Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 78

  Cistern and Buckets

  Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering hiserect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm,to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He hascarried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting ofonly two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block.Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm,he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly heldby a hand on the deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part,the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he landson the summit of the head. There--still high elevated abovethe rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayersfrom the top of a tower. A short-handled sharp spade beingsent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper placeto begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceedsvery heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in.By the time this cautious search is over, a stout ironbound bucket,precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one endof the whip; while the other end, being stretched acrossthe deck, is there held by two or three alert hands.These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian,to whom another person has reached up a very long pole.Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downwardguides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears;then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes thebucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk.Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel iscaught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub.Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same rounduntil the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end,Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeperand deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the polehave gone down.

  Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all atonce a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego,that wild Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a momenthis one-handed hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head;or whether the place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy;or whether the Evil One himself would have it to fall out so,without stating his particular reasons; how it was exactly,there is no telling now; but, on a sudden, as the eightiethor ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor Tashtego--like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh,and with a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

  "Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternationfirst came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!"and putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure hisslippery hand-hold on the whip itself the hoisters ran him high upto the top of the head, almost before Tashtego could have reachedits interior bottom. Meantime, there was a terrible tumult.Looking over the side, they saw the before lifeless head throbbingand heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if that momentseized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only the poorIndian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilousdepth to which he had sunk.

  At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearingthe whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--a sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horrorof all, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out,and with a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung,till the drunk ship reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg.The one remaining hook, upon which the entire strain now depended,seemed every instant to be on the point of giving way; an eventstill more likely from the violent motions of the head.

  "Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one handholding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop,he would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning thatthe buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.

  "In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramminghome a cartridge there?--Avast! How will that help him;jamming that iron-bound bucket on top of his head?Avast, will ye!"

  "Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the burstingof a rocket.

  Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormousmass dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock intothe whirlpool; the suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it,to far down her glittering copper; and all caught their breath,as half swinging--now over the sailors' heads, and nowover the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray,was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottomof the sea! But hardly had the blinding vapor cleared away,when a naked figure with a boardingsword in his hand,was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks.The next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg haddived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the side,and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment,and no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen.Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a littleoff from the ship.

  "Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet,swinging perch overhead; and looking further off from the side,we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves; a sight strangeto see, as an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave.

  "Both! both!--it is both!"-cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout;and soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand,and with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn intothe waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtegowas long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.

  Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving afterthe slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had madeside lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there;then dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwardsand upwards, and so hauled out our poor Tash by the head.He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a leg was presented;but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and mightoccasion great trouble;--he had thrust back the leg, and by adexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian;so that with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way--head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was doingas well as could be expected.

  And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfullyaccomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparentlyhopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,riding and rowing.

  I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sureto seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may haveeither seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore;an accident which not seldom happens, and with much less reason toothan the Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curbof the Sperm Whale's well.

  But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this?We thought the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale,was the lightest and most corky part about him; and yet thou makestit sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than itself.We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye; for at the time poorTash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents,leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well--a double welded,hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier thanthe sea water, and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost.But the tendency to rapid sinking in this substance was in the presentinstance materially counteracted by the other parts of the head remainingundetached from it, so that it sank very slowly and deliberately indeed,affording Queequeg a fair chance for performing his agile obstetricson the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery,so it was.

  Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a veryprecious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiestof fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed inthe secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale.Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled--the deliciousdeath of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotchof a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaningtoo far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head,and sweetly perished there?