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_ Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most
effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows
tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that
in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst
of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that
cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled
masts fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of
the tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at
every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional
disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb
and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer
lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though
lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat
(Ahab's) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up
against the reeling ship's high teetering side, stove in the boat's
bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a
sieve.
"Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
"but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You
see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it
leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But
as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck
here. But never mind; it's all in fun: so the old song
says;"--(SINGS.)
Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A' flourishin' his tail,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
The scud all a flyin',
That's his flip only foamin';
When he stirs in the spicin',--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin' of this flip,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold
thy peace."
"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a
coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is,
Mr. Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to
cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the
doxology for a wind-up."
"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."
"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else,
never mind how foolish?"
"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing
his hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale
comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby
Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat
there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is
wont to stand--his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard,
and sing away, if thou must!
"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"
"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn
it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to
windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see
it lightens up there; but not with the lightning."
At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness,
following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at
the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
"Who's there?"
"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by
elbowed lances of fire.
Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry
off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea
some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the
water. But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth,
that its end may avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if
kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps,
besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more
or less impeding the vessel's way in the water; because of all this,
the lower parts of a ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard;
but are generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more
readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the
sea, as occasion may require.
"The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished
to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting
flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop them
over, fore and aft. Quick!"
"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the
weaker side. Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and
Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let
them be, sir."
"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!
All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each
of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air,
like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a
swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its
gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing.
"Blast it!"--but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes
caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The
corpusants have mercy on us all!"
To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance
of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate
curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a
seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common
oath when God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His
"Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the
cordage.
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from
the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the
gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and
seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted
mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely
gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by
the preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic
blue flames on his body.
The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once
more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall.
A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against
some one. It was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy
cry; it was not the same in the song."
"No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I
hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long
faces?--have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr.
Starbuck--but it's too dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that
mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are
rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil,
d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like
sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti
candles--that's the good promise we saw."
At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and
once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed
redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.
"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.
At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the
flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head
bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging
rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number
of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung
pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig.
In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or
running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck;
but all their eyes upcast.
"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white
flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast
links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against
it; blood against fire! So."
Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his
foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right
arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and
I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor
reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill;
and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake
life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the
midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.
Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go;
yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and
feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in
thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest
navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still
remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest
me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."
[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP
LENGTHWISE TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST,
CLOSES HIS EYES, HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]
"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it
wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but
I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take
the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take
it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and
ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some
stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.
Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness
leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open
eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now
I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my
sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?
There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how
came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which
thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some
unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy
eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee,
thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou
foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy
incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with
haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I
leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee;
defyingly I worship thee!"
"The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"
Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly
lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his
whale-boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused
the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb
there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent
harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab
by the arm--"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an
ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while
we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a
better voyage than this."
Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
braces--though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the
aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous
cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and
snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them;
swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a
rope's end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from
the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab
again spoke:--
"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that
ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow
out the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished
the flame.
As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood
of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render
it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for
thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners
did run from him in a terror of dismay. _
Read next: CHAPTER 120 The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
Read previous: CHAPTER 118 The Quadrant.
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