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- 1227670
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- 1219690
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- 1995
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- moby-dick
- text
- somewhere—to something else than common land, more palmy than the
palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward, then;
the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old
mast-head! What’s this?—green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.
No such green weather stains on Ahab’s head! There’s the difference now
between man’s old age and matter’s. But aye, old mast, we both grow old
together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a
leg, that’s all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live
flesh every way. I can’t compare with it; and I’ve known some ships
made of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital
stuff of vital fathers. What’s that he said? he should still go before
me, my pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at
the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and
all night I’ve been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye,
aye, like many more thou told’st direful truth as touching thyself, O
Parsee; but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head—keep
a good eye upon the whale, the while I’m gone. We’ll talk to-morrow,
nay, to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and
tail.”
He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
through the cloven blue air to the deck.
In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop’s
stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
mate,—who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck—and bade him pause.
“Starbuck!”
“Sir?”
“For the third time my soul’s ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck.”
“Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so.”
“Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
Starbuck!”
“Truth, sir: saddest truth.”
“Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the
flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb,
Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck’s tears the glue.
“Oh, my captain, my captain!—noble heart—go not—go not!—see, it’s a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!”
“Lower away!”—cried Ahab, tossing the mate’s arm from him. “Stand by
the crew!”
In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.
“The sharks! the sharks!” cried a voice from the low cabin-window
there; “O master, my master, come back!”
But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath
the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time
they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with
their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats
in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them
in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of
marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that
had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first
descried; and whether it was that Ahab’s crew were all such
tiger-yellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the
senses of the sharks—a matter sometimes well known to affect
them,—however it was, they seemed to follow that one boat without
molesting the others.
“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
following with his eyes the receding boat—“canst thou yet ring boldly
to that sight?—lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by
them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?—For
when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be
sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the
evening and the end of that thing—be that end what it may. Oh! my God!
what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to see
but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
clearing; but clouds sweep between—Is my journey’s end coming? My legs
feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats
it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak
aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft
there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the whale!—Ho!
again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane”—pointing
to the red flag flying at the main-truck—“Ha! he soars away with
it!—Where’s the old man now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder,
shudder!”
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a
downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but
intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a
little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the
profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered
against the opposing bow.
“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and
no hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!”
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist,
it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping
back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
marble trunk of the whale.
“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in
him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two
mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.
While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round
and round to the fish’s back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in
which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of
the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his
sable raiment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old
Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand.
“Befooled, befooled!”—drawing in a long lean breath—“Aye, Parsee! I see
thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, _this_ then is the
hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of
thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those
boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;
if not, Ahab is enough to die—Down, men! the first thing that but
offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.—Where’s the
whale?