Moby Dick by Herman Melville (read this if txt) đ
- Author: Herman Melville
- Performer: 0142437247
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âAye, sir,â said Starbuck drawing near, ââtis a solemn sight; an omen, and an ill one.â
âOmen? omen?âthe dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wivesâ darkling hint.âBegone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, coldâI shiver!âHow now? Aloft there! Dâye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second!â
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
âCanât see the spout now, sir;âtoo darkââcried a voice from the air.
âHow heading when last seen?â
âAs before, sir,âstraight to leeward.â
âGood! he will travel slower now âtis night. Down royals and top-gallant stunsails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; heâs making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her full before the wind come down!â Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning.ââThen advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mastââMen, this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that manâs; and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away now! the deck is thine, sir!â
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
CHAPTER 134
The Chase â Second Day
At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
âDâye see him?â cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light to spread.
âSee nothing, sir.â
âTurn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought for;â the top-gallant sails!âaye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no matterââtis but resting for the rush.â
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creatureâs future wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the pilotâs coast is to him. So that to this hunterâs wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a babyâs pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the whalemanâs allies; for of what present avail to the becalmed or wind-bound mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannonball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field.
âBy salt and hemp!â cried Stubb, âbut this swift motion of the deck creeps up oneâs legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two brave fellows!âHa, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea,âfor by live-oaks! my spineâs a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait that leaves no dust behind!â
âThere she blowsâshe blows!âshe blows!âright ahead!â was now the mast-head cry.
âAye, aye!â cried Stubb, âI knew itâye canât escapeâblow on and split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your trumpâ blister your lungs!âAhab will dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream!â
And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past nightâs suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting thingsâoak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hempâyet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this manâs valor, that manâs fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
âWhy sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?â cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. âSway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears.â
It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the air vibrate as with the combined discharge of rifles. The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, asâ much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile aheadâMoby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance.
âThere she breaches! there she breaches!â was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
âAye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!â cried Ahab, âthy hour and thy harpoon are at hand down all of ye, but one man at the fore. The boats!âstand by!â
Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch.
âLower away,â he cried, so soon as he had reached his boatâa spare one, rigged the afternoon previous. âMr. Starbuck, the ship is thineâ keep away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!â
As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the three crews. Ahabâs boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale head-and-head,â that is, pull straight up to his forehead,âa not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whaleâs sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were plain as the shipâs three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him; though, at times, but by a plankâs breadth; while all the time, Ahabâs unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.
But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the
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