Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line of
judges:—like a hawk’s beak it pecks my brain. _I’ll, I’ll_ solve it,
though!”
When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as
on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of
the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by
lanterns in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and
sharpening their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken
keel of Ahab’s wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while
still as on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his
scuttle; his hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its
dial; sat due eastward for the earliest sun.
CHAPTER CXXXV.
THE CHASE—THIRD DAY.
The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.
“In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that’s all.
Helm there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely
day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to
the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them,
a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here’s food for thought,
had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels,
feels; _that’s_ tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity.
God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be,
a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor
brains beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain
was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in
which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair
is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no,
it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between
the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild
winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails
lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown
ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals,
and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as
fleeces. Out upon it!—it’s tainted. Were I the wind, I’d blow no more
on such a wicked, miserable world. I’d crawl somewhere to a cave, and
slink there. And yet, ’tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who
ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.
Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that
strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.
Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing than _that_. Would now
the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and
outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as
objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a
most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that
there’s something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm
Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in
strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark,
however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest
Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go
at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly
blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something
so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it!
Aloft there! What d’ye see?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun!
Aye, aye, it must be so. I’ve oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye,
he’s chasing _me_ now; not I, _him_—that’s bad; I might have known it,
too. Fool! the lines—the harpoons he’s towing. Aye, aye, I have run him
by last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
outs! Man the braces!”
Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod’s
quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
white wake.
“Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw,” murmured Starbuck
to himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. “God
keep us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside
wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!”
“Stand by to sway me up!” cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.
“We should meet him soon.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” and straightway Starbuck did Ahab’s bidding, and once
more Ahab swung on high.
A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off
the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the
three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had
voiced it.
“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On
deck there!—brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s
too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over
that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must
down. But let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea;
there’s time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young;
aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the
sand-hills of Nantucket! The same!—the same!—the same to Noah as to
me. There’s a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They
must lead 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 by, 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? sees’t 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