While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man’s line—now parting—admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could;—in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils,—Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom and sent it turning over and over into the air till it fell again—gunwale downwards—and Ahab and his men struggled out from under it like seals from a sea-side cave.
The first uprising momentum of the whale—modifying its direction as he struck the surface—involuntarily launched him along it to a little distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment, slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side; and whenever a stray oar, a bit of plank, or the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward way at a traveller’s methodic pace.
As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there; but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his boat’s broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor did it so exhaust him as the previous day’s mishap.
But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.
“Aye, aye, Starbuck, ‘tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has.”
“The ferrule has not stood, sir,” said the carpenter, now coming up; “I put good work into that leg.”
“But no bones broken, sir, I hope,” said Stubb with true concern.
“Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!—d’ye see it.—But even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of mine one jot more me than this dead one that’s lost. Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder roof?—Aloft there! which way?”
“Dead to leeward, sir.”
“Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of the spare boats and rig them—Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat’s crews.”
“Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir.”
“Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accurséd fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!”
“Sir?”
“My plaguey body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane—there, that shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By heaven it cannot be!—missing?—quick! call them all.”
The old man’s hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there.
“The Parsee!” cried Flask—“he must have been caught in—“
“The black vomit wrench thee!—run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle—find him—not gone—not gone!”
But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was nowhere to be found.
“Aye, sir,” said Stubb—“caught among the tangles of your line—I thought I saw him dragging under.”
“My line! My line? Gone?—gone? What means that little word?—What death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too!—toss over the litter there,—d’ye see it?—the forged iron, men, the white whale’s—
“No, no, no,—blistered fool! this hand did dart it!—’tis in the fish!—Aloft there! Keep him nailed—Quick!—all hands to the rigging of the boats—collect the oars—harpooneers! the irons, the irons!—hoist the royals higher—a pull on all the sheets!—helm there! steady, steady for your life! I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet!”
“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself!” cried Starbuck. “Never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’s name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—
“What more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!”
“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man, and if ye could but grasp the truth of what transpires here in this very skull, then might thy heart be as mine, but ye cannot! for the intricate invisible threads by which Ahab is twitched to do this thing, though undeniable, they art visible only to Ahab, and ah! by Fedallah—gone, gone before, he didst say it!
“Starbuck, this whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the lieutenant of the Fates; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.
“Stand round me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered lance; propped up on a lonely foot. ‘Tis Ahab—his body’s part; but Ahab’s soul’s a centipede that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale; and I may look so. But ere I break, ye’ll hear me crack; and till ye hear that, know that Ahab’s hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again, to sink for evermore. So it will be with Moby Dick—two days he’s floated—tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he’ll rise once more,—but only to spout his last! D’ye feel brave men, brave?”
“As fearless fire,” cried Stubb.
“And as mechanical,” muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he muttered on: “The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek to drive out of others’ hearts what’s clinched so fast in mine!—The Parsee—the Parsee!—gone, gone? and he was to go before:—but still was to be seen again ere I could perish—How’s that?—There’s a riddle now 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, I will solve it, though!”
When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.
So once more the sail was shortened, and night descended; 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; gazing due eastward for the earliest sun.
In the darkest hour of that long night, Ahab paces the deck in the dark on his newly crafted leg, the thump-tock, thump-tock upon the deck resounding in the aft cabin below like a clock counting down his doom; but the three harpooneers who sit round the supper table in the cabin there beneath crazed Ahab are unperturbed; see there, Tashtego, with expert flourish, puts the last rasping hone to the steel of his harpoon, then takes one of several lamps throwing a warm but fitful glow about the cabin, and moves with it to a bit of mirror and carefully begins to shave with the sharpened steel, the long barb softly rasping gainst his golden skin; Daggoo eats heartily, noisily smacking his lips as he watches, amused and jesting with Tashtego about the sparseness of the Indian’s facial hair and admonishing him to beware slitting his own throat; Queequeg sleeps in his chair in shadow, softly snoring, tattooed chin resting on his chest.
A bumping thump and a throaty groan is heard from the afterhold; Tashtego and Daggoo exchange quizzical glances and turn to the source of the noise; Queequeg bestirs himself and blearily opens his eyes. Daggoo, standing, sets down his gruel and strides to the large wall map from whence the noise arose—now a more frantic bashing, scratching sound, the map shivering visibly with every thump. Daggoo, with concerned brow—for it seems to him as if one of his shipmates must be in peril behind that door—quickly scans the map and easily discerns the trick of it; he rotates the map away, again exchanging a puzzled glance with Tashtego, then, after a moment of study, lifts the latch.
The door bursts open, knocking Daggoo back more from startlement than force, and out staggers slender Pip. Upon seeing him, Daggoo, who had great reverence for the wisdom of the mad, begins to smile in greeting when the thing that had been Pip springs slavering for his throat; behind pale Pip, another shapeless form begins to drag itself from the dark within the room, but the harpooneers do not mark it; Pip commands their full attention.
Daggoo is saved from the blessing of instant death in that moment only by his great height and Pip’s small stature, for though Pip leaps for Daggoo’s throat to tear it out and drink his life’s blood, Pip falls instead against Daggoo’s massive chest, clawing and slavering and—oh, tragedy!—Daggoo is bit by Pip who is now no longer aping a Shammy but is a zomby in truth. In swift reaction Daggoo beats the small snarling form to the planks with one mighty blow from his fist, then kicks it writhing across the small cabin, near to where Tashtego stands in open-mouthed shock, his sharpened steel still halfway to his half-shaven face.
The thing that had been Pip lands and, making no attempt to stand, grasps at Tashtego’s leg and sinks its teeth into the brave Indian’s calf. Howling, Tashtego dances back when, in a blur of motion, Queequeg, with a roaring, inarticulate cry comes flying across the cabin, his tomahawk arcing with surprising violence down on the zomby head of their former shipmate once, twice, thrice; gore spatters outward in increasing amounts with each blow; then for a frozen moment, all is still.
Within that vast stillness, like a sleek in time itself, Queequeg is yet more still; for in that timeless instant did Queequeg come to know his doom, just as Yojo foretold to him; for when his trusted tomahawk pipe had struck the third time, a drop of black ichor spattered into his open, panting mouth. He spat, but alas!, it mattered not, the damage is done.
In that moment of stillness, a heavy, dragging shuffle and a withered hiss is heard from behind. The trio spins round as one man. There, dragging itself from out the hold is a legless, rotten, stinking thing, with half its skull removed, the black brain visible within, and no small amount of brain matter missing; a pale, obscene mushroom juts out from its brow, centered there, and pulsing faintly with pale blue light.
Tashtego advances with steel raised. Queequeg says, “Spear him through him eye! Kill-ee him brain! Tash, you close mouth; close eyes!” not knowing that for the brave Wampanoag, it mattered not, for had Tashtego drunk casks of the thing’s black blood he would have been no more infected. Tash advanced, and drove his harpoon through the eye socket of the hissing, groaning creature, and so it is done, and so is the ship’s immediate disaster averted, and its certain doom assured.
All three then swore blood oaths to say nothing of this incident until the White Whale was a corpse slung alongside the Pequod.
Chapter
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.”
All morning Ahab lurchingly paced the quarterdeck in furious thought, ever and anon shouting to the lookouts. “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, I, Ishmael with joy and trepidation did descry the spout and sent up the shout! as, one instant later from the other mast-heads, two shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it.
Ahab roared his challenge: “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, do we not, my ship? Aye, and me 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.
I, too, had scrambled from aloft to the deck, where Ahab, his countenance fierce, strode up to me. “Thou hast raised the white whale, sailor, and for that I thank thee. Did I not say that he who raises the white whale on the day of his death will receive this gold piece, sung full of luck? Did I not? For this, this is that whale’s final day upon this watery world, and ere the sun sinks I will have his burst heart in this very hand!” He shook his fist in my face and then, as though throttling a great urge to continue, Ahab thrust the glittering coin at me. “It is thine. Take it. Spend it not but in dire need.” Ahab impatiently shoved the coin at me again, and with no small reluctance, I received it. Then whirling about on his false leg, Ahab prepared to lower. I placed the coin in my pocket where it seemed but a dire ballast.
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.”
Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale Page 52