
Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to
touch him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood
there.
Ahab turned.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir.”
“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such
a day—very much such a sweetness as this—I struck my first whale—a
boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty—forty—forty years ago!—ago! Forty
years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not
spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the
desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a
Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any
sympathy from the green country without—oh, weariness! heaviness!
Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this;
only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty
years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment
of my soil!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily
hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away,
whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage
pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I
widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the
madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with
which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly
chased his prey—more a demon than a man!—aye, aye! what a forty years’
fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase?
why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance?
how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck!