MOBY DICK; OR THE 🐳

By Herman Melville
Translation by Peter Teichman and emoji🔥



CHAPTER 1⃣. Loomings.


☎ me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having
little or no money in my 👜, and 0⃣ particular to 😟 me on
shore, I thought I would sail about a little and 📅 the watery 🏢 of
the 👨. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating
the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the 👄;
whenever it is a 🔇, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up
the 🌹 of every funeral I 😆; and especially whenever my hypos get
such an upper 🚹 of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to 🌊
as 🔜 as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and 🍳. With a
philosophical 👋 Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
🉑 to the 🚢. There is 0⃣ surprising in this. If they but knew
it, almost all 🚹 in their degree, some time or other, cherish very
nearly the same feelings towards the 🌊 with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with
her surf. Right and left, the streets 🉑 you waterward. Its extreme
downtown is the 🔋, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and
cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. ❌ from Corlears
👮 to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What
do you 📅?--Posted like 🔇 sentinels all around the town, 🐻
thousands upon thousands of mortal 🚹 fixed in 🌊 reveries. Some
leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some
looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the
rigging, as if striving to get a 😯 better seaward peep. But these
are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to
counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are
the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! 0⃣ will content them but the
extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water
as they possibly can without falling in. And there they 🐻--miles of
them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets
and avenues--north, 🇪🇸, south, and west. Yet here they all 🔗.
Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all
those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. 🉑
almost any path you please, and ❌ to 1⃣ it carries you down in a
dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic
in it. Let the most absent-minded of 🚹 be plunged in his deepest
reveries--🐻 that 👨 on his legs, 👗 his feet a-going, and he will
infallibly 🍃 you to water, if water there be in all that region.
Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this
experiment, if your 🚋 happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every 1⃣ knows, meditation and water are wedded for
ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to 🔑 you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There 🐻 his trees,
each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
here sleeps his meadow, and there 😴 his cattle; and up from yonder
cottage goes a 😪 🚬. Deep into distant woodlands winds a
mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their
hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though
this 💴-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's
❓, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's ♥ were fixed upon the
magic stream before him. ❌ 📲 the Prairies in June, when for scores
on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among 🐯-lilies--what is the
1⃣ charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were
Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your Ⓜ miles to
📅 it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving 2⃣
handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a 🍰, which he sadly
needed, or 💺 his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why
is almost every robust 🔉 👦 with a robust 🔉 soul in him, at
some time or other crazy to ❌ to 🌊? Why upon your first voyage as a
passenger, did you yourself feel such a ㊙ vibration, when first
told that you and your 🚢 were now out of sight of land? Why did the
old Persians 📖 the 🌊 holy? Why did the Greeks 🍃 it a separate
deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
And 😯 deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because
he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the ⛲,
plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves 📅
in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of
life; and this is the 🔑 to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to 🌊 whenever I begin
to 🌹 🌁 about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs,
I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever ❌ to 🌊 as a passenger.
For to ❌ as a passenger you must needs have a 👜, and a 👜 is
but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get
🌊-🐱--🌹 quarrelsome--don't 😴 of nights--do not enjoy
themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never ❌ as a passenger;
nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever ❌ to 🌊 as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and 🎶
of such offices to those who like them. For my 🏢, I abominate all
honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to 🉑 😟 of myself,
without taking 😟 of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory
in that, a cook being a sort of officer on 🚢-board--yet, somehow,
I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously
buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no 1⃣ who
will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
🐦 than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old
Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river 🐴, that you 📅 the
mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

No, when I ❌ to 🌊, I ❌ as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-❓.
True, they rather ♣ me about some, and 💩 me 🌹 from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort
of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches 1⃣'s sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established 🏠 in the land, the
Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all,
if just previous to putting your 🚹 into the tar-🚽, you have been
lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys 🐻
in awe of you. The transition is a keen 1⃣, I assure you, from a
schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and
the Stoics to enable you to 😁 and 🉑 it. But 😳 this wears off in
time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a 🌊-captain orders me to get a broom
and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,
I mean, in the scales of the 🆕 Testament? Do you think the archangel
Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't
a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old 🌊-captains may
♣ me about--however they may 💷 and 👊 me about, I have the
satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is
1⃣ way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical
or metaphysical point of ⌚, that is; and so the universal 💷 is
passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and
be content.

Again, I always ❌ to 🌊 as a sailor, because they 💩 a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never 🐻 passengers a 1⃣
penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must
🐻. And there is all the difference in the 👨 between paying
and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable
infliction that the 2⃣ orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING
PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a 👨
receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly
believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account
can a monied 👨 enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
to perdition!

Finally, I always ❌ to 🌊 as a sailor, because of the wholesome
exercise and pure air of the 🙇-castle deck. For as in this 👨,
❓ winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is,
if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most 🏢 the
Commodore on the 💩-deck gets his 🏧 at 🔙 🚹 from
the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not
so. In much the same way do the commonalty 🍃 their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.
But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the 🌊 as a
merchant sailor, I should now 🉑 it into my ❓ to ❌ on a whaling
voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the
constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me
in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any 1⃣ else. And,
doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed 🏢 of the Ⓜ
programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as
a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.
I 🉑 it that this 🏢 of the 🎶 must have 🏃 something like this:


"Ⓜ CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.

"WHALING VOYAGE BY 1⃣ ISHMAEL.

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."


Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
Fates, put me down for this shabby 🏢 of a whaling voyage, when others
were 👗 down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and
easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though
I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the
circumstances, I think I can 📅 a little into the springs and motives
which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced
me to 👗 about performing the 🏢 I did, besides cajoling me into the
delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill
and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
🐳 himself. Such a portentous and ㊙ monster roused all my
curiosity. Then the 😠 and distant seas where he rolled his island
bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the 🐳; these, with all
the attending marvels of a Ⓜ Patagonian sights and sounds, helped
to sway me to my wish. With other 🚹, perhaps, such things would not
have been inducements; but as for me, I am 😧 with an everlasting
itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is 🔉, I am quick to perceive a
horror, and could 😯 be social with it--would they let me--since it
is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the 🚉
1⃣ lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
great flood-gates of the ❓-👨 swung open, and in the 😠
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, 2⃣ and 2⃣ there floated into
my inmost soul, endless processions of the 🐳, and, mid most of them
all, 1⃣ Ⓜ hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.



CHAPTER 2⃣. The Carpet-👜.


I stuffed a 👕 or 2⃣ into my old carpet-👜, tucked it under my arm,
and started for Cape 🎺 and the Pacific. Quitting the 🔉 city of
old Manhatto, I duly arrived in 🆕 Bedford. It was a Saturday night in
December. Much was I 😞 upon learning that the little 📦
for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that 🚉
would offer, till the following Monday.

As most 🆕 candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling 🔚 at
this same 🆕 Bedford, thence to 🚢 on their voyage, it may as well
be related that I, for 1⃣, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was
made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a
🆗, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous
old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though 🆕 Bedford has
of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though
in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much 💺 her, yet Nantucket
was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the 🚉 where the
first dead American 🐳 was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket
did those aboriginal whalemen, the 😳-🚹, first sally out in canoes to
🍃 🐶 to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that
first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
cobblestones--so goes the story--to 😖 at the whales, in ♣ to
🔑 when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

Now having a night, a day, and 😯 another night following before me
in 🆕 Bedford, ere I could 🚢 for my destined port, it became a
matter of concernment where I was to eat and 😴 meanwhile. It was a
very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold
and cheerless. I knew no 1⃣ in the 🚉. With anxious grapnels I had
sounded my 👝, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,--So,
wherever you ❌, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the ♥ of
a dreary street shouldering my 👜, and comparing the gloom towards the
north with the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you
may conclude to ♣ for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire
the price, and don't be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the 🏠 of "The
Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further
on, from the bright 😳 windows of the "Sword-🐟 Inn," there came such
fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and 🎇 from
before the 🏠, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ❌ inches
thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,--rather 😩 for me, when I struck
my 🐾 against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless
service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too
expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing 1⃣ moment to ⌚ the
broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses
within. But ❌ on, Ishmael, said I at 🔚; don't you hear? get away
from before the 🚪; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I
went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for
there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either 🚹,
and here and there a 💿, like a 💿 moving about in a tomb. At
this hour of the night, of the 🔚 day of the week, that 💩 of
the town proved all but deserted. But 🔜 I came to a smoky ✨
proceeding from a low, wide 🚧, the 🚪 of which stood invitingly
open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the
public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an
ash-📦 in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost
choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The
Crossed Harpoons," and "The Sword-🐟?"--this, then must needs be the
🏠 of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud 🔉
within, pushed on and opened a 🔙, interior 🚪.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A 💯 black
faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black 👼
of Doom was beating a 📖 in a pulpit. It was a negro ⛪; and the
preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and
wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,
Wretched entertainment at the 🏠 of 'The Trap!'

Moving on, I at 🔚 came to a dim sort of ✨ not far from the docks,
and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging
🏠 over the 🚪 with a white painting upon it, faintly representing
a tall straight ⛲ of 🌁 spray, and these words underneath--"The
Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."

Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular 🔗, thought
I. But it is a common 🔑 in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this
Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the ✨ looked so dim, and
the 🚉, for the time, looked 😯 enough, and the dilapidated little
wooden 🏠 itself looked as if it might have been carted here from
the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging 🏠 had a
poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
🏢 for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea ☕.

It was a queer sort of 🚉--a gable-ended old 🏠, 1⃣ side palsied
as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner,
where that 😠 👃 Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever
it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a
mighty pleasant zephyr to any 1⃣ in-doors, with his feet on the 👿
quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that 😠 👃 called
Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose works I possess the only copy
extant--"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether Ⓜ lookest out at
it from a 👓 window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether
Ⓜ observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both
sides, and of which the wight 🔚 is the only glazier." True enough,
thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, Ⓜ
reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is
the 🏠. What a pity they didn't 🔚 up the chinks and the crannies
though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late
to 💩 any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone
is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus
there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and
shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might 👊 up both ears
with rags, and put a 🌽-cob into his 👄, and yet that would not
keep out the 😠 Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his
😳 silken wrapper--(he had a redder 1⃣ afterwards) pooh, pooh! What
a 🆗 frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them
🍑 of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; 🍃
me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up
to the Ⓜ northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra
than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise 🔛 the
🎶 of the equator; yea, ye gods! ❌ down to the fiery pit itself, in
♣ to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
🚪 of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
moored to 1⃣ of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a
Czar in an 🎇 palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
temperance ♣, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is
plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the 🎇 from our frosted feet,
and 📅 what sort of a 🚉 this "Spouter" may be.



CHAPTER 3⃣. The Spouter-Inn.


Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding 1⃣ of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On 1⃣ side hung a very large
oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent
study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful ❓ of
the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
you almost thought some ambitious 🆕 artist, in the time of the 🆕
England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint
of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
especially by throwing open the little window towards the 🔙 of the
entry, you at 🔚 come to the 🔚 that such an idea, however
😠, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and 😖 you was a long, limber, portentous,
black mass of something hovering in the ♥ of the picture over 3⃣
blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy,
soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to 🐏 a nervous 👨 distracted.
Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable
sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily
took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting
meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would 💨 you
through.--It's the Black 🌊 in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural
combat of the 4⃣ 🔑 elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a
Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream
of Time. But at 🔚 all these fancies yielded to that 1⃣ portentous
something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest
were plain. But 🔚; does it not 🉑 a faint resemblance to a gigantic
🐟? 😳 the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom
I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a
great hurricane; the half-foundered 🚢 weltering there with its 3⃣
dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated 🐳, purposing to
⛲ clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself
upon the 3⃣ mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly 👗 with
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of
👨 hair; and 1⃣ was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round
like the segment made in the 🆕-mown 🐀 by a long-armed mower. You
shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and 🐺
could ever have gone a 🔚-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying
implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons
all 😕 and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long
lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen
whales between a 🌅 and a sunset. And that harpoon--so like a
corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas, and 🏃 away with by a 🐳,
years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered
nigh the 💩, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a
👨, travelled full forty feet, and at 🔚 was found imbedded in the
hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut
through what in old times must have been a great 🔑 chimney with
fireplaces all round--you enter the public room. A 😯 duskier 🚉
is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled
planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's
cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored
old ark rocked so furiously. On 1⃣ side stood a long, low, shelf-like
table covered with cracked 👓 cases, filled with dusty rarities
gathered from this wide 👨's remotest nooks. 😌 from the
further 🐟 of the room stands a dark-looking den--the 🍰--a rude
attempt at a right 🐳's ❓. Be that how it may, there stands the
vast arched bone of the 🐳's jaw, so wide, a 🚋 might almost 🐏
beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters,
bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift 🔚, like another
cursed Jonah (by which 🔑 indeed they called him), bustles a little
withered old 👨, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors
deliriums and 🔚.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though
true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses
deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating 💺. Parallel meridians
rudely pecked into the 👓, 💍 these footpads' goblets. 😆 to
THIS 🎶, and your 👢 is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so
on to the full 👓--the Cape 🎺 measure, which you may gulp down for
a shilling.

Upon entering the 🚉 I found a number of 🆕 seamen gathered about
a table, examining by a dim ✨ divers specimens of SKRIMSHANDER. I
sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a
room, received for answer that his 🏠 was full--not a bed unoccupied.
"But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections
to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin'
a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing."

I told him that I never liked to 😴 2⃣ in a bed; that if I should
ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
that if he (the landlord) really had no other 🚉 for me, and the
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with
the half of any decent 👨's blanket.

"I thought so. All right; 🉑 a 💺. Supper?--you want supper?
Supper'll be ready directly."

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
🔋. At 1⃣ 🔚 a ruminating tar was 😯 further adorning it with
his 💩-👅, stooping over and diligently 🏃 away at the space
between his legs. He was trying his 🚹 at a 🚢 under full sail, but
he didn't 💩 much headway, I thought.

At 🔚 some 4⃣ or 5⃣ of us were summoned to our meal in an
adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland--no 🔥 at all--the landlord
said he couldn't afford it. 0⃣ but 2⃣ dismal tallow candles, each
in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our 👿 jackets, and
📖 to our lips cups of scalding 🍵 with our half frozen fingers. But
the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only ♥ and potatoes,
but dumplings; 🔉 heavens! dumplings for supper! 1⃣ 🆕 fellow in
a green 📦 🍰, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most 😨
manner.

"My 👦," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
sartainty."

"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"

"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer
is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't--he eats
0⃣ but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."

"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?"

"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so
turned out that we should 😴 together, he must undress and get into
bed before I did.

Supper over, the company went 🔙 to the 🍰-room, when, knowing not
what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening
as a 🍑 on.

🔜 a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord
cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing
this 🌅; a 3⃣ years' voyage, and a full 🚢. Hurrah, boys; now
we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."

A tramping of 🌊 boots was heard in the entry; the 🚪 was flung open,
and in rolled a 😠 👗 of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy
⌚ coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all
bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
👏 of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their ⛵,
and this was the first 🏠 they entered. No ❓, then, that they
made a straight wake for the 🐳's 👄--the 🍰--when the wrinkled
little old Jonah, there officiating, 🔜 poured them out brimmers all
round. 1⃣ complained of a bad cold in his ❓, upon which Jonah
mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how
long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the
weather side of an 🎇-island.

The liquor 🔜 mounted into their heads, as it generally does 😳
with the arrantest topers 🆕 landed from 🌊, and they began capering
about most obstreperously.

I observed, however, that 1⃣ of them held somewhat aloof, and though
he seemed desirous not to 👶 the hilarity of his shipmates by his own
sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise
as the rest. This 👨 interested me at once; and since the 🌊-gods
had ordained that he should 🔜 become my shipmate (though but a
😴-partner 1⃣, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will
here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full 6⃣ feet
in 🔝, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have
seldom seen such 💪 in a 👨. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep
shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to 🍃
him much 😂. His 🔉 at once announced that he was a Southerner,
and from his 🆗 stature, I thought he must be 1⃣ of those tall
mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry
of his companions had mounted to its 🔝, this 👨 slipped away
unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the
🌊. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and
being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised
a 😢 of "Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of
the 🏠 in pursuit of him.

It was now about ♣ ⭕'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally 😯 after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself
upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance
of the seamen.

No 👨 prefers to 😴 2⃣ in a bed. In fact, you would a 🔉 ✋
rather not 😴 with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but
people like to be ㊙ when they are 😴. And when it comes to
😴 with an 👽 👽, in a strange inn, in a strange
town, and that 👽 a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely
multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should
😴 2⃣ in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more 😴
2⃣ in a bed at 🌊, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
all 😴 together in 1⃣ apartment, but you have your own hammock, and
🔝 yourself with your own blanket, and 😴 in your own skin.

The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
thought of 😴 with him. It was fair to presume that being a
harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the 🐚 might be, would not be of
the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be
🏠 and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at
midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?

"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't 😴
with him. I'll try the bench here."

"Just as you please; I'Ⓜ sorry I 🏦 🆓 ye a tablecloth for a
mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots and
notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's ✈
there in the 🍰--wait, I say, and I'll 💩 ye snug enough." So saying
he procured the ✈; and with his old silk 💩 first dusting
the bench, vigorously 👗 to planing away at my bed, the while 😁
like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at 🔚 the
✈-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was
near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's 🍶 to quit--the
bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing
in the 👨 could 💩 eider down of a 💴 plank. So gathering up the
shavings with another 😁, and throwing them into the great stove in
the ♥ of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a
brown study.

I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a 🐾 too
short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a 🐾 too
narrow, and the other bench in the room was about 4⃣ inches higher
than the planed 1⃣--so there was no yoking them. I then placed the
first bench lengthwise 🔛 the only 🔝 space against the wall,
leaving a little interval between, for my 🔙 to settle down in. But I
🔜 found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under
the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially
as another current from the rickety 🚪 met the 1⃣ from the window,
and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate
vicinity of the 🏢 where I had thought to spend the night.

The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but 🔚, couldn't I steal
a march on him--💨 his 🚪 inside, and 🌹 into his bed, not to be
wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
🔙 thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
🌅, so 🔜 as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!

😯, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending
a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I began to think
that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against
this 👽 harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping
in before long. I'll have a 🔉 look at him then, and perhaps we may
become jolly 🔉 bedfellows after all--there's no telling.

But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,
and going to bed, yet no 🏠 of my harpooneer.

"Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep such
late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve ⭕'clock.

The landlord chuckled again with his 🏃 chuckle, and seemed to
be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he
answered, "generally he's an early 🐦--airley to bed and airley to
🌹--yes, he's the 🐦 what catches the worm. But to-night he went out
a peddling, you 📅, and I don't 📅 what on airth keeps him so late,
unless, may be, he can't sell his ❓."

"Can't sell his ❓?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
are telling me?" getting into a towering 😡. "Do you pretend to say,
landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday
night, or rather Sunday 🌅, in peddling his ❓ around this town?"

"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't
sell it here, the market's overstocked."

"With what?" shouted I.

"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the 👨?"

"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better
🔚 spinning that yarn to me--I'Ⓜ not green."

"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I
rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a
slanderin' his ❓."

"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a 😡 again at this
unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.

"It's broke a'ready," said he.

"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"

"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."

"Landlord," said I, going up to him as 🆒 as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-😡--"landlord, 🔚 whittling. You and I must understand 1⃣
another, and that too without delay. I come to your 🏠 and want a
bed; you tell me you can only 🍃 me half a 1⃣; that the other half
belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I
have not yet seen, you 🏃 in telling me the most mystifying and
exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
towards the 👨 whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of 🔗,
landlord, which is an intimate and ㊙ 1⃣ in the highest
degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the
night with him. And in the first 🚉, you will be so 🔉 as to unsay
that story about selling his ❓, which if true I 🉑 to be 🔉
evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of 😴
with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by trying
to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to
a criminal prosecution."

"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long
sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy,
this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from
the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed 🆕 Zealand heads
(great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but 1⃣, and that 1⃣
he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not
do to be sellin' 👨 heads about the streets when folks is goin' to
churches. He wanted to, 🔚 Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was
goin' out of the 🚪 with 4⃣ heads strung on a 🚋, for all the
airth like a 🚋 of inions."

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable ㊙, and showed
that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me--but at
the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a
Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
business as selling the heads of dead idolators?

"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous 👨."

"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting 😨
late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed; Sal and me
slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's plenty of room
for 2⃣ to 👢 about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that. Why,
afore we 🍃 it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the
🐾 of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about 1⃣ night, and
somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come 🔛 here, I'll 🍃 ye a
glim in a 💓;" and so saying he lighted a 💿 and held it towards
me, offering to 🍃 the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a
clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday--you won't 📅 that
harpooneer to-night; he's come to ⚓ somewhere--come 🔛 then; DO
come; WON'T ye come?"

I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
ushered into a small room, cold as a 🍞, and furnished, sure enough,
with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any 4⃣ harpooneers
to 😴 abreast.

"There," said the landlord, placing the 💿 on a crazy old 🌊 chest
that did 🔁 duty as a wash-🐻 and ♥ table; "there, 💩
yourself comfortable now, and 🔉 night to ye." I turned round from
eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.

Folding 🔙 the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the
most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced
round the room; and besides the bedstead and ♥ table, could 📅
no other furniture belonging to the 🚉, but a rude shelf, the 4⃣
walls, and a papered fireboard representing a 👨 striking a 🐳. Of
things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed
up, and thrown upon the floor in 1⃣ corner; also a large seaman's 👜,
containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no ❓ in lieu of a land trunk.
Likewise, there was a 📦 of outlandish bone 🐟 hooks on the shelf
over the 🔥-🚉, and a tall harpoon standing at the ❓ of the bed.

But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it 🔚 to the
✨, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive
at some satisfactory 🔚 concerning it. I can compare it to
0⃣ but a large 🚪 mat, ornamented at the edges with little
tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an
Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the ♥ of this mat,
as you 📅 the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible
that any sober harpooneer would get into a 🚪 mat, and parade the
streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try
it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and
thick, and I thought a little 🔇, as though this ㊙ harpooneer
had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of 👓
stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore
myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
❓-peddling harpooneer, and his 🚪 mat. After thinking some time on
the bed-side, I got up and took off my 👿 👑, and then stood in
the ♥ of the room thinking. I then took off my 🍰, and thought
a little more in my 👕 sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now,
half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about
the harpooneer's not coming 🏠 at all that night, it being so very
late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and
then blowing out the ✨ tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the
😟 of heaven.

Whether that mattress was stuffed with 🌽-cobs or 😕 crockery,
there is no telling, but I rolled about a 🔉 ✋, and could not 😴
for a long time. At 🔚 I slid off into a ✨ doze, and had pretty
nearly made a 🔉 offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a 🔉
footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of ✨ come into the room
from under the 🚪.

Lord 😌 me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
❓-peddler. But I lay perfectly 😯, and resolved not to say a word
till spoken to. Holding a ✨ in 1⃣ 🚹, and that identical 🆕
Zealand ❓ in the other, the 👽 entered the room, and without
looking towards the bed, placed his 💿 a 🔉 way off from me on the
floor in 1⃣ corner, and then began 🏃 away at the knotted cords
of the large 👜 I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all
eagerness to 📅 his face, but he kept it averted for some time while
employed in unlacing the 👜's 👄. This accomplished, however, he
turned round--when, 🔉 heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of
a dark, purplish, 🐔 colour, here and there stuck over with large
blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a 😨
bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is,
just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to 🔧 his face
so towards the ✨, that I plainly saw they could not be
😌-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were
stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to 💩 of this;
but 🔜 an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of
a white 👨--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been
tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the 🏃 of his
distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,
thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a 👨 can be honest in any
sort of skin. But then, what to 💩 of his unearthly complexion, that
🏢 of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the
squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be 0⃣ but a 🔉 🍰 of
tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white 👨
into a purplish 🐔 1⃣. However, I had never been in the South Seas;
and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the
skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty
having opened his 👜, he commenced fumbling in it, and 🔜 pulled
out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing
these on the old chest in the ♥ of the room, he then took the 🆕
Zealand ❓--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed it down into the 👜.
He now took off his hat--a 🆕 beaver hat--when I came nigh singing out
with 🆕 surprise. There was no hair on his ❓--none to speak of at
least--0⃣ but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His
bald purplish ❓ now looked for all the 👨 like a mildewed 💀.
Had not the 👽 stood between me and the 🚪, I would have bolted
out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.

😳 as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but
it was the 🔙 floor 🔙. I am no coward, but what to 💩 of
this ❓-peddling purple 👿 altogether passed my comprehension.
Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and
😖 about the 👽, I confess I was now as much afraid of him
as if it was the devil himself who had thus 😕 into my room at
the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not
🔙 enough just then to 📲 him, and demand a satisfactory answer
concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at 🔚 showed
his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered
with the same squares as his face; his 🔙, too, was all over the same
dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just
escaped from it with a 😌-plaster 👕. 😯 more, his very
legs were marked, as if a 📦 of dark green frogs were 🏃 up
the trunks of 🆕 palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some
abominable 🐺 or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South
Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.
A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might
🉑 a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the 🐺 went about
something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that
he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his 🔉 grego, or wrapall, or
dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with
a hunch on its 🔙, and exactly the colour of a 3⃣ days' old Congo
👶. Remembering the embalmed ❓, at first I almost thought that
this black manikin was a real 👶 preserved in some similar manner. But
seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a 🔉 ✋
like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be 0⃣ but a wooden
idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the 🐺 goes up to the
empty 🔥-🚉, and removing the papered 🔥-board, sets up this
little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The
chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I
thought this 🔥-🚉 made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel
for his Congo idol.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half ㊙ image, feeling but
ill at 😌 meantime--to 📅 what was next to ⌚. First he takes
about a 🔁 handful of shavings out of his grego 👝, and places
them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of 🚢 🍪 on
🔝 and applying the 🔥 from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into
a sacrificial blaze. 🔜, after many hasty snatches into the 🔥,
and 😯 hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be
scorching them badly), he at 🔚 succeeded in drawing out the 🍪;
then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of
it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such
dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange
antics were accompanied by 😯 👽 guttural noises from the
devotee, who seemed to be praying in a 🍑-song or else singing some
pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the
most unnatural manner. At 🔚 extinguishing the 🔥, he took the idol
up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego 👝 as
carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.

All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
now or never, before the ✨ was put out, to break the spell in which
I had so long been bound.

But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal 1⃣.
Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the ❓ of it for an
💓, and then holding it to the ✨, with his 👄 at the handle,
he puffed out great clouds of tobacco 🚬. The next moment the ✨
was extinguished, and this 😠 cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth,
sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and 🎁
a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.

Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
be, to keep 😯, and let me get up and ✨ the lamp again. But his
guttural responses 😆 me at once that he but ill comprehended my
meaning.

"Who-🇪🇸 debel you?"--he at 🔚 said--"you no speak-🇪🇸, dam-me, I kill-🇪🇸."
And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the
dark.

"Landlord, for God's 🍶, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord! ⌚!
Coffin! Angels! 😌 me!"

"Speak-🇪🇸! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-🇪🇸!" again growled the
cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk 😕 the
hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on 🔥.
But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room ✨
in 🚹, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.

"Don't be afraid now," said he, 😁 again, "Queequeg here wouldn't
harm a hair of your ❓."

"🔚 your 😁," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that
infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"

"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads
around town?--but 🔧 flukes again and ❌ to 😴. Queequeg, look
here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this 👨 sleepe you--you sabbee?"

"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
sitting up in bed.

"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
throwing the 👗 to 1⃣ side. He really did this in not only a civil
but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment.
For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking
cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to
myself--the 👨's a 👨 being just as I am: he has just as much reason
to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better 😴 with a sober
cannibal than a drunken Christian.

"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or
whatever you ☎ it; tell him to 🔚 🚬, in short, and I will
🔧 in with him. But I don't fancy having a 👨 🚬 in bed with me.
It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to 1⃣ side as much as to
say--"I won't 👻 a leg of ye."

"🔉 night, landlord," said I, "you may ❌."

I turned in, and never slept better in my life.



CHAPTER 4⃣. The Counterpane.


Upon waking next 🌅 about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown
over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost
thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of
odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his
tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure,
no 2⃣ parts of which were of 1⃣ precise 😎--owing I suppose to
his keeping his arm at 🌊 unmethodically in sun and 😎, his 👕
sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--this same arm of his, I
say, looked for all the 👨 like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could
hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and
it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that
Queequeg was 😗 me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a
👶, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--I
think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little
sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,
was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--my
mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to
bed, though it was only 2⃣ ⭕'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But
there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the
third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time,
and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.

I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse
before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the
small of my 🔙 ached to think of it. And it was so ✨ too; the
sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the
streets, and the 🔉 of ☀ voices all over the 🏠. I felt worse
and worse--at 🔚 I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my
stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself
at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to 🍃 me a 🔉
slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie
abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most
conscientious of stepmothers, and 🔙 I had to ❌ to my room. For
several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great ✋ worse than I
have ever done since, 😳 from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At
🔚 I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly
waking from it--half steeped in dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before
sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock
🏃 through all my frame; 0⃣ was to be seen, and 0⃣ was
to be heard; but a supernatural 🚹 seemed placed in mine. My arm hung
over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, 🔇 form
or phantom, to which the 🚹 belonged, seemed closely seated by my
bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with
the most 😨 fears, not daring to drag away my 🚹; yet ever thinking
that if I could but stir it 1⃣ 1⃣ inch, the horrid spell would be
😕. I knew not how this consciousness at 🔚 glided away from me;
but waking in the 🌅, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for
days and weeks and months afterwards I 😖 myself in confounding
attempts to explain the ㊙. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle
myself with it.

Now, 🉑 away the 😨 fear, and my sensations at feeling the
supernatural 🚹 in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to
those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan
arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly
recurred, 1⃣ by 1⃣, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to
the comical predicament. For though I tried to 🏃 his arm--🔓 his
bridegroom clasp--yet, 😴 as he was, he 😯 hugged me tightly,
as though 0⃣ but 🔚 should 🏢 us 👫. I now strove to rouse
him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over,
my neck feeling as if it were in a 🐴-👮; and suddenly felt a
slight 🍞. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk
😴 by the 🐺's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced 👶. A
pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange 🏠 in the
broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!--in the 🔑 of
goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and
loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his
😗 a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of 💨, I succeeded in
extracting a grunt; and 🔜, he drew 🔙 his arm, shook himself
all over like a Newfoundland 🐶 just from the water, and sat up in bed,
stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he
did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly 🌅 over
him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings
now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at
🔚, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow,
and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon
the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that,
if it pleased me, he would 🍛 first and then 🍃 me to 🍛
afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,
under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the
truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what
you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I 🐻 this
particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much
civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;
staring at him from the bed, and watching all his 🚽 motions; for
the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless,
a 👨 like Queequeg you don't 📅 every day, he and his ways were well
worth unusual regarding.

He commenced dressing at 🔝 by donning his beaver hat, a very tall 1⃣,
by the by, and then--😯 minus his trowsers--he hunted up his boots.
What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next
movement was to 🐚 himself--boots in 🚹, and hat on--under the bed;
when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was
hard at 🏃 booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever
heard of, is any 👨 required to be ㊙ when putting on his
boots. But Queequeg, do you 📅, was a creature in the transition
stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
to ® off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His
education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not
been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled
himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been 😯 a 🐺,
he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At
🔚, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his
eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not
being much accustomed to boots, his 👫 of 🔇, wrinkled cowhide
ones--probably not made to ♣ either--rather pinched and 😧
him at the first ❌ off of a bitter cold 🌅.

Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
street being very narrow, the 🏠 opposite commanded a plain ⌚
into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;
I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his 🚽 somewhat,
and particularly to get into his pantaloons as 🔜 as possible. He
complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the
🌅 any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to
my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his
chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a
👨 of hard soap on the wash-🐻 ♥ table, dipped it into water
and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to 📅 where he kept
his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner,
slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the ❓, whets it a little
on his 👢, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall,
begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks
I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.
Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of
what 🆗 steel the ❓ of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp
the long straight edges are always kept.

The rest of his 🚽 was 🔜 achieved, and he proudly marched out of
the room, wrapped up in his great pilot 👿 👑, and sporting his
harpoon like a marshal's baton.



CHAPTER 5⃣. Breakfast.


I quickly followed suit, and descending into the 🍰-room accosted the
😁 landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
bedfellow.

However, a 🔉 😆 is a mighty 🔉 thing, and rather too scarce a
🔉 thing; the more's the pity. So, if any 1⃣ 👨, in his own
proper person, afford stuff for a 🔉 joke to anybody, let him not be
🔙, but let him cheerfully 🍃 himself to spend and be spent in
that way. And the 👨 that has anything bountifully laughable about him,
be sure there is more in that 👨 than you perhaps think for.

The 🍰-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a 🔉 look at. They were
nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and 🔙 mates, and third mates, and
🌊 carpenters, and 🌊 coopers, and 🌊 blacksmiths, and harpooneers,
and 🚢 keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an
unshorn, shaggy 👗, all wearing 👿 jackets for 🌅 gowns.

You could pretty plainly tell how long each 1⃣ had been ashore. This
🆕 fellow's 🔉 cheek is like a sun-toasted 🍐 in hue, and
would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been 3⃣ days
landed from his Indian voyage. That 👨 next him looks a few shades
lighter; you might say a 👻 of satin wood is in him. In the
complexion of a third 😯 lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached
withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could ®
a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the
Andes' western slope, to ® forth in 1⃣ array, contrasting climates,
zone by zone.

"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a 🚪, and in we went
to breakfast.

They say that 🚹 who have seen the 👨, thereby become quite at 😌
in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard,
the great 🆕 England traveller, and Mungo 🅿, the Scotch 1⃣; of all
🚹, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the
mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or
the taking a long solitary 🚶 on an empty 🐻, in the negro ♥
of Africa, which was the ♥ of poor Mungo's performances--this kind of
travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social
polish. 😯, for the most 🏢, that sort of thing is to be had
anywhere.

These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some
🔉 stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every
👨 maintained a 🔉 😯. And not only that, but they looked
embarrassed. Yes, here were a 👗 of 🌊-dogs, many of whom without the
slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire
strangers to them--and duelled them dead without 😉; and yet, here
they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same 📲, all of
kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they
had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.
A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!

But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the ❓ of
the table, too, it so chanced; as 🆒 as an icicle. To be sure I cannot
say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially
justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it
there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent
jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But
THAT was certainly very coolly done by him, and every 1⃣ knows that in
most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he eschewed
☕ and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks,
done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the
rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting
there quietly digesting and 🚬 with his inseparable hat on, when I
sallied out for a stroll.



CHAPTER 6⃣. The Street.


If I had been 😲 at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite ♣ of a
civilized town, that astonishment 🔜 departed upon taking my first
daylight stroll through the streets of 🆕 Bedford.

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to ⌚ the queerest looking nondescripts from 👽
parts. 😳 in Broadway and 🌰 streets, Mediterranean mariners
will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not
👽 to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
Yankees have often scared the natives. But 🆕 Bedford beats all Water
Street and Wapping. In these 🔚-mentioned haunts you 📅 only sailors;
but in 🆕 Bedford, actual cannibals 🐻 chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet 🏃 on their bones unholy flesh. It
makes a 👽 stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
and Brighggians, and, besides the 😠 specimens of the whaling-craft
which unheeded reel about the streets, you will 📅 other sights 😯
more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
scores of green Vermonters and 🆕 Hampshire 🚹, all athirst for gain
and glory in the fishery. They are mostly 🆕, of stalwart frames;
fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch
the 🐳-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
🉑-tailed 🍰, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-👅. Here
comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine 😷.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred 1⃣--I mean a
downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the 🐶-days, will mow his
2⃣ acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
country dandy like this takes it into his ❓ to 💩 a distinguished
reputation, and joins the great 🐳-fishery, you should 📅 the
comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his
🌊-outfit, he orders 🔔-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his
canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps
in the first howling gale, when Ⓜ 🎨 driven, straps, buttons, and
all, down the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
bumpkins to ® her visitors. Not at all. 😯 🆕 Bedford is a queer
🚉. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this
day perhaps have been in as howling 🚋 as the coast of Labrador.
As it is, parts of her 🔙 country are enough to frighten 1⃣, they
look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest 🚉 to live
in, in all 🆕 England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like
Canaan; a land, also, of 🌽 and wine. The streets do not 🏃 with
milk; nor in the ⛲-time do they pave them with 🆕 eggs. Yet, in
spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in 🆕 Bedford. Whence came
they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?

❌ and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
🏠, and your ❓ will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses
and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
1⃣ and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the 💺
of the 🌊. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?

In 🆕 Bedford, fathers, they say, 🍃 whales for dowers to their
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-👨.
You must ❌ to 🆕 Bedford to 📅 a brilliant 💒; for, they say,
they have reservoirs of oil in every 🏠, and every night recklessly
🔥 their lengths in spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to 📅; full of 🆗 maples--long
avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and
bountiful 🐴-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their
tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is 🎨;
which in many a district of 🆕 Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
of flowers upon the 😇 refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final
day.

And the women of 🆕 Bedford, they 🌼 like their own 😳 roses. But
roses only 🌼 in summer; whereas the 🆗 carnation of their cheeks
is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere 👫 that
🌼 of theirs, ye cannot, 😌 in Salem, where they tell me the 🆕
girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off
shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of
the Puritanic sands.



CHAPTER 7⃣. The Chapel.


In this same 🆕 Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are
the moody fishermen, 🔜 bound for the Indian 🌊 or Pacific, who
💣 to 💩 a Sunday 📲 to the 🏢. I am sure that I did not.

Returning from my first 🌅 stroll, I again sallied out upon this
special errand. The sky had changed from 🔝, ☀ cold, to driving
sleet and ☁. Wrapping myself in my shaggy 👑 of the cloth called
bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn 😡. Entering, I
found a small 😕 congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and
widows. A muffled 😯 reigned, only 😕 at times by the shrieks
of the 😡. Each 🔇 worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from
the other, as if each 🔇 grief were insular and incommunicable. The
chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these 🔇 islands of 🚹 and
women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders,
masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. 3⃣ of them ran
something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:--

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF 🚽 TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was
😖 overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November
1st, 1836. THIS 💊 Is erected to his Memory BY HIS 👶.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,
WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming 1⃣ of the boats'
crews OF THE 🚢 ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a 🐳, On the
Off-shore ⚓ in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is
here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows
of his ⛵ was killed by a Sperm 🐳 on the coast of 🗾, AUGUST
3d, 1833. THIS 💊 Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.

Shaking off the sleet from my 🎇-glazed hat and 👑, I seated myself
near the 🚪, and turning sideways was surprised to 📅 Queequeg near
me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze
of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This 🐺 was the only
person 🎁 who seemed to 🎶 my entrance; because he was the only
1⃣ who could not ®, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid
inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen
whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not;
but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly
did several women 🎁 🐻 the countenance if not the trappings
of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak
tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to 🏃 afresh.

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green 🐀; who standing among
flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation
that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
black-bordered marbles which 🔝 no ashes! What despair in those
immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in
the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to
the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might
those tablets 🐻 in the cave of Elephanta as here.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of 👨 are included;
why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is
that to his 🔑 who yesterday departed for the other 👨, we prefix
so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the
Life Insurance Companies 🐻 🔚-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies
antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we
😯 refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to 😯 all
the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a
whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and 😳 from these
dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
✨ of that darkened, doleful day ® the fate of the whalemen
who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But
somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to 🚢, 🆗
chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove ⛵ will 💩 me an
immortal by brevet. Yes, there is 🔚 in this business of whaling--a
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a 👨 into Eternity. But what
then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and 🔚.
Methinks that what they ☎ my shadow here on earth is my true
♥. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too
much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that
thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my
better being. In fact 🉑 my body who will, 🉑 it I say, it is not
me. And therefore 3⃣ cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove ⛵ and
stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.



CHAPTER 8⃣. The Pulpit.


I had not been seated very long ere a 👨 of a certain venerable
robustness entered; immediately as the 😡-pelted 🚪 flew 🔙 upon
admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
sufficiently attested that this 🆗 old 👨 was the chaplain. Yes, it
was the famous 🔰 Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his
youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.
At the time I now write of, 🔰 Mapple was in the hardy winter of a
🔉 old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a 🔙
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone
certain mild gleams of a 🆕 developing 🌼--the ⛲ verdure
peeping forth 😳 beneath February's snow. No 1⃣ having previously
heard his history, could for the first time behold 🔰 Mapple without
the utmost 😟, because there were certain engrafted clerical
peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life
he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no ☔, and
certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down
with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth 👑 seemed almost to
drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed.
However, hat and 🍰 and overshoes were 1⃣ by 1⃣ removed, and hung up
in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,
he quietly approached the pulpit.

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty 1⃣, and since a
regular stairs to such a 🔝 would, by its long 🐟 with the floor,
seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect,
it seemed, had acted upon the hint of 🔰 Mapple, and finished the
pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side 🏃, like
those used in mounting a 🚢 from a ⛵ at 🌊. The wife of a whaling
captain had provided the chapel with a handsome 👫 of 😳 worsted
👨-ropes for this 🏃, which, being itself nicely headed, and
stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what
manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for
an 💓 at the 🐾 of the 🏃, and with both hands grasping the
ornamental knobs of the 👨-ropes, 🔰 Mapple 🐱 a look 🆙,
and then with a truly sailor-like but 😯 reverential dexterity, 🚹
over 🚹, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-🔝 of his vessel.

The perpendicular parts of this side 🏃, as is usually the 🐚 with
swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,
so that at every 👣 there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a 🚢,
these joints in the 🎁 instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not
prepared to 📅 🔰 Mapple after gaining the 🔝, slowly 🔧
round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the 🏃
👣 by 👣, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him
impregnable in his little Quebec.

I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
🔰 Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,
that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks
of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this
thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be,
then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual
withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?
Yes, for replenished with the ♥ and wine of the word, to the faithful
👨 of God, this pulpit, I 📅, is a self-containing stronghold--a lofty
Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.

But the side 🏃 was not the only strange feature of the 🚉,
borrowed from the chaplain's former 🌊-farings. Between the marble
cenotaphs on either 🚹 of the pulpit, the wall which formed its 🔙
was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant 🚢 beating
against a 😨 😡 off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
breakers. But high above the flying 💨 and dark-rolling clouds, there
floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an 👼's
face; and this bright face shed a distinct 🏢 of radiance upon the
🚢's tossed deck, something like that silver 🐚 now inserted into
the 😤's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah, noble 🚢," the 👼
seemed to say, "💓 on, 💓 on, Ⓜ noble 🚢, and 🉑 a hardy
helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling
off--serenest azure is at 🚹."

Nor was the pulpit itself without a 👻 of the same 🌊-taste that
had achieved the 🏃 and the picture. Its panelled front was in
the likeness of a 🚢's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a
😌 👨 of 📜 🏃, fashioned after a 🚢's 🎻-headed
beak.

What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this earth's
foremost 🏢; all the rest comes in its 🌹; the pulpit leads the
👨. From thence it is the 😡 of God's quick 💢 is first
descried, and the 🙇 must 🉑 the earliest brunt. From thence it is
the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds.
Yes, the 👨's a 🚢 on its passage out, and not a voyage complete;
and the pulpit is its 🙇.



CHAPTER 9⃣. The Sermon.


🔰 Mapple 🌹, and in a mild 🔉 of unassuming 🏢 ordered
the 😕 people to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away
to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of 🔉 🌊-boots among the benches, and a
😯 slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was 😯 again, and
every ♥ on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large
brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered
a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the
💺 of the 🌊.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of
a 🔔 in a 🚢 that is foundering at 🌊 in a ☁--in such tones he
commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and 😂--

     "The ribs and terrors in the 🐳,
     Arched over me a dismal gloom,
     While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
     And 🌹 me deepening down to doom.

     "I saw the opening maw of hell,
     With endless pains and sorrows there;
     Which none but they that feel can tell--
     Oh, I was plunging to despair.

     "In black distress, I called my God,
     When I could scarce believe him mine,
     He bowed his 👂 to my complaints--
     No more the 🐳 did me confine.

     "With speed he flew to my relief,
     As on a radiant 🐬 borne;
     😨, yet bright, as lightning shone
     The face of my Deliverer God.

     "My song for ever shall 📖
     That 😨, that joyful hour;
     I 🍃 the glory to my God,
     His all the mercy and the 🏢."


Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
howling of the 😡. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
over the leaves of the Bible, and at 🔚, folding his 🚹 down upon
the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the 🔚 verse of the
first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great 🐟 to 🉑 up
Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this 📖, containing only 4⃣ chapters--4⃣ yarns--is 1⃣
of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what
depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine 🔉! what a pregnant
lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the
🐟's belly! How 🎈-like and boisterously Ⓜ! We feel the floods
surging over us; we 🔉 with him to the kelpy 💺 of the waters;
🌊-weed and all the slime of the 🌊 is about us! But WHAT is this
lesson that the 📖 of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a 2⃣-stranded
lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful 🚹, and a lesson to me as a pilot
of the living God. As sinful 🚹, it is a lesson to us all, because it
is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the
swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and
😂 of Jonah. As with all sinners among 🚹, the sin of this 👦 of
Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never
mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard
command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to
do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to
persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in
this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah 😯 further flouts at
God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a 🚢 made by 🚹 will
🏃 him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains
of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a 🚢
that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city
than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned 🚹. And where is
Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa,
as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
Atlantic was an almost 👽 🌊. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa,
shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the
Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than 2⃣ Ⓜ miles to the
westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. 📅 ye
not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee 👨-wide from God?
Miserable 👨! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
slouched hat and guilty ♥, skulking from his God; prowling among the
shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So 😕,
self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those
days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested
ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a
hat-📦, valise, or carpet-👜,--no friends accompany him to the wharf
with their adieux. At 🔚, after much dodging search, he finds the
Tarshish 🚢 receiving the 🔚 items of her cargo; and as he steps on
board to 📅 its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment
desist from hoisting in the goods, to 🎶 the 👽's evil ♥.
Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all 😌 and confidence;
in vain essays his wretched 😁. Strong intuitions of the 👨 assure
the mariners he can be no 😇. In their gamesome but 😯 serious
way, 1⃣ whispers to the other--"💩, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe,
do you 🎶 him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the
adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, 1⃣ of the missing
murderers from Sodom." Another runs to ® the 🎶 that's stuck
against the spile upon the wharf to which the 🚢 is moored, offering
5⃣ 💯 gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and
containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah
to the 🎶; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,
prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and
summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a
coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong
suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him
not to be the 👨 that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends
into the cabin.

"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless
❓ mangles Jonah! For the 💓 he almost turns to flee again.
But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this 🚢 to Tarshish; how 🔜
sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah,
though the 👨 now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that
hollow 🔉, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with the
next coming tide,' at 🔚 he slowly answered, 😯 intently eyeing
him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'🔜 enough for any honest 👨 that goes a
passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another 🔪. But he swiftly calls away
the Captain from that 👃. 'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the
passage money how much is that?--I'll 🐻 now.' For it is particularly
written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this
history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And
taken with the context, this is full of meaning.

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was 1⃣ whose discernment detects crime
in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this
👨, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without
a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's 👜, ere he
judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual ♥; and it's assented
to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
time resolves to help a flight that paves its 🌹 with gold. Yet when
Jonah fairly takes out his 👜, prudent suspicions 😯 molest the
Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any
way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my
state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'Ⓜ travel-😩; I need 😴.'
'Ⓜ lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah
enters, and would 🔒 the 🚪, but the 🔒 contains no 🔑. Hearing
him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and
mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed
to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws
himself into his 🏢, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost
resting on his forehead. The air is 🔚, and Jonah gasps. Then, in
that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the 🚢's water-🎶, Jonah
feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the 🐳
shall 📖 him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.

"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
oscillates in Jonah's room; and the 🚢, heeling over towards the wharf
with the weight of the 🔚 bales received, the lamp, 🔥 and all,
though in slight ❓, 😯 maintains a permanent obliquity with
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it
but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp
alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his 🏢 his 😧 eyes
👋 round the 🚉, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no
refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more
and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight 🆙, so it
burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'

"Like 1⃣ who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, 😯
reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
Roman 🏃-🐴 but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
1⃣ who in that miserable plight 😯 turns and turns in 💫 😧,
praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at 🔚 amid
the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the
👨 who bleeds to 🔚, for conscience is the wound, and there's 0⃣
to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his 🏢, Jonah's prodigy
of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to 😴.

"And now the time of tide has come; the 🚢 casts off her cables; and
from the deserted wharf the uncheered 🚢 for Tarshish, all careening,
glides to 🌊. That 🚢, my friends, was the first of recorded
smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the 🌊 rebels; he will not
🉑 the wicked burden. A 😨 😡 comes on, the 🚢 is like to
break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to 😌 her;
when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the 👃
is 😱, and the 🚹 are yelling, and every plank thunders with
trampling feet right over Jonah's ❓; in all this 😠 tumult, Jonah
sleeps his hideous 😴. He sees no black sky and 😠 🌊, feels not
the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far 👢 of the
mighty 🐳, which 😳 now with open 👄 is cleaving the seas after
him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the 🚢--a
🏢 in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the
frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead 👂, 'What
meanest Ⓜ, ⭕, sleeper! 🌹!' Startled from his lethargy by that
😨 😢, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck,
grasps a shroud, to look out upon the 🌊. But at that moment he is
sprung upon by a panther 🎈 leaping over the bulwarks. 👋 after
👋 thus leaps into the 🚢, and finding no speedy 🌋 runs 💥
🙇 and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
And ever, as the white 🌔 shows her affrighted face from the steep
gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
bowsprit pointing high 🆙, but 🔜 💓 downward again towards the
😧 deep.

"Terrors upon terrors 🏃 shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors 🎶
him; more and more certain 🌹 their suspicions of him, and at 🔚,
fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven,
they fall to casting lots, to 📅 for whose cause this great tempest was
upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they
💍 him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest
Ⓜ? Thy country? What people? But 🎶 now, my shipmates, the behavior
of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where
from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions,
but likewise another answer to a ❓ not put by them, but the
unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard 🚹 of God that is
upon him.

"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven
who hath made the 🌊 and the dry land!' Fear him, ⭕ Jonah? Aye, well
mightest Ⓜ fear the Lord God THEN! Straightway, he now goes on to
💩 a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more
appalled, but 😯 are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating
God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his
deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to 🉑 him and 🐱 him
forth into the 🌊, for he knew that for HIS 🍶 this great tempest
was upon them; they mercifully 🔧 from him, and seek by other means to
😌 the 🚢. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder;
then, with 1⃣ 🚹 raised invokingly to God, with the other they not
unreluctantly lay 📖 of Jonah.

"And now behold Jonah taken up as an ⚓ and dropped into the 🌊;
when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the 🇪🇸, and the 🌊
is 😯, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth
water 💺. He goes down in the whirling ♥ of such a masterless
commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into
the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the 🐳 shoots-to all his ivory
teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto
the Lord out of the 🐟's belly. But 🎶 his prayer, and ⌚ a
weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not 😢 and wail for
🚋 deliverance. He feels that his 😨 punishment is just. He
leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that
spite of all his pains and pangs, he will 😯 look towards His holy
temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not
clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to
God was this 🐻 in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of
him from the 🌊 and the 🐳. Shipmates, I do not 🚉 Jonah before
you to be copied for his sin but I do 🚉 him before you as a model
for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, 🉑 heed to repent of it like
Jonah."

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the 😱,
slanting 😡 without seemed to add 🆕 🏢 to the preacher, who,
when describing Jonah's 🌊-😡, seemed tossed by a 😡 himself.
His deep chest heaved as with a ⚓-swell; his tossed arms seemed the
warring elements at 🏃; and the thunders that rolled away from off his
swarthy brow, and the ✨ leaping from his ♥, made all his simple
hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves
of the 📖 once more; and, at 🔚, standing motionless, with closed
eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and 🙇 his ❓ lowly,
with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these
words:

"Shipmates, God has laid but 1⃣ 🚹 upon you; both his hands press
upon me. I have ® ye by what murky ✨ may be mine the lesson that
Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and 😯 more to me,
for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down
from this mast-❓ and 💺 on the hatches there where you 💺, and
listen as you listen, while some 1⃣ of you reads ME that other and more
😨 lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God.
How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or 🔈 of true things, and
bidden by the Lord to 🔉 those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should 🔥, fled
from his mission, and sought to 🏃 his duty and his God by taking
🚢 at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we
have seen, God came upon him in the 🐳, and swallowed him down to
living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him 🔛 'into the
midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ❌ Ⓜ
fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his ❓,' and all the
watery 👨 of woe bowled over him. Yet 😳 then beyond the ✋ of
any plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the 🐳 grounded upon
the 🌊's utmost bones, 😳 then, God heard the engulphed, repenting
prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the 🐟; and from the
shuddering cold and blackness of the 🌊, the 🐳 came breeching
up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and
earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the
Lord came a 🔙 time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like
2⃣ 🌊-shells, 😯 multitudinously murmuring of the 🌊--Jonah
did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the
Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this 👨 charms from
Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
to appal! Woe to him whose 🔉 🔑 is more to him than goodness! Woe
to him who, in this 👨, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would
not be true, 😳 though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
himself a castaway!"

He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
face to them again, showed a deep 😂 in his eyes, as he cried out with
a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard 🚹 of
every woe, there is a sure 😂; and higher the 🔝 of that 😂,
than the 💺 of the woe is deep. Is not the main-🚚 higher than
the kelson is low? 😂 is to him--a far, far 🆙, and inward
😂--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever
stands forth his own inexorable self. 😂 is to him whose strong
arms yet 🔙 him, when the 🚢 of this 🐾 treacherous 👨 has
gone down beneath him. 😂 is to him, who gives no 💩 in the
truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out
from under the robes of Senators and Judges. 😂,--🔝-gallant
😂 is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
God, and is only a patriot to heaven. 😂 is to him, whom all the
waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous 💍 can never shake
from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal 😂 and deliciousness
will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
breath--⭕ 🔰!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal,
here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this 👨's, or
mine own. Yet this is 0⃣: I 🍃 eternity to Thee; for what is 👨
that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

He said no more, but slowly 👋 a benediction, covered his face with
his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
and he was left alone in the 🚉.



CHAPTER ❌. A ♥ Friend.


Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.
He was sitting on a bench before the 🔥, with his feet on the stove
hearth, and in 1⃣ 🚹 was holding 🔚 up to his face that little
negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a 💩-👅
gently whittling away at its 👃, meanwhile humming to himself in his
heathenish way.

But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty 🔜, going
to the table, took up a large 📖 there, and placing it on his lap
began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth
page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
🎁 utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He
would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number
1⃣ each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was
only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his
astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.

With much 😟 I sat watching him. 🐺 though he was, and
hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance
yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot
hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw
the traces of a simple honest ♥; and in his large, deep eyes,
fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a ♥ that would dare a
Ⓜ devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing
about the Pagan, which 😳 his uncouthness could not altogether maim.
He looked like a 👨 who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
Whether it was, too, that his ❓ being shaved, his forehead was drawn
out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was
his ❓ was phrenologically an excellent 1⃣. It may seem ridiculous,
but it reminded me of General Washington's ❓, as seen in the popular
busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope
from above the brows, which were likewise very 😌, like 2⃣
long promontories thickly wooded on 🔝. Queequeg was George Washington
cannibalistically developed.

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
looking out at the 😡 from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
never troubled himself with so much as a 1⃣ glance; but appeared
wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous 📖.
Considering how sociably we had been 😴 together the night
previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found
thrown over me upon waking in the 🌅, I thought this indifference
of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not
know exactly how to 🉑 them. At first they are overawing; their calm
self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed
also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have
no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck
me as mighty singular; yet, upon 🔙 thoughts, there was something
almost sublime in it. Here was a 👨 some twenty Ⓜ miles from
🏠, by the way of Cape 🎺, that is--which was the only way he could
get there--thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in
the 📡 Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his 😌; preserving
the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to
himself. Surely this was a 👻 of 🆗 philosophy; though no ❓ he
had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be
true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or
so striving. So 🔜 as I hear that such or such a 👨 gives himself
out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old 👩, he
must have "😕 his digester."

As I sat there in that now lonely room; the 🔥 burning low, in that
mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
round the casements, and peering in upon us 🔇, solitary 👫;
the 😡 booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of
strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered ♥
and maddened 🚹 were turned against the wolfish 👨. This soothing
🐺 had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a
nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.
😠 he was; a very sight of sights to 📅; yet I began to feel myself
mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll
try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but
hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
and hints, doing my best to 🍑 with him meanwhile. At first he little
noticed these advances; but 🔜, upon my referring to his 🔚
night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps
a little complimented.

We then turned over the 📖 together, and I endeavored to explain to
him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
that were in it. Thus I 🔜 engaged his 😟; and from that we went
to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen
in this famous town. 🔜 I proposed a social 🚬; and, producing
his 👝 and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat
exchanging puffs from that 😠 pipe of his, and keeping it regularly
passing between us.

If there yet lurked any 🎇 of indifference towards me in the Pagan's
breast, this pleasant, genial 🚬 we had, 🔜 thawed it out, and left
us cronies. He seemed to 🉑 to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as
I to him; and when our 🚬 was over, he pressed his forehead against
mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were
married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were ♥ friends;
he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this
sudden 🔥 of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing
to be much distrusted; but in this simple 🐺 those old rules would
not apply.

After supper, and another social chat and 🚬, we went to our room
together. He made me a 🎁 of his embalmed ❓; took out his
enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out
some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
mechanically dividing them into 2⃣ equal portions, pushed 1⃣ of them
towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay.
He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed
the 📰 fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
anxious for me to 🔗 him; but well knowing what was to ⌚, I
deliberated a moment whether, in 🐚 he invited me, I would comply or
otherwise.

I was a 🔉 Christian; born and bred in the ♥ of the infallible
Presbyterian ⛪. How then could I 🔗 with this 😠 idolator in
worshipping his 👨 of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do
you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an
insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do
the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to
my fellow 👨 what I would have my fellow 👨 to do to me--THAT is the
will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow 👨. And what do I wish that
this Queequeg would do to me? Why, 🔗 with me in my particular
Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then 🔗 with him
in his; ergo, I must 🔧 idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped
prop up the 😇 little idol; offered him burnt 🍪 with
Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his 👃; and that
done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
and all the 👨. But we did not ❌ to 😴 without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no 🚉 like a bed for ㊙
disclosures between friends. 👨 and wife, they say, there open the very
💺 of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie
and chat over old times till nearly 🌅. Thus, then, in our hearts'
honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving 👫.



CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.


We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
over mine, and then drawing them 🔙; so entirely sociable and 😇
and easy were we; when, at 🔚, by reason of our confabulations, what
little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent 🏢
began to 🌹 wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
sitting up; the 👗 well tucked around us, leaning against the
❓-board with our 4⃣ knees drawn up 🔚 together, and our 2⃣
noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt
very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;
indeed out of bed-👗 too, seeing that there was no 🔥 in the
room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
small 🏢 of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this 👨
that is not what it is merely by contrast. 0⃣ exists in itself. If
you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so
a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if,
like Queequeg and me in the bed, the 🔝 of your 👃 or the 🔝
of your ❓ be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general
consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this
reason a 😴 apartment should never be furnished with a 🔥, which
is 1⃣ of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the 🔝 of this
sort of deliciousness is to have 0⃣ but the blanket between you and
your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the
1⃣ warm ✨ in the ♥ of an arctic crystal.

We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether
by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
keeping my eyes shut, in ♣ the more to concentrate the snugness
of being in bed. Because no 👨 can ever feel his own identity aright
except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element
of our essences, though ✨ be more congenial to our clayey 🏢. Upon
opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created
darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
twelve-⭕'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did
I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
strike a ✨, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt
a strong desire to have a few 😯 puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said,
that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his 🚬 in the
bed the night before, yet 📅 how elastic our stiff prejudices 🌹 when
love once comes to 🙇 them. For now I liked 0⃣ better than to
have Queequeg 🚬 by me, 😳 in bed, because he seemed to be full
of such serene 🏠 😂 then. I no more felt unduly concerned for
the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed
㊙ comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real
friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
the Tomahawk from 1⃣ to the other, till slowly there grew over us a
blue hanging tester of 🚬, illuminated by the 🔥 of the 🆕-lit
lamp.

Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the 🐺 away to far
distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,
eager to hear his history, I begged him to ❌ on and tell it. He gladly
complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with
his 😕 phraseology, now enable me to 🎁 the whole story such as
it may 🌹 in the mere skeleton I 🍃.



CHAPTER 12. Biographical.


Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

When a 🆕-hatched 🐺 🏃 😠 about his native woodlands in
a 🐀 👊, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
sapling; 😳 then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
to 📅 something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or 2⃣. His
🔰 was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the
maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable
warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins--royal stuff; though
sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
untutored youth.

A 🎏 Harbor 🚢 visited his 🔰's bay, and Queequeg sought a
passage to Christian lands. But the 🚢, having her full complement of
seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his 🔰's influence
could 😤. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
off to a distant 🔉, which he knew the 🚢 must pass through when
she quitted the island. On 1⃣ side was a coral reef; on the other a low
👅 of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the
water. Hiding his canoe, 😯 afloat, among these thickets, with its
🙇 seaward, he sat down in the 💩, paddle low in 🚹; and when the
🚢 was gliding by, like a 💓 he darted out; gained her side; with
1⃣ 🔙 💨 of his 🐾 capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up
the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled
a ☎-💨 there, and swore not to let it ❌, though hacked in pieces.

In vain the captain threatened to 😖 him overboard; suspended a
cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the 👦 of a King, and
Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his 😠
desire to 📲 Christendom, the captain at 🔚 relented, and told
him he might 💩 himself at 🏠. But this 🆗 🆕 🐺--this 🌊
Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among
the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to
toil in the shipyards of 👽 cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming
ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the 🏢 of enlightening his
untutored countrymen. For at 💺--so he told me--he was actuated by a
🔉 desire to ⌚ among the Christians, the arts whereby to
💩 his people 😯 happier than they were; and more than that,
😯 better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen 🔜
convinced him that 😳 Christians could be both miserable and wicked;
infinitely more so, than all his 🔰's heathens. Arrived at 🔚 in
old 🎏 Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on
to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that 🚉 also,
poor Queequeg gave it up for 😖. Thought he, it's a wicked 👨 in
all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

And thus an old idolator at ♥, he yet lived among these Christians,
wore their 👗, and tried to 🍑 their gibberish. Hence the queer
ways about him, though now some time from 🏠.

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going 🔙, and having
a coronation; since he might now consider his 🔰 dead and gone, he
being very old and feeble at the 🔚 accounts. He answered no, not yet;
and added that he was 😨 Christianity, or rather Christians, had
unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled 🚽 of thirty pagan
Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,--as 🔜 as
he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to
sail about, and sow his 😠 oats in all 4⃣ oceans. They had made a
harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
movements. He answered, to ❌ to 🌊 again, in his old 📲. Upon
this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
an adventurous whaleman to 🚢 from. He at once resolved to accompany
me to that island, 🚢 aboard the same vessel, get into the same ⌚,
the same ⛵, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap;
with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.
To all this I joyously assented; for besides the ♥ I now felt
for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not
💣 to be of great usefulness to 1⃣, who, like me, was wholly ignorant
of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the 🌊, as
known to merchant seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe's 🔚 dying puff, Queequeg embraced
me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the ✨, we
rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very 🔜 were
😴.


CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.


Next 🌅, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed ❓ to a 💈,
for a block, I settled my own and comrade's 🎶; using, however, my
comrade's money. The 😁 landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's 🐓 and 🐷 stories
about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
whom I now companied with.

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
poor carpet-👜, and Queequeg's canvas 🔥 and hammock, away we went
down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket 📦 schooner moored at the
wharf. As we were going 🔛 the people stared; not at Queequeg
so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such ㊙ terms. But we
heeded them not, going 🔛 wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked
him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
♥, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
he had a particular ♥ for his own harpoon, because it was of
assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers
and mowers, who ❌ into the farmers' meadows armed with their own
scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--😳 so, Queequeg,
for his own ㊙ reasons, preferred his own harpoon.

Shifting the barrow from my 🚹 to his, he told me a funny story about
the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in 🎏 Harbor. The owners
of his 🚢, it seems, had lent him 1⃣, in which to 🏃 his
🔉 chest to his boarding 🏠. Not to seem ignorant about the
thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in
which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it
fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why,"
said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, 1⃣ would
think. Didn't the people 😆?"

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of
Rokovoko, it seems, at their 💒 feasts express the fragrant water
of 🆕 cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and
this punchbowl always forms the great 🔑 ornament on the braided
mat where the feast is held. Now a certain Ⓜ merchant 🚢 once
touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very
stately punctilious 👨, at least for a 🌊 captain--this
commander was invited to the 💒 feast of Queequeg's 👶, a
pretty 🆕 👸 just turned of ❌. Well; when all the 💒
guests were assembled at the bride's 🎍 cottage, this Captain
marches in, and being assigned the 🚉 of honour, placed himself over
against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the
King, Queequeg's 🔰. Grace being said,--for those people have their
grace as well as we--though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such
times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the
ducks, glance 🆙 to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say,
being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony
of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers
into the 🎳 before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself
placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking
himself--being Captain of a 🚢--as having plain precedence over a
mere island King, especially in the King's own 🏠--the Captain coolly
proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I suppose for a
huge finger-👓. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?--Didn't our
people 😆?"

At 🔚, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On 1⃣ side, 🆕
Bedford 🌹 in terraces of streets, their 🎇-covered trees all
glittering in the 🔝, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on
casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the 👨-wandering
🐳 ships lay 🔇 and safely moored at 🔚; while from others
came a 🔉 of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and
forges to 🏃 the pitch, all betokening that 🆕 cruises were on the
start; that 1⃣ most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a
🔙; and a 🔙 ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all
earthly 😓.

Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed 🆕; the little
Moss tossed the quick ✨ from her bows, as a 🆕 colt his snortings.
How I snuffed that 🐉 air!--how I spurned that turnpike earth!--that
common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and
hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the 🌊 which will
permit no records.

At the same ✨-⛲, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.
On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the
🐚; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways
leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the
2⃣ tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of
this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that
for some time we did not 🎶 the jeering glances of the passengers, a
lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that 2⃣ fellow beings should be so
companionable; as though a white 👨 were anything more dignified than a
whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,
by their intense greenness, must have come from the ♥ and ♥ of
all verdure. Queequeg caught 1⃣ of these 🆕 saplings mimicking him
💺 his 🔙. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping
his harpoon, the brawny 🐺 caught him in his arms, and by an almost
miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;
then slightly tapping his 💩 in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with
bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his 🔙 upon him,
lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.

"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, 🏃 towards that officer;
"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."

"Hallo, _you_ sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the 🌊, stalking
up to Queequeg, "what in 💥 do you mean by that? Don't you know you
might have killed that chap?"

"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.

"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-🇪🇸 that 👨 there," pointing
to the 😯 shivering greenhorn.

"Kill-🇪🇸," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
🚧 of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-🇪🇸 🐟-🇪🇸; Queequeg no kill-🇪🇸
so small-🇪🇸 🐟-🇪🇸; Queequeg kill-🇪🇸 big 🐳!"

"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-🇪🇸 YOU, you cannibal, if you
try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your ♥."

But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
mind his own ♥. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted
the weather-sheet, and the tremendous 💥 was now flying from side to
side, completely sweeping the entire after 🏢 of the deck. The poor
fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all
hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the 💥 to stay it,
seemed 😡. It flew from right to left, and 🔙 again, almost
in 1⃣ ticking of a ⌚, and every 💓 seemed on the point of
snapping into splinters. 0⃣ was done, and 0⃣ seemed capable of
being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the
💥 as if it were the 😦 jaw of an exasperated 🐳. In the
midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and
crawling under the path of the 💥, whipped 📖 of a rope, secured 1⃣
🔚 to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it
round the 💥 as it swept over his ❓, and at the next jerk, the spar
was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was 🏃 into the
👃, and while the hands were clearing away the 💩 ⛵, Queequeg,
stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living 🙇 of
a leap. For 3⃣ minutes or more he was seen swimming like a 🐶,
throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing
his brawny shoulders through the freezing ✨. I looked at the Ⓜ
and glorious fellow, but saw no 1⃣ to be saved. The greenhorn had gone
down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now
took an 💓's glance around him, and seeming to 📅 just how matters
were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he 🌹 again,
1⃣ arm 😯 striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form.
The ⛵ 🔜 picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands
voted Queequeg a noble 🎺; the captain begged his pardon. From that
hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took
his 🔚 long dive.

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
all deserved a 🎀 from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only
asked for water--🆕 water--something to wipe the brine off; that
done, he put on dry 👗, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the
bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying
to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock 👨, in all meridians. We
cannibals must help these Christians."



CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.


0⃣ more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
🆗 🏃, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

Nantucket! 🉑 out your map and look at it. 📅 what a real corner of
the 👨 it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely
than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock, and elbow of
sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than
you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting 📰. Some
gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
don't 🌹 naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have
to 🚢 beyond seas for a spile to 🔚 a leak in an oil cask; that
pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true
cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,
to get under the 😎 in summer time; that 1⃣ blade of 🐀 makes an
oasis, 3⃣ blades in a day's 🚶 a prairie; that they 🐻 quicksand
shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,
belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island
of by the 🌊, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of 🌊 turtles. But these
extravaganzas only ® that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
settled by the 😳-🚹. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle
swooped down upon the 🆕 England coast, and carried off an 👶
Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their 👶 borne
out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to ⌚ in the same
direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they
discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--the
poor little Indian's skeleton.

What ❓, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should 🉑
to the 🌊 for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in
the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at 🔚,
launching a navy of great ships on the 🌊, explored this watery 👨;
put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in
at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared
everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-🌊
Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious 🏢, that
his very panics are more to be 😨 than his most fearless and
malicious assaults!

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these 🌊 hermits, issuing from
their 🐜-hill in the 🌊, overrun and conquered the watery 👨 like
so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
Indian oceans, as the 3⃣ pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm
all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; 2⃣ thirds
of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the 🌊 is his; he
owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of
way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but
floating forts; 😳 pirates and privateers, though following the 🌊
as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of
the land like themselves, without seeking to 🏃 their living from the
bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on
the 🌊; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and
fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his 🏠; THERE
lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it
overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the 🌊, as prairie
cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as
chamois hunters 🌹 the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so
that when he comes to it at 🔚, it smells like another 👨, more
strangely than the 🌔 would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull,
that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to 😴 between billows;
so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,
and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow 👢 herds of
walruses and whales.



CHAPTER 15. Chowder.


It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly
to ⚓, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of
the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of 1⃣ of the best kept
hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin
Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he
plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try 🚽-luck at
the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a 🐔
warehouse on our starboard 🚹 till we opened a white ⛪ to the
larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard 🚹 till we made a
corner 3⃣ points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
👨 we met where the 🚉 was: these crooked directions of his very
much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg
insisted that the 🐔 warehouse--our first point of departure--must
be left on the larboard 🚹, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to
say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little
in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant
to inquire the way, we at 🔚 came to something which there was no
mistaking.

2⃣ enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,
swung from the cross-trees of an old 🔝-mast, planted in front of an
old 🚪. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other
side, so that this old 🔝-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of
crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the 2⃣ remaining horns; yes, 2⃣
of them, 1⃣ for Queequeg, and 1⃣ for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A
Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones
staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a 👫
of prodigious black pots too! Are these 🔚 throwing out oblique hints
touching Tophet?

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled 👩
with 🐔 hair and a 🐔 gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
under a 🔇 😳 lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured
♥, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a 👨 in a purple woollen
👕.

"Get 🔛 with ye," said she to the 👨, "or I'll be combing ye!"

"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from 🏠, but leaving
Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon
making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing
further scolding for the 🎁, ushered us into a little room, and
seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded
repast, turned round to us and said--"🍞 or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"🍞 or Cod?" she repeated.

"A 🍞 for supper? a cold 🍞; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"
says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the 👨 in the purple
👕, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear 0⃣
but the word "🍞," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open 🚪 ⭐ to
the kitchen, and bawling out "🍞 for 2⃣," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can 💩 out a supper for us
both on 1⃣ 🍞?"

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that 🚬 chowder
came in, the ㊙ was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
hazel nuts, mixed with pounded 🚢 🍪, and salted pork cut up into
little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned
with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty
voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food
before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched
it with great expedition: when leaning 🔙 a moment and bethinking
me of Mrs. Hussey's 🍞 and cod announcement, I thought I would try
a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen 🚪, I uttered the word
"cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my 💺. In a few moments the
savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in 🔉
time a 🆗 cod-chowder was placed before us.

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the 🎳, thinks I
to myself, I ❓ now if this here has any effect on the ❓?
What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look,
Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your 🎳? Where's your harpoon?"

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved
its 🔑; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you
began to look for 🐟-bones coming through your 👗. The area
before the 🏠 was paved with 🍞-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished
necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books
bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk,
too, which I could not at all account for, till 1⃣ 🌅 happening
to 🉑 a stroll 🔛 the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw
Hosea's brindled 🐮 feeding on 🐟 remnants, and marching 🔛 the
sand with each 🐾 in a cod's decapitated ❓, looking very slip-shod,
I assure ye.

Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede
me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his
harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I;
"every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why not?" "Because
it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since 🆕 Stiggs coming from that
unfort'nt 5⃣'y'ge of his, when he was gone 4⃣ years and a half, with
only 3⃣ barrels of _ile_, was found dead in my first floor 🔙, with
his harpoon in his side; ever since then I 🍃 no boarders to 🉑
sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for
she had learned his 🔑), "I will just 🉑 this here iron, and keep
it for you till 🌅. But the chowder; 🍞 or cod to-morrow for
breakfast, 🚹?"

"Both," says I; "and let's have a 👫 of smoked herring by way of
variety."



CHAPTER 16. The 🚢.


In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and
no small 😟, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
diligently consulting Yojo--the 🔑 of his black little god--and Yojo
had told him 2⃣ or 3⃣ times over, and strongly insisted upon it
everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-🎯 in
harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo
earnestly enjoined that the selection of the 🚢 should rest wholly
with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in ♣ to
do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I,
Ishmael, should infallibly ✨ upon, for all the 👨 as though it
had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately 🚢
myself, for the 🎁 irrespective of Queequeg.

I have forgotten to 🎶 that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising forecast
of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather 🔉
sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all
cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.

Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection
of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied
upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to 🏃
us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced
no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly
prepared to 👗 about this business with a determined rushing sort
of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little
affair. Next 🌅 early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our
little bedroom--for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan,
or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that
day; HOW it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself
to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX
Articles--leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo
warming himself at his sacrificial 🔥 of shavings, I sallied out among
the shipping. After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries,
I learnt that there were 3⃣ ships up for 3⃣-years' voyages--The
Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know the
origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no ❓ remember, was
the 🔑 of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct
as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her,
hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod,
looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very
🚢 for us.

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for 0⃣ I
know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-📦
galliots, and what not; but 🉑 my word for it, you never saw such a
rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a 🚢 of the old
🏫, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look
about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms
of all 4⃣ oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French
grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable
bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of 🗾,
where her original ones were 😖 overboard in a gale--her masts stood
stiffly up like the spines of the 3⃣ old kings of Cologne. Her
ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
🎏-💎 in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these
her old antiquities, were added 🆕 and marvellous features, pertaining
to the 😠 business that for more than half a 💯 she had followed.
Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-👫, before he commanded
another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and 1⃣ of the
🌠 owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his
chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid
it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, 1⃣
by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She
was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck 🔉 with
pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of
a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All
round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like 1⃣ continuous
jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm 🐳, inserted there for
pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not
through 🐾 blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of
🌊-ivory. Scorning a turnstile 🚲 at her reverend helm, she sported
there a tiller; and that tiller was in 1⃣ mass, curiously carved
from the long narrow 😦 jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who
steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the 🐉, when he holds
🔙 his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a
most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Now when I looked about the 💩-deck, for some 1⃣ having 🏢,
in ♣ to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw
nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of ⛺, or
rather wigwam, pitched a little 💺 the main-mast. It seemed only
a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ❌
feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken
from the ♥ and highest 🏢 of the jaws of the right-🐳.
Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced
together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in
a tufted point, where the 🆓 hairy fibres waved to and fro like the
🔝-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's ❓. A triangular opening
faced towards the bows of the 🚢, so that the insider commanded a
complete ⌚ forward.

And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found 1⃣ who
by his aspect seemed to have 🏢; and who, it being noon, and
the 🚢's 🏃 suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
over with curious carving; and the 💺 of which was formed of a
stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
constructed.

There was 0⃣ so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
the elderly 👨 I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker 💨;
only there was a 🆗 and almost microscopic net-🏃 of the minutest
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from
his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together. Such ♥-wrinkles are very 🔉 in a scowl.

"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the 🚪 of
the ⛺.

"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost Ⓜ want of him?"
he demanded.

"I was thinking of shipping."

"Ⓜ wast, wast Ⓜ? I 📅 Ⓜ 🎨 no Nantucketer--ever been in a
stove ⛵?"

"No, Sir, I never have."

"Dost know 0⃣ at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?

"0⃣, Sir; but I have no ❓ I shall 🔜 ⌚. I've been several
voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"

"Merchant service be damned. 🍑 not that lingo to me. Dost 📅 that
leg?--I'll 🉑 that leg away from thy 💩, if ever Ⓜ talkest of
the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now
ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships.
But flukes! 👨, what makes thee want to ❌ a whaling, eh?--it looks
a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not been a pirate, hast
Ⓜ?--Didst not rob thy 🔚 Captain, didst Ⓜ?--Dost not think of
murdering the officers when Ⓜ gettest to 🌊?"

I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the 😷
of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard.

"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
shipping ye."

"Well, sir, I want to 📅 what whaling is. I want to 📅 the 👨."

"Want to 📅 what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped ♥ on Captain Ahab?"

"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"

"Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this 🚢."

"I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."

"Ⓜ 🎨 speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,
🆕 👨. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to 📅 the Pequod fitted
out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
are 🏢 owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if Ⓜ wantest
to know what whaling is, as Ⓜ tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of
finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. 👏
♥ on Captain Ahab, 🆕 👨, and Ⓜ wilt find that he has only 1⃣
leg."

"What do you mean, sir? Was the other 1⃣ 😖 by a 🐳?"

"😖 by a 🐳! 🆕 👨, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a
⛵!--ah, ah!"

I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at
the hearty grief in his concluding ❗, but said as calmly as I
could, "What you say is no ❓ true enough, sir; but how could I know
there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular 🐳, though indeed
I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident."

"Look ye now, 🆕 👨, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye 📅; Ⓜ
dost not 🍑 shark a bit. SURE, ye've been to 🌊 before now; sure of
that?"

"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been 4⃣ voyages in the
merchant--"

"Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant
service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it. But let us understand each
other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel
inclined for it?"

"I do, sir."

"Very 🔉. Now, 🎨 Ⓜ the 👨 to pitch a harpoon down a live 🐳's
throat, and then 🌹 after it? Answer, quick!"

"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be
got 🆓 of, that is; which I don't 🉑 to be the fact."

"🔉 again. Now then, Ⓜ not only wantest to ❌ a-whaling, to find
out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to ❌ in ♣ to
📅 the 👨? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just
👣 forward there, and 🉑 a peep over the weather-🙇, and then 🔙
to me and tell me what ye 📅 there."

For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
knowing exactly how to 🉑 it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
concentrating all his 😤's feet into 1⃣ scowl, Captain Peleg started
me on the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the weather 🙇, I perceived that the
🚢 swinging to her ⚓ with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
pointing towards the open 🌊. The prospect was unlimited, but
exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
could 📅.

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came 🔙; "what did ye
📅?"

"Not much," I replied--"0⃣ but water; considerable horizon though,
and there's a 😢 coming up, I think."

"Well, what does Ⓜ think then of seeing the 👨? Do ye wish to ❌
round Cape 🎺 to 📅 any more of it, eh? Can't ye 📅 the 👨 where
you 🐻?"

I was a little staggered, but ❌ a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
Pequod was as 🔉 a 🚢 as any--I thought the best--and all this I now
repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness
to 🚢 me.

"And Ⓜ mayest as well 🏠 the papers right off," he added--"come
🔛 with ye." And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.

Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who 🔛 with
Captain Peleg was 1⃣ of the largest owners of the vessel; the other
shares, as is sometimes the 🐚 in these ports, being held by a crowd
of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each
owning about the value of a timber ❓, or a 🐾 of plank, or a 💥
or 2⃣ in the 🚢. People in Nantucket 💺 their money in whaling
vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks
bringing in 🔉 😟.

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified
by things altogether 👽 and heterogeneous. For some of these same
Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and 🐳-hunters. They
are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

So that there are instances among them of 🚹, who, named with Scripture
names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in childhood
naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and Ⓜ of the Quaker
idiom; 😯, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
peculiarities, a Ⓜ bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
Scandinavian 🌊-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things
🔗 in a 👨 of greatly superior natural 🐏, with a globular brain
and a ponderous ♥; who has also by the stillness and seclusion
of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath
constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think
untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or
🐺 impressions 🆕 from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
advantages, to ⌚ a bold and nervous lofty language--that 👨 makes
1⃣ in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature, formed for
noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically
regarded, if either by 🐻 or other circumstances, he have what seems
a half wilful overruling morbidness at the 💺 of his nature. For all
🚹 tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure
of this, ⭕ 🆕 ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But,
as yet we have not to do with such an 1⃣, but with quite another; and
😯 a 👨, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another
phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a 👢 for what are called
serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
his subsequent 🌊 life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island
creatures, round the 🎺--all that had not moved this native born
Quaker 1⃣ 1⃣ jot, had not so much as altered 1⃣ 🐟 of his
vest. 😯, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of
common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from
conscientious scruples, to 🉑 arms against land invaders, yet himself
had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe
to 👨 bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied 🍰, spilled tuns
upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the 😔 evening of his
days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
not know; but it did not seem to 😟 him much, and very probably
he had long since come to the sage and sensible 🔚 that a 👨's
religion is 1⃣ thing, and this practical 👨 quite another. This
👨 pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-👦 in short 👗
of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat;
from that becoming ⛵-header, chief-👫, and captain, and finally a
🚢 owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous
📲 by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of
sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the 😯 receiving of his
well-earned income.

Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
incorrigible old hunks, and in his 🌊-going days, a bitter, hard
task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
upon arriving 🏠, were mostly all carried ashore to the 🏥, sore
exhausted and worn out. For a pious 👨, especially for a Quaker, he was
certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to 🏦,
though, at his 🚹, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate
quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard 🏃 out of them. When Bildad was a
chief-👫, to have his drab-coloured ♥ intently looking at you, made
you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something--a 🔨
or a marling-👂, and ❌ to 🏃 like mad, at something or other,
never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own
person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his
long, gaunt body, he carried no 🆓 flesh, no superfluous beard,
his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his
broad-brimmed hat.

Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
was small; and there, 💨-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so,
and never leaned, and this to 😌 his 🍰 tails. His broad-👄 was
placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was
buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on 👃, he seemed absorbed in
reading from a ponderous 📖.

"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been
studying those Scriptures, now, for the 🔚 thirty years, to my certain
knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?"

As if long habituated to such profane 🍑 from his old shipmate,
Bildad, without noticing his 🎁 irreverence, quietly looked up, and
seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.

"He says he's our 👨, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to 🚢."

"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow 🎶, and turning round to me.

"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.

"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.

"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at
his 📖 in a mumbling 🎶 quite audible.

I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg,
his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said
0⃣, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest,
and drawing forth the 🚢's articles, placed pen and ink before him,
and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time
to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to 🔒 for the
voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no
wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of
the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the
degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the 🚢's
company. I was also aware that being a green 🚹 at whaling, my own
lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the 🌊,
could steer a 🚢, 💒 a rope, and all that, I made no ❓ that
from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that
is, the 275th 🏢 of the 🔝 net proceeds of the voyage, whatever
that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they
☎ a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than 0⃣; and if we had a
lucky voyage, might pretty nearly 🐻 for the clothing I would 🐻 out
on it, not to speak of my 3⃣ years' beef and board, for which I would
not have to 🐻 1⃣ stiver.

It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am 1⃣ of those
that never 🉑 on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
👨 is ready to board and ♣ me, while I am putting up at this grim
🏠 of the 💥 ☁. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay
would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I
been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered 💩.

But 1⃣ thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
how that they being the 🌠 proprietors of the Pequod, therefore
the other and more inconsiderable and 😕 owners, left nearly the
whole management of the 🚢's affairs to these 2⃣. And I did not know
but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty ✋ to say about
shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,
quite at 🏠 there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his
own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his
💩-👅, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was
such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded
us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his 📖, "LAY not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth--"

"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay
shall we 🍃 this 🆕 👨?"

"Ⓜ knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the 7⃣ 💯 and
seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust do
☁, but LAY--'"

LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the 7⃣ 💯 and
seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for 1⃣,
shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do ☁.
It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though from the
magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet
the slightest consideration will ® that though 7⃣ 💯 and
seventy-7⃣ is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to 💩
a TEENTH of it, you will then 📅, I say, that the 7⃣ 💯 and
seventy-seventh 🏢 of a farthing is a 🔉 ✋ less than 7⃣
💯 and seventy-7⃣ gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.

"Why, 🐚 your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "Ⓜ dost not want to
swindle this 🆕 👨! he must have more than that."

"7⃣ 💯 and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without lifting
his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your 💎 is, there
will your ♥ be also."

"I am going to put him down for the 3⃣ hundredth," said Peleg, "do ye
hear that, Bildad! The 3⃣ hundredth lay, I say."

Bildad laid down his 📖, and turning solemnly towards him said,
"Captain Peleg, Ⓜ hast a generous ♥; but Ⓜ must consider the
duty Ⓜ owest to the other owners of this 🚢--widows and orphans,
many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
🆕 👨, we may be taking the 🍞 from those widows and those
orphans. The 7⃣ 💯 and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg."

"Ⓜ Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
cabin. "🐚 ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these
matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be
🔉 enough to 🔰 the largest 🚢 that ever sailed round Cape
🎺."

"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing
❌ inches of water, or ❌ fathoms, I can't tell; but as Ⓜ 🎨 😯
an impenitent 👨, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be
but a leaky 1⃣; and will in the 🔚 sink thee foundering down to the
fiery pit, Captain Peleg."

"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, 👨; past all natural bearing, ye
insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any 👨 creature that
he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and
start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll 🉑 a live 🐐 with
all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured
👦 of a wooden 🔫--a straight wake with ye!"

As he thundered out this he made a 👢 at Bildad, but with a marvellous
oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.

Alarmed at this 😨 outburst between the 2⃣ 🌠 and
responsible owners of the 🚢, and feeling half a mind to 🍃 up
all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
commanded, I stepped aside from the 🚪 to 🍃 egress to Bildad, who,
I made no ❓, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened
💢 of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the
transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of
withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As
for Peleg, after letting off his 😡 as he had, there seemed no more
left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a
little as if 😯 nervously agitated. "Whew!" he whistled at 🔚--"the
😢's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, Ⓜ used to be 🔉 at
sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My 💩-👅 here needs
the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my 🆕 👨,
Ishmael's thy 🔑, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye ❌ here, Ishmael,
for the 3⃣ hundredth lay."

"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to 🚢
too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"

"To be sure," said Peleg. "Fetch him 🔛, and we'll look at him."

"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the 📖 in
which he had again been burying himself.

"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever
whaled it any?" turning to me.

"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."

"Well, bring him 🔛 then."

And, after signing the papers, off I went; 0⃣ doubting but that I
had done a 🔉 🌅's 🏃, and that the Pequod was the identical
🚢 that Yojo had provided to 🏃 Queequeg and me round the Cape.

But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain
with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in
many cases, a 🐳-🚢 will be completely fitted out, and receive all
her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving
to 🉑 command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the
shore intervals at 🏠 so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have
a 🏠, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble
himself much about his 🚢 in port, but leaves her to the owners till
all is ready for 🌊. However, it is always as well to have a look at
him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning 🔙
I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.

"And what dost Ⓜ want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; Ⓜ
🎨 shipped."

"Yes, but I should like to 📅 him."

"But I don't think Ⓜ wilt be able to at 🎁. I don't know exactly
what's the matter with him; but he keeps 🔚 inside the 🏠; a sort
of 🐱, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't 🐱; but no, he
isn't well either. Any how, 🆕 👨, he won't always 📅 me, so I
don't suppose he will thee. He's a queer 👨, Captain Ahab--so some
think--but a 🔉 1⃣. Oh, Ⓜ'lt like him well enough; no fear, no
fear. He's a Ⓜ, ungodly, god-like 👨, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak
much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. 🎶 ye, be
forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as
'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed
his fiery lance in mightier, 👽 foes than whales. His lance!
aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't
Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, 👦; and Ahab
of old, Ⓜ knowest, was a crowned king!"

"And a very vile 1⃣. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
they not 👊 his blood?"

"Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in
his ♥ that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board
the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not 🔑 himself.
'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died
when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at
Gayhead, said that the 🔑 would somehow 🌹 prophetic. And, perhaps,
other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to ⚠ thee. It's a
lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as 👫 years ago;
I know what he is--a 🔉 👨--not a pious, 🔉 👨, like Bildad, but
a swearing 🔉 👨--something like me--only there's a 🔉 ✋ more of
him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on
the passage 🏠, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it
was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
about, as any 1⃣ might 📅. I know, too, that ever since he 😖
his leg 🔚 voyage by that accursed 🐳, he's been a kind of
moody--desperate moody, and 🐺 sometimes; but that will all pass
off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, 🆕 👨, it's
better to sail with a moody 🔉 captain than a 😆 bad 1⃣. So
🔉-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to
have a wicked 🔑. Besides, my 👦, he has a wife--not 3⃣ voyages
wedded--a sweet, resigned 👧. Think of that; by that sweet 👧 that
old 👨 has a 👶: 📖 ye then there can be any utter, hopeless
harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his
humanities!"

As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
😠 vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time,
I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what,
unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange
awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all 🔑, was
not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did
not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed
like ㊙ in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However,
my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the
🎁 dark Ahab slipped my mind.



CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.


As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,
never mind how comical, and could not find it in my ♥ to undervalue
😳 a congregation of ants worshipping a 🐸-🚽; or those other
creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism
quite unprecedented in other planets, 🙇 down before the torso of
a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate
possessions yet owned and rented in his 🔑.

I say, we 🔉 Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that? Queequeg
thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;
and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans
alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the ❓, and
sadly need mending.

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the 🚪; but
no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. "Queequeg,"
said I softly through the 🔑-hole:--all 🔇. "I say, Queequeg! why
don't you speak? It's I--Ishmael." But all remained 😯 as before. I
began to 🌹 alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought
he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the 🔑-hole; but
the 🚪 opening into an odd corner of the room, the 🔑-hole prospect
was but a crooked and sinister 1⃣. I could only 📅 🏢 of the
🐾-board of the bed and a 🎶 of the wall, but 0⃣ more. I
was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of
Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken
from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's strange, thought I;
but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or
never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no
possible mistake.

"Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all 😯. Something must have happened.
Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the 🚪; but it stubbornly resisted.
🏃 down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person
I met--the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must
be the matter. I went to 💩 the bed after breakfast, and the 🚪 was
locked; and not a 🐭 to be heard; and it's been just so 🔇 ever
since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma'am!--Mistress! murder! Mrs.
Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I
following.

Mrs. Hussey 🔜 appeared, with a mustard-🚽 in 1⃣ 🚹 and a
vinegar-cruet in the other, having just 😕 away from the occupation
of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black 👦 meantime.

"Wood-🏠!" cried I, "which way to it? 🏃 for God's 🍶, and fetch
something to 👃 open the 🚪--the axe!--the axe! he's had a stroke;
depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs
again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-🚽 and
vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.

"What's the matter with you, 🆕 👨?"

"Get the axe! For God's 🍶, 🏃 for the doctor, some 1⃣, while I 👃
it open!"

"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet,
so as to have 1⃣ 🚹 😇; "look here; are you talking about prying
open any of my doors?"--and with that she seized my arm. "What's the
matter with you? What's the matter with you, shipmate?"

In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
whole 🐚. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to 1⃣ side of her
👃, she ruminated for an 💓; then exclaimed--"No! I haven't seen
it since I put it there." 🏃 to a little closet under the landing
of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's
harpoon was missing. "He's killed himself," she cried. "It's unfort'nate
Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor
mother!--it will be the ruin of my 🏠. Has the poor lad a 👶?
Where's that 👧?--there, Betty, ❌ to Snarles the Painter, and tell
him to 🔑 me a 🏠, with--"no suicides permitted here, and no
🚬 in the parlor;"--might as well kill both birds at once. Kill?
The Lord be merciful to his 👻! What's that noise there? You, 🆕
👨, avast there!"

And 🏃 up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to 🐏
open the 🚪.

"I don't 🍃 it; I won't have my premises spoiled. ❌ for the
locksmith, there's 1⃣ about a mile from here. But avast!" putting her
🚹 in her side-👝, "here's a 🔑 that'll fit, I guess; let's
📅." And with that, she turned it in the 🔒; but, alas! Queequeg's
supplemental 💨 remained unwithdrawn within.

"Have to burst it open," said I, and was 🏃 down the entry a
little, for a 🔉 start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing
I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
sudden bodily 👢 dashed myself full against the 🎶.

With a prodigious noise the 🚪 flew open, and the knob slamming
against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, 🔉
heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether 🆒 and self-collected; right
in the ♥ of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on
🔝 of his ❓. He looked neither 1⃣ way nor the other way, but sat
like a carved image with scarce a 🏠 of active life.

"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter with
you?"

"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.

But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt
like pushing him over, so as to change his 🏢, for it was almost
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for 🆙 of
8⃣ or ❌ hours, going too without his regular meals.

"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so 🍃 us, if you
please, and I will 📅 to this strange affair myself."

🔚 the 🚪 upon the landlady, I endeavored to 😤 upon
Queequeg to 🉑 a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could
do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not 🏃 a peg,
nor say a 1⃣ word, nor 😳 look at me, nor 🎶 my presence in
the slightest way.

I ❓, thought I, if this can possibly be a 🏢 of his Ramadan; do
they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;
yes, it's 🏢 of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he'll
get up sooner or later, no ❓. It can't 🔚 for ever, thank God,
and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't believe it's very
punctual then.

I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as
they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,
confined to the north of the 🎶, in the Atlantic 🌊 only); after
listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven ⭕'clock, I went
up stairs to ❌ to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he
was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to
🌹 vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be
sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room,
holding a 👨 of wood on his ❓.

"For heaven's 🍶, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have
some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg." But not a
word did he reply.

Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to ❌ to bed and to 😴;
and no ❓, before a great while, he would ⌚ me. But previous to
turning in, I took my 🔉 bearskin 👑, and threw it over him, as
it promised to be a very cold night; and he had 0⃣ but his ordinary
round 👑 on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into
the faintest doze. I had blown out the 💿; and the mere thought
of Queequeg--not 4⃣ feet off--sitting there in that uneasy 🏢,
stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of
it; 😴 all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his
hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!

But somehow I dropped off at 🔚, and knew 0⃣ more till break of
day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he
had been screwed down to the floor. But as 🔜 as the first glimpse of
sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints,
but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his
forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion,
be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any
other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when
a 👨's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment
to him; and, in 🆗, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to
♣ in; then I think it high time to 🉑 that individual aside and
argue the point with him.

And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into bed
now, and lie and listen to me." I then went on, beginning with the 🌹
and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various
religions of the 🎁 time, during which time I labored to ®
Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in
cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless
for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and
common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an
extremely sensible and sagacious 🐺, it pained me, very badly pained
me, to 📅 him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan
of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the
♥ caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be
half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish
such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In 1⃣ word, Queequeg,
said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested
🍎-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary
dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could 🉑 it
in. He said no; only upon 1⃣ memorable occasion. It was after a great
feast given by his 🔰 the king, on the gaining of a great battle
wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about 2⃣ ⭕'clock in the
afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.

"No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew the
inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had
visited that very island, and he told me that it was the 🛃, when
a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the
Ⓜ or garden of the victor; and then, 1⃣ by 1⃣, they were placed
in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with
breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were
sent round with the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as
though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.

After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first 🚉, he somehow seemed
🔇 of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his
own point of ⌚; and, in the 🔙 🚉, he did not more than 1⃣
third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he
no ❓ thought he knew a 🔉 ✋ more about the true religion than
I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending 😟 and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible
🆕 👨 should be so hopelessly 😖 to evangelical pagan piety.

At 🔚 we 🌹 and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not
💩 much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the
Pequod, sauntering 🔛, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.



CHAPTER 18. His 🎶.


As we were 🚶 down the 🔚 of the wharf towards the 🚢, Queequeg
carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff 🔉 loudly hailed us
from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,
unless they previously produced their papers.

"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the
bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.

"I mean," he replied, "he must ® his papers."

"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow 🔉, 😌 his ❓ from
💺 Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must ® that he's converted.
👦 of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "🎨 Ⓜ at 🎁 in
communion with any Christian ⛪?"

"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational ⛪." Here
be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at
🔚 come to be converted into the churches.

"First Congregational ⛪," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in
Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-🏠?" and so saying, taking
out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great 🐔 bandana
💩, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a 🔉 long look at
Queequeg.

"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very
long, I rather guess, 🆕 👨."

"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would
have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."

"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of
Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it
every Lord's day."

"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said
I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
Congregational ⛪. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."

"🆕 👨," said Bildad sternly, "Ⓜ 🎨 skylarking with me--explain
thyself, Ⓜ 🆕 Hittite. What ⛪ dost thee mean? answer me."

Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same
ancient Catholic ⛪ to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,
and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's 👦 and soul of
us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
worshipping 👨; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some
queer crotchets no ways touching the Ⓜ belief; in THAT we all 🔗
hands."

"💒, Ⓜ mean'st 💒 hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "🆕
👨, you'd better 🚢 for a missionary, instead of a 🙇-mast 🚹;
I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy--why 🔰 Mapple
himself couldn't 💓 it, and he's reckoned something. Come aboard, come
aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there--what's
that you ☎ him? tell Quohog to 👣 🔛. By the great ⚓, what
a harpoon he's got there! looks like 🔉 stuff that; and he handles it
about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your 🔑 is, did you ever 🐻
in the ❓ of a 🐳-⛵? did you ever strike a 🐟?"

Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his 😠 sort of way, jumped upon
the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of 1⃣ of the 🐳-boats
hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--

"👑'ain, you 📅 him small drop tar on water dere? You 📅 him? well,
spose him 1⃣ 🐳 ♥, well, den!" and taking sharp 🚋 at it, he
darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad 👄, clean across the
🚢's decks, and struck the glistening tar 🏢 out of sight.

"Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the 🎶, "spos-ee him 🐳-🇪🇸
♥; why, dad 🐳 dead."

"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the 🔚
vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the 🚢's papers. We must have
Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in 1⃣ of our boats. Look ye, Quohog,
we'll 🍃 ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a
harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."

So down we went into the cabin, and to my great 😂 Queequeg was 🔜
enrolled among the same 🚢's company to which I myself belonged.

When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how
to write, does he? I say, Quohog, 🐚 ye! dost Ⓜ 🏠 thy 🔑 or
💩 thy 🎶?"

But at this ❓, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
🏢 in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the
offered pen, copied upon the 📰, in the proper 🚉, an exact
counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so
that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative,
it stood something like this:--

Quohog. his ❌ 🎶.

Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
and at 🔚 rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
broad-skirted drab 🍰, took out a 📦 of tracts, and selecting
1⃣ entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," placed it in
Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the 📖 with both his,
looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "👦 of darkness, I must do my
duty by thee; I am 🏢 owner of this 🚢, and feel concerned for the
souls of all its crew; if Ⓜ 😯 clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I
sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn
the idol 🔔, and the hideous 🐉; 🔧 from the 💢 to come; mind
thine ♥, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer 🔝 of the fiery pit!"

Something of the salt 🌊 yet lingered in old Bildad's language,
heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.

"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,"
cried Peleg. "Pious harpooneers never 💩 🔉 voyagers--it takes the shark
out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.
There was 🆕 Nat Swaine, once the bravest ⛵-header out of all
Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to
🔉. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and
sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in 🐚 he got stove
and went to Davy Jones."

"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "Ⓜ thyself,
as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; Ⓜ knowest, Peleg, what
it is to have the fear of 🔚; how, then, can'st Ⓜ prate in this
ungodly guise. Ⓜ beliest thine own ♥, Peleg. Tell me, when this
same Pequod here had her 3⃣ masts overboard in that typhoon on 🗾,
that same voyage when Ⓜ went 👫 with Captain Ahab, did'st Ⓜ not
think of 🔚 and the Judgment then?"

"Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--"hear him, all of ye.
Think of that! When every moment we thought the 🚢 would sink!
🔚 and the Judgment then? What? With all 3⃣ masts making such an
everlasting thundering against the side; and every 🌊 breaking over us,
🙇 and aft. Think of 🔚 and the Judgment then? No! no time to think
about 🔚 then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of;
and how to 😌 all hands--how to rig jury-masts--how to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of."

Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his 🍰, stalked on deck,
where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
sailmakers who were mending a 🔝-sail in the waist. Now and then
he stooped to pick up a patch, or 😌 an 🔚 of tarred twine, which
otherwise might have been wasted.



CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.


"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that 🚢?"

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when
the above words were put to us by a 👽, who, pausing before us,
levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in ❓. He was but
shabbily apparelled in faded 👑 and patched trowsers; a rag of a
black 💩 investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed
bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.

"Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.

"You mean the 🚢 Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a little
more time for an uninterrupted look at him.

"Aye, the Pequod--that 🚢 there," he said, drawing 🔙 his whole
arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.

"Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."

"Anything down there about your souls?"

"About what?"

"Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though,
I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--🔉 luck to 'em; and they are
all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth 🚲 to a wagon."

"What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.

"HE'S got enough, though, to 💩 up for all deficiencies of that sort
in other chaps," abruptly said the 👽, placing a nervous emphasis
upon the word HE.

"Queequeg," said I, "let's ❌; this fellow has 😕 🆓 from
somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."

"🔚!" cried the 👽. "Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old 💥
yet, have ye?"

"Who's Old 💥?" said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness
of his manner.

"Captain Ahab."

"What! the captain of our 🚢, the Pequod?"

"Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that 🔑. Ye
hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"

"No, we hav'n't. He's 🐱 they say, but is getting better, and will be
all right again before long."

"All right again before long!" laughed the 👽, with a solemnly
derisive sort of 😆. "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."

"What do you know about him?"

"What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"

"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's
a 🔉 🐳-hunter, and a 🔉 captain to his crew."

"That's true, that's true--yes, both true enough. But you must 🌹 when
he gives an ♣. 👣 and growl; growl and ❌--that's the word with
Captain Ahab. But 0⃣ about that thing that happened to him off Cape
🎺, long ago, when he lay like dead for 3⃣ days and nights;
0⃣ about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in
Santa?--heard 0⃣ about that, eh? 0⃣ about the silver calabash
he 👏 into? And 0⃣ about his losing his leg 🔚 voyage,
according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a word about them matters and
something more, eh? No, I don't think ye did; how could ye? Who knows
it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell
about the leg, and how he 😖 it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare
say. Oh yes, THAT every 1⃣ knows a'most--I mean they know he's only 1⃣
leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off."

"My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
don't know, and I don't much 😟; for it seems to me that you must be a
little damaged in the ❓. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of
that 🚢 there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about
the loss of his leg."

"ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"

"Pretty sure."

With finger pointed and ♥ levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
👽 stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
little, turned and said:--"Ye've shipped, have ye? Names down on the
papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be;
and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed
and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must ❌ with him, I
suppose; as well these as any other 🚹, God pity 'em! 🌅 to ye,
shipmates, 🌅; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'Ⓜ sorry I stopped
ye."

"Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell
us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are
mistaken in your 🔙; that's all I have to say."

"And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap 🍑 up that way;
you are just the 👨 for him--the likes of ye. 🌅 to ye, shipmates,
🌅! Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded not to 💩 1⃣
of 'em."

"Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us. It
is the easiest thing in the 👨 for a 👨 to look as if he had a great
㊙ in him."

"🌅 to ye, shipmates, 🌅."

"🌅 it is," said I. "Come 🔛, Queequeg, let's 🍃 this crazy
👨. But 🔚, tell me your 🔑, will you?"

"Elijah."

Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was
0⃣ but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone
perhaps above a 💯 yards, when chancing to 🔧 a corner, and
looking 🔙 as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,
though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I
said 0⃣ to Queequeg of his being 💺, but passed on with my
comrade, anxious to 📅 whether the 👽 would 🔧 the same corner
that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging
us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This
circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing,
shrouded sort of 🍑, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments
and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain
Ahab; and the leg he had 😖; and the Cape 🎺 fit; and the silver
calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the 🚢
the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage
we had bound ourselves to sail; and a 💯 other shadowy things.

I was resolved to 😆 myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
seeming to 🎶 us. This 😌 me; and once more, and finally as it
seemed to me, I pronounced him in my ♥, a humbug.



CHAPTER 20. All 🆙.


A day or 2⃣ passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
Not only were the old sails being mended, but 🆕 sails were coming on
board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything
betokened that the 🚢's preparations were hurrying to a 🔚. Captain
Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp
look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing
at the stores; and the 🚹 employed in the 📖 and on the rigging were
🏃 till long after night-fall.

On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given at
all the inns where the 🚢's company were stopping, that their chests
must be on board before night, for there was no telling how 🔜
the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
resolving, however, to 😴 ashore till the 🔚. But it seems they
always 🍃 very long 🎶 in these cases, and the 🚢 did not sail
for several days. But no ❓; there was a 🔉 ✋ to be done, and
there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
was fully equipped.

Every 1⃣ knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives
and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, 🍳-crackers, and what not, are
indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,
which necessitates a 3⃣-years' housekeeping upon the wide 🌊,
far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And
though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means
to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of the
whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the
fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors
usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling
vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially
to the 🔚 and loss of the very things upon which the success of
the voyage most depends. Hence, the 🆓 boats, 🆓 spars, and 🆓
lines and harpoons, and 🆓 everythings, almost, but a 🆓 Captain
and 🔁 🚢.

At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, 🍞, water,
🔥, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time
there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
ends of things, both large and small.

Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
Bildad's 👶, a 🏃 old lady of a most determined and indefatigable
♥, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if SHE
could help it, 0⃣ should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once
fairly getting to 🌊. At 1⃣ time she would come on board with a jar
of pickles for the steward's pantry; another time with a bunch of quills
for the chief 👫's desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a
👋 of flannel for the small of some 1⃣'s rheumatic 🔙. Never did
any 👩 better deserve her 🔑, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as
everybody called her. And like a 👶 of charity did this charitable
Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to 🔧 her 🚹
and ♥ to anything that promised to 🐻 safety, comfort, and
consolation to all on board a 🚢 in which her beloved brother
Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or 2⃣ of
well-saved dollars.

But it was startling to 📅 this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
board, as she did the 🔚 day, with a long oil-ladle in 1⃣ 🚹, and
a 😯 longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
Captain Peleg at all 🔙. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
a long list of the articles needed, and at every 🆕 arrival, down
went his 🎶 opposite that article upon the 📰. Every once in a
while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, 💥 at the 🚹
down the hatchways, 💥 up to the riggers at the mast-❓, and then
concluded by 💥 🔙 into his wigwam.

During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when
he was going to come on board his 🚢. To these questions they would
answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard
every day; meantime, the 2⃣ captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend
to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been
downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my ♥
that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage,
without once laying my eyes on the 👨 who was to be the absolute
dictator of it, so 🔜 as the 🚢 sailed out upon the open 🌊.
But when a 👨 suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to 🔝 up his
suspicions 😳 from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
0⃣, and tried to think 0⃣.

At 🔚 it was given out that some time next day the 🚢 would
certainly sail. So next 🌅, Queequeg and I took a very early start.



CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.


It was nearly 6⃣ ⭕'clock, but only grey imperfect 🌁 🌅, when we
drew nigh the wharf.

"There are some sailors 🏃 ahead there, if I 📅 right," said I to
Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by 🌅, I guess; come on!"

"Avast!" cried a 🔉, whose owner at the same time coming 🔚 💺
us, laid a 🚹 upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself
between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight,
strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.

"Going aboard?"

"Hands off, will you," said I.

"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "❌ 'way!"

"Ain't going aboard, then?"

"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know,
Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"

"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and
wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable
glances.

"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We
are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be
detained."

"Ye be, be ye? Coming 🔙 afore breakfast?"

"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."

"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few
paces.

"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."

But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his 🚹 on my
shoulder, said--"Did ye 📅 anything looking like 🚹 going towards that
🚢 a while ago?"

Struck by this plain matter-of-fact ❓, I answered, saying, "Yes,
I thought I did 📅 4⃣ or 5⃣ 🚹; but it was too dim to be sure."

"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah. "🌅 to ye."

Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
touching my shoulder again, said, "📅 if you can find 'em now, will ye?

"Find who?"

"🌅 to ye! 🌅 to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh! I
was going to ⚠ ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all 1⃣,
all in the 🏠 too;--sharp frost this 🌅, ain't it? 🔉-bye to
ye. Shan't 📅 ye again very 🔜, I guess; unless it's before the Ⓜ
Jury." And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for
the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.

At 🔚, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in 🔉
😯, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward
to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a
✨, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
tattered pea-👑. He was thrown at whole length upon 2⃣ chests, his
face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest 😴
slept upon him.

"Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said I,
looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf,
Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would
have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter,
were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable ❓. But I 💓 the
thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg
that perhaps we had best 💺 up with the body; telling him to establish
himself accordingly. He put his 🚹 upon the sleeper's 🌹, as though
feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly
down there.

"Gracious! Queequeg, don't 💺 there," said I.

"Oh! perry dood 💺," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't 😧 him
face."

"Face!" said I, "☎ that his face? very benevolent countenance then;
but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you
are 🔉, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,
he'll twitch you off 🔜. I ❓ he don't wake."

Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the ❓ of the sleeper, and
lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
over the sleeper, from 1⃣ to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him
in his 😕 fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his
land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king,
chiefs, and great people generally, were in the 🛃 of fattening some
of the 😦 orders for ottomans; and to furnish a 🏠 comfortably in
that respect, you had only to buy up 8⃣ or ❌ lazy fellows, and lay
them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on
an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible
into 🚶-sticks; upon occasion, a chief 📲 his attendant, and
desiring him to 💩 a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
in some 🔇 marshy 🚉.

While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's ❓.

"What's that for, Queequeg?"

"Perry easy, kill-🇪🇸; oh! perry easy!"

He was going on with some 😠 reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
which, it seemed, had in its 2⃣ uses both brained his foes and soothed
his soul, when we were directly attracted to the 😴 rigger. The
strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began
to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed
troubled in the 👃; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and
rubbed his eyes.

"Holloa!" he breathed at 🔚, "who be ye smokers?"

"Shipped 🚹," answered I, "when does she sail?"

"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain
came aboard 🔚 night."

"What Captain?--Ahab?"

"Who but him indeed?"

I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
heard a noise on deck.

"Holloa! Starbuck's 🆙," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief 👫,
that; 🔉 👨, and a pious; but all alive now, I must 🔧 to." And so
saying he went on deck, and we followed.

It was now 🔝 🌅. 🔜 the crew came on board in twos and
threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively
engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various
🔚 things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly
enshrined within his cabin.



CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.


At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the 🚢's riggers,
and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the
ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a 🐳-⛵, with her 🔚
🎁--a night-👑 for Stubb, the 🔙 👫, her brother-in-law, and a
🆓 Bible for the steward--after all this, the 2⃣ Captains, Peleg
and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief 👫, Peleg
said:

"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is
all ready--just spoke to him--0⃣ more to be got from shore, eh?
Well, ☎ all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here--🐚 'em!"

"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad,
"but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."

How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high 🚹 on the
💩-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at 🌊, as
well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no 🏠 of
him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then,
the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the
🚢 under weigh, and steering her well out to 🌊. Indeed, as that was
not at all his proper business, but the pilot's; and as he was not
yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore, Captain Ahab stayed
below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant
service many captains never ® themselves on deck for a considerable
time after heaving up the ⚓, but remain over the cabin table,
having a 🍃 merry-making with their shore friends, before they
quit the 🚢 for 🔉 with the pilot.

But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and
commanding, and not Bildad.

"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered at
the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, 🐏'em aft."

"Strike the ⛺ there!"--was the next ♣. As I hinted before, this
whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
Pequod, for thirty years, the ♣ to strike the ⛺ was well known to
be the next thing to heaving up the ⚓.

"👨 the capstan! Blood and 💥!--🌹!"--was the next command, and
the crew sprang for the handspikes.

Now in getting under weigh, the 🚉 generally occupied by the pilot
is the forward 🏢 of the 🚢. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it
known, in addition to his other officers, was 1⃣ of the licensed pilots
of the port--he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
♣ to 😌 the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned
in, for he never piloted any other craft--Bildad, I say, might now
be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching
⚓, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,
to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of
a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty 🔉 will.
Nevertheless, not 3⃣ days previous, Bildad had told them that no
profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
getting under weigh; and Charity, his 👶, had placed a small choice
copy of Watts in each seaman's 🏢.

Meantime, overseeing the other 🏢 of the 🚢, Captain Peleg ripped
and swore astern in the most 😨 manner. I almost thought he would
sink the 🚢 before the ⚓ could be got up; involuntarily I paused
on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the
perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a
pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious
Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his 7⃣ 💯 and
seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp 👃 in my 🌹, and
turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the
act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first
👢.

"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.
"⛲, Ⓜ 🐑-❓; ⛲, and break thy ⚓! Why don't ye
⛲, I say, all of ye--⛲! Quohog! ⛲, Ⓜ chap with the 😳
whiskers; ⛲ there, Scotch-👑; ⛲, Ⓜ green pants. ⛲, I
say, all of ye, and ⛲ your eyes out!" And so saying, he moved
🔛 the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
imperturbable Bildad kept ⭐ off with his psalmody. Thinks I,
Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.

At 🔚 the ⚓ was up, the sails were 👗, and off we glided. It
was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into
night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry 🌊, whose
freezing spray cased us in 🎇, as in polished armor. The long rows of
teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the 🌔; and like the white
ivory tusks of some huge 🐘, vast curving icicles depended from
the bows.

Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first ⌚, and ever and anon, as the
old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost
all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady
notes were heard,--

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 🐻 dressed in living green.
So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between."


Never did those sweet words 🔉 more sweetly to me than then. They
were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter 👑, there was
yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads
and glades so eternally vernal, that the 🐀 shot up by the ⛲,
untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.

At 🔚 we gained such an offing, that the 2⃣ pilots were needed
no longer. The stout sail-⛵ that had accompanied us began ranging
alongside.

It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at
this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to 🍃, yet;
very loath to 🍃, for 🔉, a 🚢 bound on so long and perilous a
voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a 🚢 in which some thousands of
his hard earned dollars were invested; a 🚢, in which an old shipmate
sailed as captain; a 👨 almost as old as he, once more starting to
encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say 🔉-bye to
a thing so every way brimful of every 😟 to him,--poor old Bildad
lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the
cabin to speak another 🍃 word there; again came on deck, and
looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only
bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards
the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere
and nowhere; and at 🔚, mechanically coiling a rope upon its 🎏,
convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the 🚹, and holding up a 🏮,
for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say,
"Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can 🐻 it; yes, I can."

As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all
his philosophy, there was a tear 💓 in his ♥, when the 🏮
came too near. And he, too, did not a little 🏃 from cabin to deck--now
a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief 👫.

But, at 🔚, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look
about him,--"Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must ❌. 🔙 the
main-Ⓜ there! ⛵ ahoy! 🐻 by to come 🔚 alongside, now!
Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, 👦--say your 🔚. Luck to ye,
Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--🔉-bye and
🔉 luck to ye all--and this day 3⃣ years I'll have a hot supper
🚬 for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"

"God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, 🚹," murmured old
Bildad, almost incoherently. "I hope ye'll have 🆗 weather now, so
that Captain Ahab may 🔜 be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all
he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye ❌.
Be careful in the 🏃, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly,
ye harpooneers; 🔉 white cedar plank is raised full 3⃣ per cent.
within the year. Don't 🍃 your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind
that cooper don't waste the 🆓 staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in
the green locker! Don't 🐳 it too much a' Lord's days, 🚹; but don't
👧 a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's 🔉 gifts. Have an
♥ to the molasses 3⃣, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought.
If ye 👻 at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. 🔉-bye,
🔉-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the 📖, Mr.
Starbuck; it'll 👶. Be careful with the butter--twenty cents the
🔨 it was, and mind ye, if--"

"Come, come, Captain Bildad; 🔚 palavering,--away!" and with that,
Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the ⛵.

🚢 and ⛵ diverged; the cold, 🔇 night breeze blew between; a
😱 gull flew overhead; the 2⃣ hulls wildly rolled; we gave
3⃣ 🔉-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
Atlantic.



CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.


Some chapters 🔙, 1⃣ Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
mariner, encountered in 🆕 Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I 📅 standing at her
helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon
the 👨, who in mid-winter just landed from a 4⃣ years' dangerous
voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for 😯 another
😠 term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest
things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories 🐻 no epitaphs; this
6⃣-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say
that it fared with him as with the 😡-tossed 🚢, that miserably
drives 🔛 the leeward land. The port would fain 🍃 succor; the port
is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm
blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale,
the port, the land, is that 🚢's direst jeopardy; she must fly all
hospitality; 1⃣ 👻 of land, though it but graze the keel, would 💩
her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail
off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would
blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed 🌊's landlessness again;
for refuge's 🍶 forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her
bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to 📅 of that mortally
intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
😓 of the soul to keep the open independence of her 🌊; while
the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to 🐱 her on the
treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, 😳 if that were safety!
For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of
the 😨! is all this agony so vain? 🉑 ♥, 🉑 ♥,
⭕ Bulkington! 🉑 thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
🌊-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!



CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.


As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I
am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done
to us hunters of whales.

In the first 🚉, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
accounted on a 😳 with what are called the 🆓 professions. If a
👽 were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan ♣,
it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were
he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation
of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm
🐳 Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.

Doubtless 1⃣ ⭐ reason why the 👨 declines honouring us
whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our 📲 amounts to a
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is
true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
all Martial Commanders whom the 👨 invariably delights to honour. And
as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
🔜 be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally 👽,
and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm 🐳-🚢
at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But 😳
granting the 👢 in ❓ to be true; what 😕 slippery
decks of a 🐳-🚢 are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies'
plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit
of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran
who has freely marched up to a 🔋, would quickly recoil at the
apparition of the sperm 🐳's vast 💩, fanning into eddies the air
over his ❓. For what are the comprehensible terrors of 👨 compared
with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

But, though the 👨 scouts at us 🐳 hunters, yet does it
unwittingly 🐻 us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that 🔥 round
the globe, 🔥, as before so many shrines, to our glory!

But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
scales; 📅 what we whalemen are, and have been.

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling
fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit
out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some
score or 2⃣ of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 🐻 to her whalemen in bounties
🆙 of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of
America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the 👨;
sail a navy of 🆙 of 7⃣ 💯 vessels; manned by eighteen
Ⓜ 🚹; yearly consuming 4⃣,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
harbors a well reaped harvest of $7⃣,000,000. How comes all this, if
there be not something puissant in whaling?

But this is not the half; look again.

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
point out 1⃣ 1⃣ peaceful influence, which within the 🔚 sixty
years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad 👨, taken in
1⃣ aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. 1⃣ way
and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may
well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to
catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
the 🐳-🚢 has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no 💹, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
American and European 🚹-of-war now peacefully ride in once 🐺
harbors, let them 🔥 salutes to the honour and glory of the
🐳-🚢, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes
of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that
scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were
as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their
succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin
wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
not willingly have dared. All that is made such a 👋 of in the old
South 🌊 Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of
our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates
3⃣ chapters to, these 🚹 accounted unworthy of being 👗 down in the
🚢's common log. Ah, the 👨! Oh, the 👨!

Until the 🐳 fishery rounded Cape 🎺, no commerce but colonial,
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
the long 🎶 of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.
It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the
Spanish 🔝, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it
might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at 🔚 eventuated the
liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the 🔗 of Old Spain, and
the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
to the enlightened 👨 by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born
discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores
as pestiferously barbarous; but the 🐳-🚢 touched there. The
🐳-🚢 is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover,
in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were
several times saved from starvation by the benevolent 🍪 of the
🐳-🚢 luckily dropping an ⚓ in their waters. The uncounted
isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage
to the 🐳-🚢, that cleared the way for the missionary and the
merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their
first destinations. If that 🔁-bolted land, 🗾, is ever to become
hospitable, it is the 🐳-🚢 alone to whom the credit will be due;
for already she is on the 🚪.

But if, in the face of all this, you 😯 declare that whaling has no
aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
every time.

The 🐳 has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
will say.

THE 🐳 NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote
the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than
Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from
Other, the Norwegian 🐳-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our
glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!

True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
🔉 blood in their veins.

NO 🔉 BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal
blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
afterwards, by 💒, Mary Folger, 1⃣ of the old settlers
of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long 🎶 of Folgers and
harpooneers--all kith and 👪 to noble Benjamin--this day darting the
barbed iron from 1⃣ side of the 👨 to the other.

🔉 again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
respectable.

WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
law, the 🐳 is declared "a royal 🐟."*

Oh, that's only nominal! The 🐳 himself has never figured in any
Ⓜ imposing way.

THE 🐳 NEVER FIGURED IN ANY Ⓜ IMPOSING WAY? In 1⃣ of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the 👨's capital,
the bones of a 🐳, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were
the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*


*📅 subsequent chapters for something more on this ❓.


Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.

NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our 📲 the very heavens
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! 🐏 down your
hat in presence of the Czar, and 🉑 it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a 👨 that, in his lifetime, has taken 3⃣ 💯 and fifty
whales. I account that 👨 more honourable than that great captain of
antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
🌼 thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
but high 😯 👨 which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a 👨 might rather
have done than to have left undone; if, at my 🔚, my executors, or
more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here
I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a
🐳-🚢 was my Yale College and my Harvard.



CHAPTER 25. Postscript.


In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance 0⃣ but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might
tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be
blameworthy?

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, 😳 modern
ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there
may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows?
Certain I am, however, that a king's ❓ is solemnly oiled at his
coronation, 😳 as a ❓ of salad. Can it be, though, that they
anoint it with a ⌚ of making its interior 🏃 well, as they anoint
machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential
dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but
meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably
smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature 👨 who uses hair-oil,
unless medicinally, that 👨 has probably got a quoggy 🏢 in him
somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is
used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil,
nor castor oil, nor 🉑's oil, nor 🏫 oil, nor cod-liver oil. What
then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
state, the sweetest of all oils?

Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
queens with coronation stuff!



CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.


The chief 👫 of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest 👨, and though born on an icy
coast, seemed well adapted to 🏃 hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
as twice-baked 🍪. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would
not 👶 like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of
general drought and famine, or upon 1⃣ of those fast days for which
his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and
cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely
the condensation of the 👨. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the
contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped
up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified
Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to 🏃 for long ages to come,
and to 🏃 always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like
a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well
in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to 📅 there the yet
lingering images of those Ⓜ-fold perils he had calmly confronted
through life. A staid, steadfast 👨, whose life for the most 🏢 was a
telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for
all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities
in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to
overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
endued with a deep natural reverence, the 😠 watery loneliness of his
life did therefore strongly 🏃 him to superstition; but to that
sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to
⛲, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents
and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
of his 🆕 Cape wife and 👶, 🏃 to 🙇 him 😯 more from the
original ruggedness of his nature, and open him 😯 further to those
latent influences which, in some honest-hearted 🚹, restrain the gush
of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous
vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no 👨 in my ⛵," said
Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a 🐳." By this, he seemed to mean,
not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises
from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly
fearless 👨 is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the 🔙 👫, "Starbuck, there, is as careful
a 👨 as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere long
📅 what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a 👨 like
Stubb, or almost any other 🐳 hunter.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at 🚹 upon all
mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this
business of whaling, courage was 1⃣ of the great staple outfits of
the 🚢, like her beef and her 🍞, and not to be foolishly wasted.
Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor
for persisting in fighting a 🐟 that too much persisted in fighting
him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical 🌊 to kill
whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that
hundreds of 🚹 had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was
his own 🔰's? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn
limbs of his brother?

With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
could, nevertheless, 😯 👋, must indeed have been extreme. But
it was not in reasonable nature that a 👨 so organized, and with such
😨 experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature
that these things should 💣 in latently engendering an element in
him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
confinement, and 🔥 all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid 🚹, which,
while generally abiding 🏠 in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the 👨, yet
cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and
mighty 👨.

But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the ♥ to
write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
the fall of valour in the soul. 🚹 may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
🚹 may have mean and meagre faces; but 👨, in the ideal, is so noble
and so sparkling, such a Ⓜ and glowing creature, that over any
ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should 🏃 to 😖 their
costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves,
so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
seem gone; bleeds with keenest 😧 at the undraped 👓 of
a valor-ruined 👨. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this
august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but
that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Ⓜ shalt 📅 it
shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a 👂; that democratic
dignity which, on all hands, radiates without 🔚 from God; Himself! The
great God absolute! The ♥ and circumference of all democracy! His
omnipresence, our divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if 😳 the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them
all, shall at times 🌹 himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall 👻
that workman's arm with some ethereal ✨; if I shall spread a 🌈
over his disastrous 👗 of sun; then against all mortal critics 🉑
me out in it, Ⓜ Just ♥ of Equality, which hast spread 1⃣ royal
mantle of 👨 over all my kind! 🉑 me out in it, Ⓜ great
democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
pale, poetic pearl; Ⓜ who didst 👗 with doubly hammered leaves
of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Ⓜ who
didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
war-🐴; who didst 💥 him higher than a 🚽! Ⓜ who, in all
Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
the kingly commons; 🉑 me out in it, ⭕ God!



CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.


Stubb was the 🔙 👫. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local 🛃, was called a Cape-Cod-👨. A happy-❌-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
🐶, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year. 🔉-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
🐳-⛵ as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his 🏢 of the ⛵, as an old stage-driver is about the
snugness of his 📦. When 🔚 to the 🐳, in the very 🔚-🔒 of
the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as
a whistling 🐒 his 🔨. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes
while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long 🛃 had,
for this Stubb, converted the jaws of 🔚 into an easy chair. What he
thought of 🔚 itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of
it at all, might be a ❓; but, if he ever did chance to 🐱 his
mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no ❓, like a 🔉 sailor,
he took it to be a sort of ☎ of the ⌚ to tumble aloft, and bestir
themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed
the ♣, and not sooner.

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
unfearing 👨, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
👨 full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ⚓ with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious 🔉-humor of his; that
thing must have been his pipe. For, like his 👃, his short, black
little pipe was 1⃣ of the regular features of his face. You would
almost as 🔜 have expected him to 🔧 out of his 🏃 without his
👃 as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy ✋ of his 🚹; and, whenever he
turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting 1⃣ from
the other to the 🔚 of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his 👄.

I say this continual 🚬 must have been 1⃣ cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every 1⃣ knows that this earthly air, whether
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of
the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
cholera, some people ❌ about with a camphorated 💩 to their
mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco
🚬 might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.

The third 👫 was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A
short, stout, ruddy 🆕 fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally
and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly 😖
was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
bulk and ㊙ ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
the wondrous 🐳 was but a species of magnified 🐭, or at least
water-🐀, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
application of time and trouble in ♣ to kill and boil. This
ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
the matter of whales; he followed these 🐟 for the fun of it; and a
3⃣ years' voyage round Cape 🎺 was only a jolly joke that lasted
that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so 👨 may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was 1⃣ of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and 🔚 long. They
called him King-🚉 on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that 🔑 in Arctic
whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted
into it, serves to 👫 the 🚢 against the icy concussions of those
battering seas.

Now these 3⃣ mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
🚹. They it was who by universal prescription commanded 3⃣ of the
Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that Ⓜ ♣ of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these 3⃣ headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked 3⃣ of lancers;
😳 as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.

And since in this famous fishery, each 👫 or headsman, like a Gothic
🐴 of old, is always accompanied by his ⛵-steerer or harpooneer,
who in certain conjunctures provides him with a 🆕 lance, when
the former 1⃣ has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
moreover, as there generally subsists between the 2⃣, a 🔚 intimacy
and friendliness; it is therefore but 😆, that in this 🚉 we 👗
down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
them belonged.

First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief 👫, had selected
for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.

Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from ☀ ❓, the most westerly
promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there 😯 exists the 🔚
🔚 of a village of 😳 🚹, which has long supplied the neighboring
island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the
fishery, they usually ❌ by the generic 🔑 of ☀-Headers. Tashtego's
long, 🏃, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding
eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their
glittering 🚧--all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor
of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest
of the great 🆕 England moose, had scoured, 🙇 in 🚹, the aboriginal
forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the 🐶 of the 😠
beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great
whales of the 🌊; the unerring harpoon of the 👦 fitly replacing the
infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny 💪 of his lithe
snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of
the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this 😠 Indian to be a 👦
of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the 🔙
👫's squire.

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-🐺, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
from his ears were 2⃣ golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
them ☎-bolts, and would 🍑 of securing the 🔝-sail halyards to
them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
anywhere in the 👨 but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
manner of 🚹 they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of 6⃣
feet 5⃣ in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
him; and a white 👨 standing before him seemed a white 🎏 come to
🙏 truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus
Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-👨
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that
at the 🎁 day not 1⃣ in 2⃣ of the many Ⓜ 🚹 before the
mast employed in the American 🐳 fishery, are Americans born, though
pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the
American 🐳 fishery as with the American army and military and
merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the 🚧
of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all
these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest
of the 👨 as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of
these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound
Nantucket whalers frequently 👻 to augment their crews from the hardy
peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers
sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to
receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards,
they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
Islanders seem to 💩 the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders
in the Pequod, ISOLATOES too, I ☎ such, not acknowledging the common
continent of 🚹, but each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his
own. Yet now, federated 🔛 1⃣ keel, what a 👗 these Isolatoes were!
An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the 🌊, and all
the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
👨's grievances before that 🍰 from which not very many of them ever
come 🔙. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor
Alabama 👦! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long 📅 him,
beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for,
to the great 💩-deck on high, he was 📲 strike in with angels, and
💓 his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!



CHAPTER 28. Ahab.


For several days after leaving Nantucket, 0⃣ above hatches was seen
of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly 😌 each other at the watches,
and for 0⃣ that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
only commanders of the 🚢; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they
but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was
there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate
into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.

Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
gazed aft to 🎶 if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
disquietude touching the 👽 captain, now in the seclusion of the
🌊, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened
at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
almost ready to 😁 at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
uneasiness--to ☎ it so--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
about me in the 🚢, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley 👗 than any of the
tame merchant-🚢 companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, 😯 I ascribed this--and rightly ascribed it--to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that 😠 Scandinavian 📲
in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect
of the 3⃣ chief officers of the 🚢, the mates, which was most
forcibly calculated to 😌 these colourless misgivings, and induce
confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. 3⃣
better, more likely 🌊-officers and 🚹, each in his own different way,
could not readily be found, and they were every 1⃣ of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape 👨. Now, it being Christmas when the
🚢 shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,
though all the time 🏃 away from it to the southward; and by every
degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that
merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather 💺 us. It was 1⃣
of those less lowering, but 😯 grey and gloomy enough mornings of the
transition, when with a fair 👃 the 🚢 was rushing through the water
with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I
mounted to the deck at the ☎ of the forenoon ⌚, so 🔜 as I
levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.
Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his 💩-deck.

There seemed no 🏠 of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a 👨 cut away from the 🔙, when
the 🔥 has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away 1⃣ particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini's 🐱 Perseus. Threading its way out
from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down 1⃣ side of his
tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,
you saw a slender rod-like 🎶, lividly whitish. It resembled that
perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of
a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
without wrenching a 1⃣ twig, peels and grooves out the bark from 🔝
to 💺, ere 🏃 off into the soil, leaving the tree 😯 greenly
alive, but branded. Whether that 🎶 was born with him, or whether it
was the scar left by some desperate wound, no 1⃣ could certainly say.
By some tacit 🉑, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was
made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old
☀-❓ Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till
he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
then it came upon him, not in the 😡 of any mortal fray, but in
an elemental strife at 🌊. Yet, this 😠 hint seemed inferentially
negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral 👨,
who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this
laid ♥ upon 😠 Ahab. Nevertheless, the old 🌊-traditions, the
immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously
contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered--then, whoever should do that 🔚 🏢 for the dead, would
find a 🐻-🎶 on him from 🔝 to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
this ivory leg had at 🌊 been fashioned from the polished bone of
the sperm 🐳's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off 🗾," said the old
☀-❓ Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming 🏠 for it. He has a quiver of 'em."

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
the Pequod's 💩 deck, and pretty 🔚 to the mizzen shrouds, there
was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank.
His bone leg steadied in that hole; 1⃣ arm elevated, and holding by a
shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the
🚢's ever-pitching 🙇. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude,
a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
officers say 0⃣ to him; though by all their minutest gestures
and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
consciousness of being under a troubled master-♥. And not only that,
but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

Ere long, from his first 📲 in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
But after that 🌅, he was every day visible to the crew; either
standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory 🚽 he had; or
heavily 🚶 the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
🌹 a little genial, he became 😯 less and less a recluse; as
if, when the 🚢 had sailed from 🏠, 0⃣ but the dead wintry
bleakness of the 🌊 had then kept him so ㊙. And, by and by, it
came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,
for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at 🔚 ☀ deck,
he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was
only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so
that there was little or 0⃣, out of himself, to employ or excite
Ahab, now; and thus 🐶 away, for that 1⃣ interval, the clouds that
layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the
loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from
his mood. For, as when the 😳-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May,
trip 🏠 to the wintry, misanthropic woods; 😳 the barest, ruggedest,
most 💥-cloven old oak will at least 🚢 forth some few green
sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the
🔚, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More
than once did he put forth the faint 🌼 of a look, which, in any
other 👨, would have 🔜 flowered out in a 😁.



CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.


Some days elapsed, and 🎇 and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now
went rolling through the bright Quito ⛲, which, at 🌊, almost
perpetually reigns on the 🚪 of the eternal August of the Tropic.
The warmly 🆒, 🔝, 💍, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days,
were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with
🌹-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
jewelled velvets, nursing at 🏠 in lonely pride, the memory of their
absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For 😴 👨,
'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.
But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend 🆕
spells and potencies to the outward 👨. Inward they turned upon the
soul, especially when the 😯 mild hours of eve came on; then, memory
shot her crystals as the 🔝 🎇 most forms of noiseless twilights.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's
texture.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
👨 has to do with 0⃣ that looks like 🔚. Among 🌊-commanders,
the old greybeards will oftenest 🍃 their berths to 📲 the
night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels
like going down into 1⃣'s tomb,"--he would mutter to himself--"for an
old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to ❌ to my
grave-dug 🏢."

So, almost every twenty-4⃣ hours, when the watches of the night were
👗, and the 💍 on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the 💍 below;
and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
it to its 🚉 for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
this sort of steady quietude would begin to 😤, habitually, the
🔇 steersman would ⌚ the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old 👨
would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.
Some considering 👻 of 👨 was in him; for at times like these,
he usually abstained from patrolling the 💩-deck; because to his
wearied mates, seeking repose within 6⃣ inches of his ivory 🐶, such
would have been the reverberating crack and 💥 of that bony 👣, that
their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once,
the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with 🔉,
💷-like pace he was measuring the 🚢 from taffrail to mainmast,
Stubb, the old 🔙 👫, came up from below, with a certain
unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was
pleased to 🚶 the planks, then, no 1⃣ could say nay; but there might
be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and
hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the
ivory 🐶. Ah! Stubb, Ⓜ didst not know Ahab then.

"Am I a cannon-🍳, Stubb," said Ahab, "that Ⓜ wouldst 🐏 me that
fashion? But ❌ thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;
where such as ye 😴 between shrouds, to use ye to the filling 1⃣ at
🔚.--Down, 🐶, and kennel!"

Starting at the unforseen concluding ❗ of the so suddenly
scornful old 👨, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, "I
am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like
it, sir."

"Avast! gritted Ahab between his 👗 teeth, and violently moving away,
as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called
a 🐶, sir."

"Then be called ❌ times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone,
or I'll 🔝 the 👨 of thee!"

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

"I was never served so before without 🎁 a hard blow for it,"
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's
very queer. 🔚, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to ❌
🔙 and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my knees and 🙏
for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the
first time I ever DID 🙏. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too;
aye, 🉑 him 🙇 and aft, he's about the queerest old 👨 Stubb ever
sailed with. How he flashed at me!--his eyes like powder-pans! is he
mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be
something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more
than 3⃣ hours out of the twenty-4⃣; and he don't 😴 then. Didn't
that 🍞-👦, the steward, tell me that of a 🌅 he always finds
the old 👨's hammock 👗 all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets
down at the 🐾, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the
pillow a sort of 😨 hot, as though a baked brick had been on
it? A hot old 👨! I guess he's got what some folks ashore ☎
a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-🎎-row they say--worse nor a
toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me
from catching it. He's full of riddles; I ❓ what he goes into the
after 📖 for, every night, as 🍞-👦 tells me he suspects; what's
that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in
the 📖? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old
🔙--Here goes for a snooze. 💩 me, it's worth a fellow's while to be
born into the 👨, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think
of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of
queer, too. 💩 me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But
that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and
😴 when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again. But how's that?
didn't he ☎ me a 🐶? blazes! he called me ❌ times a donkey, and
piled a lot of jackasses on 🔝 of THAT! He might as well have kicked
me, and done with it. Maybe he DID 👢 me, and I didn't 🎶 it,
I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a
bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't 🐻 right
on my legs. Coming afoul of that old 👨 has a sort of turned me wrong
side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how?
how?--but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again;
and in the 🌅, I'll 📅 how this plaguey juggling thinks over by
daylight."



CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.


When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, 📲 a sailor
of the ⌚, he sent him below for his ivory 🚽, and also his pipe.
Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the 🚽 on the
weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.

In old Norse times, the thrones of the 🌊-loving Danish kings were
fabricated, saith 🛃, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could 1⃣
look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking
him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of
the 🌊, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his 👄
in quick and constant puffs, which blew 🔙 again into his face. "How
now," he soliloquized at 🔚, withdrawing the 🚇, "this 🚬 no
longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it ❌ with me if thy charm be
gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--aye, and
ignorantly 🚬 to windward all the while; to windward, and with
such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying 🐳, my final jets were the
strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?
This thing that is meant for sereneness, to 🚢 up mild white vapours
among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll
🚬 no more--"

He tossed the 😯 lighted pipe into the 🌊. The 🔥 hissed in the
waves; the same 💓 the 🚢 shot by the bubble the sinking pipe
made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.



CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.


Next 🌅 Stubb accosted Flask.

"Such a queer dream, King-🚉, I never had. You know the old 👨's
ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to 👢
🔙, upon my soul, my little 👨, I kicked my leg right off! And then,
presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept 👢
at it. But what was 😯 more curious, Flask--you know how curious all
dreams are--through all this 😡 that I was in, I somehow seemed to be
thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
👢 from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the row? It's not a real leg,
only a false leg.' And there's a mighty difference between a living
💷 and a dead 💷. That's what makes a blow from the 🚹, Flask,
fifty times more 🐺 to 🉑 than a blow from a cane. The living
member--that makes the living insult, my little 👨. And thinks I to
myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my 💫 toes against
that cursed pyramid--so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all
the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but
a cane--a whalebone cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful
cudgelling--in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a 🐾
👢. Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the 🔚 of it--the 🐾
🏢--what a small sort of 🔚 it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer
kicked me, THERE'S a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled
down to a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the
dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
🐛-haired old merman, with a hump on his 🔙, takes me by the
shoulders, and slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! 👨,
but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over
the fright. 'What am I about?' says I at 🔚. 'And what business is
that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a 👢?'
By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his
💩 to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a
👊--what do you think, I saw?--why 💥 alive, 👨, his 💩
was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on 🔙
thoughts, 'I guess I won't 👢 you, old fellow.' 'Wise Stubb,' said he,
'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of
his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to 🔚 saying
over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to
👢 the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my 🐾 for it,
when he roared out, '🔚 that 👢!' 'Halloa,' says I, 'what's
the matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue
the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says
I--'right HERE it was.' 'Very 🔉,' says he--'he used his ivory leg,
didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb,
what have you to complain of? Didn't he 👢 with right 🔉 will? it
wasn't a common pitch 💴 leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were
kicked by a great 👨, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an
honour; I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the
greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made
garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by
old Ahab, and made a wise 👨 of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him;
account his kicks honours; and on no account 👢 🔙; for you can't
help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you 📅 that pyramid?' With that, he
all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into
the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what
do you think of that dream, Flask?"

"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"

"May be; may be. But it's made a wise 👨 of me, Flask. D'ye 📅 Ahab
standing there, sideways looking over the 💩? Well, the best thing
you can do, Flask, is to let the old 👨 alone; never speak to him,
whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"

"Mast-❓, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!

"If ye 📅 a white 1⃣, split your lungs for him!

"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of
something queer about that, eh? A white 🐳--did ye 🎶 that, 👨?
Look ye--there's something special in the 👃. 🐻 by for it, Flask.
Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way."



CHAPTER 32. Cetology.


Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but 🔜 we shall be 😖
in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the
leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more
special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to
⌚.

It is some systematized exhibition of the 🐳 in his broad genera,
that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
classification of the constituents of a chaos, 0⃣ less is here
essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.

"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.

"It is not my intention, were it in my 🏢, to enter into the
❓ as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and
families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal"
(sperm 🐳), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."
"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field
strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to
torture us naturalists."

Thus speak of the 🐳, the great Cuvier, and 🚽 Hunter, and Lesson,
those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in
some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are
the 🚹, small and great, old and 🆕, landsmen and seamen, who have at
large or in little, written of the 🐳. 🏃 over a few:--The Authors
of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;
🚽 Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the
Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what
ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited
extracts will ®.

Of the names in this list of 🐳 authors, only those following Owen
ever saw living whales; and but 1⃣ of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
subject of the Greenland or right-🐳, he is the best existing
🏢. But Scoresby knew 0⃣ and says 0⃣ of the great
sperm 🐳, compared with which the Greenland 🐳 is almost unworthy
mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland 🐳 is an usurper
upon the 🚽 of the seas. He is not 😳 by any means the largest
of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
🔉 ignorance which, till some seventy years 🔙, invested the
then fabulous or utterly 👽 sperm-🐳, and which ignorance to
this 🎁 day 😯 reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
and 🐳-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days,
will 😆 you that the Greenland 🐳, without 1⃣ rival, was to
them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at 🔚 come for a 🆕
proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! 🔉 people all,--the
Greenland 🐳 is deposed,--the great sperm 🐳 now reigneth!

There are only 2⃣ books in being which at all pretend to put the living
sperm 🐳 before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree
succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in
their time surgeons to English South-🌊 🐳-ships, and both exact and
reliable 🚹. The original matter touching the sperm 🐳 to be found
in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of
excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As
yet, however, the sperm 🐳, scientific or poetic, lives not complete
in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an
unwritten life.

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline 1⃣ for the
🎁, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
laborers. As no better 👨 advances to 🉑 this matter in 🚹, I
hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I 📲 0⃣ complete;
because any 👨 thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
description of the various species, or--in this 🚉 at least--to much
of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a
systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the 🚉-🏢
is equal to it. To grope down into the 💺 of the 🌊 after them;
to have 1⃣'s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very
pelvis of the 👨; this is a 😨 thing. What am I that I should
essay to 👮 the 👃 of this leviathan! The 😨 tauntings in Job
might well appal me. Will he the (leviathan) 💩 a covenant with thee?
Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and
sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible
hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to
settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled 🚋 of this science of Cetology
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it
😯 remains a moot point whether a 🐳 be a 🐟. In his System of
Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from
the 🐟." But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,
sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict,
were 😯 found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from
the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm bilocular
♥, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "❌ lege naturae jure
meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and
they united in the opinion that the reasons 👗 forth were altogether
insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I 🉑 the 🔉 old fashioned
⚓ that the 🐳 is a 🐟, and ☎ upon holy Jonah to 🔙 me.
This 🔑 thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
respect does the 🐳 differ from other 🐟. Above, Linnaeus has given
you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;
whereas, all other 🐟 are lungless and cold blooded.

Next: how shall we define the 🐳, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
🐳 is A SPOUTING 🐟 WITH A HORIZONTAL 💩. There you have
him. However contracted, that definition is the 🍃 of expanded
meditation. A walrus spouts much like a 🐳, but the walrus is not a
🐟, because he is amphibious. But the 🔚 term of the definition is
😯 more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any 1⃣ must have
noticed that all the 🐟 familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
vertical, or up-and-down 💩. Whereas, among spouting 🐟 the 💩,
though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
🏢.

By the above definition of what a 🐳 is, I do by no means exclude
from the leviathanic brotherhood any 🌊 creature hitherto identified
with the 🐳 by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
🚹, 🔗 with it any 🐟 hitherto authoritatively regarded as 👽.*
Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed 🐟 must be
included in this ⚓-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the Ⓜ
divisions of the entire 🐳 host.


*I am aware that down to the 🎁 time, the 🐟 styled Lamatins and
Dugongs (🐷-🐟 and Sow-🐟 of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included
by many naturalists among the whales. But as these 🐷-🐟 are a noisy,
contemptible 👗, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials
as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the
Kingdom of Cetology.


First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into 3⃣ primary
BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all,
both small and large.

I. THE 🍃 🐳; 2⃣. the OCTAVO 🐳; 3⃣. the DUODECIMO 🐳.

As the type of the 🍃 I 🎁 the SPERM 🐳; of the OCTAVO, the
GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The SPERM
🐳; 2⃣. the RIGHT 🐳; 3⃣. the 5⃣-🔙 🐳; 4⃣. the HUMP-BACKED
🐳; 5⃣. the RAZOR-🔙 🐳; 6⃣. the SULPHUR-💺 🐳.

📖 I. (🍃), CHAPTER I. (SPERM 🐳).--This 🐳, among the
English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa 🐳, and the Physeter
🐳, and the Anvil Headed 🐳, is the 🎁 Cachalot of the
French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
Long Words. He is, without ❓, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being
the only creature from which that valuable ♥, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
upon. It is chiefly with his 🔑 that I now have to do. Philologically
considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm 🐳 was
almost wholly 👽 in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
was only accidentally obtained from the stranded 🐟; in those days
spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
creature identical with the 1⃣ then known in England as the Greenland
or Right 🐳. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that
quickening humor of the Greenland 🐳 which the first syllable of
the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for ✨, but only as an ointment
and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays
buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the 🏃 of time, the
true nature of spermaceti became known, its original 🔑 was 😯
retained by the dealers; no ❓ to enhance its value by a notion so
strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at
🔚 have come to be bestowed upon the 🐳 from which this spermaceti
was really derived.

📖 I. (🍃), CHAPTER 2⃣. (RIGHT 🐳).--In 1⃣ respect this is the
most venerable of the leviathans, being the 1⃣ first regularly hunted
by 👨. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and
the oil specially known as "🐳 oil," an inferior article in commerce.
Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the
following titles: The 🐳; the Greenland 🐳; the Black 🐳;
the Great 🐳; the True 🐳; the Right 🐳. There is a ✋ of
obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously
baptised. What then is the 🐳, which I include in the 🔙 species
of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the
Greenland 🐳 of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the
French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the 🐳
which for more than 2⃣ centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and
English in the Arctic seas; it is the 🐳 which the American fishermen
have long pursued in the Indian 🌊, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor'
West Coast, and various other parts of the 👨, designated by them
Right 🐳 Cruising Grounds.

Some pretend to 📅 a difference between the Greenland 🐳 of the
English and the right 🐳 of the Americans. But they precisely agree
in all their Ⓜ features; nor has there yet been presented a 1⃣
determinate fact upon which to ⚓ a radical 🎶. It is by
endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The
right 🐳 will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference
to elucidating the sperm 🐳.

📖 I. (🍃), CHAPTER 3⃣. (5⃣-🔙).--Under this ❓ I reckon
a monster which, by the various names of 5⃣-🔙, Tall-Spout, and
Long-🚽, has been seen almost in every 🌊 and is commonly the 🐳
whose distant ⛲ is so often descried by passengers crossing the
Atlantic, in the 🆕 York 📦-tracks. In the length he attains, and
in his baleen, the 5⃣-🔙 resembles the right 🐳, but is of a less
portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
🎁 a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
of large wrinkles. His Ⓜ distinguishing feature, the 5⃣, from which
he derives his 🔑, is often a conspicuous object. This 5⃣ is some
3⃣ or 4⃣ feet long, growing vertically from the 🔙 🏢 of the
🔙, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed 🔚. 😳 if
not the slightest other 🏢 of the creature be visible, this isolated
5⃣ will, at times, be seen plainly 😌 from the 🌹. When
the 🌊 is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples,
and this gnomon-like 5⃣ stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled
🌹, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it
somewhat resembles a dial, with its 💨 and wavy hour-lines graved on
it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes 🔙. The 5⃣-🔙 is not
gregarious. He seems a 🐳-hater, as some 🚹 are 👨-haters. Very
shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the 🌹 in the
remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and 1⃣ lofty ⛲
rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a 😇 plain; gifted with
such wondrous 🏢 and velocity in swimming, as to defy all 🎁
pursuit from 👨; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable
Cain of his 🏃, bearing for his 🎶 that 💨 upon his 🔙. From
having the baleen in his 👄, the 5⃣-🔙 is sometimes included with
the right 🐳, among a theoretic species denominated WHALEBONE WHALES,
that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there
would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little
known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen's
names for a few sorts.

In 🔗 with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of
great importance to 🎶, that however such a nomenclature may be
convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is
in vain to attempt a 🔝 classification of the Leviathan, founded upon
either his baleen, or hump, or 5⃣, or teeth; notwithstanding that those
marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford
the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other 🆓
bodily distinctions, which the 🐳, in his kinds, presents. How
then? The baleen, hump, 🔙-5⃣, and teeth; these are things whose
peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,
without any regard to what may be the nature of their 🚧 in other
and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm 🐳 and the humpbacked
🐳, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same
humpbacked 🐳 and the Greenland 🐳, each of these has baleen;
but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the
other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such
irregular combinations; or, in the 🐚 of any 1⃣ of them 🆓,
such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general
methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every 1⃣ of the
🐳-naturalists has split.

But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
🐳, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to 💥 the
right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
Greenland 🐳's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have
seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the
Greenland 🐳. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth 🏢 as
available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.
What then remains? 0⃣ but to 🉑 📖 of the whales bodily, in
their entire 🆓 📖, and boldly sort them that way. And this is
the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only 1⃣ that can
possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.

📖 I. (🍃) CHAPTER 4⃣. (HUMP-🔙).--This 🐳 is often seen on
the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and
towed into harbor. He has a great 💍 on him like a peddler; or you
might ☎ him the 🐘 and Castle 🐳. At any rate, the popular
🔑 for him does not sufficiently 🔑 him, since the sperm
🐳 also has a hump though a smaller 1⃣. His oil is not very
valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and ✨-hearted of
all the whales, making more ☀ ✨ and white water generally than any
other of them.

📖 I. (🍃), CHAPTER 5⃣. (RAZOR-🔙).--Of this 🐳 little is known
but his 🔑. I have seen him at a distance off Cape 🎺. Of a retiring
nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he
has never yet shown any 🏢 of him but his 🔙, which rises in a long
sharp ridge. Let him ❌. I know little more of him, nor does anybody
else.

📖 I. (🍃), CHAPTER 6⃣. (SULPHUR-💺).--Another retiring
👨, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping 🔛 the
Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,
and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is
never chased; he would 🏃 away with rope-walks of 🎶. Prodigies are
told of him. Adieu, Sulphur 💺! I can say 0⃣ more that is true
of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.

Thus ends 📖 I. (🍃), and now begins 📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO).

OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which
🎁 may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; 2⃣., the BLACK 🐟; 3⃣.,
the NARWHALE; 4⃣., the THRASHER; 5⃣., the KILLER.


*Why this 📖 of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
Because, while the whales of this ♣, though smaller than those of
the former ♣, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them
in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto 📖 in its dimensioned form
does not preserve the shape of the 🍃 📖, but the Octavo 📖
does.


📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).--Though this 🐟, whose
loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb
to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not
popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the Ⓜ distinctive
features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for 1⃣.
He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-5⃣ feet
in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in
herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in
quantity, and pretty 🔉 for ✨. By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm 🐳.

📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER 2⃣. (BLACK 🐟).--I 🍃 the popular
fishermen's names for all these 🐟, for generally they are the best.
Where any 🔑 happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,
and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black 🐟, so-called,
because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, ☎ him the
Hyena 🐳, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved 🆙, he
carries an everlasting Mephistophelean 😁 on his face. This 🐳
averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked 5⃣
in swimming, which looks something like a Roman 👃. When not more
profitably employed, the sperm 🐳 hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
🐳, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--as
some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
themselves, 🔥 unsavory tallow instead of odorous 🌹. Though their
blubber is very thin, some of these whales will 🐻 you 🆙 of
thirty gallons of oil.

📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER 3⃣. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL
🐳.--Another instance of a curiously named 🐳, so named I suppose
from his peculiar 🎺 being originally mistaken for a peaked 👃. The
creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its 🎺 averages 5⃣
feet, though some 🔝 ❌, and 😳 attain to fifteen feet. Strictly
speaking, this 🎺 is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw
in a 🎶 a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only
found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, 🎁 its owner
something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed 👨. What
precise purpose this ivory 🎺 or lance answers, it would be hard to
say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-🐟 and
🎶-🐟; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for
a rake in turning over the 💺 of the 🌊 for food. Charley Coffin
said it was used for an 🎇-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
🌹 of the Polar 🌊, and finding it sheeted with 🎇, thrusts his
🎺 up, and so breaks through. But you cannot 🌹 either of these
surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this 1⃣-sided
🎺 may really be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would
certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked 🐳, the Horned 🐳, and
the Unicorn 🐳. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism
to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain
cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same 🌊-unicorn's 🎺
was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison,
and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it
was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells
me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when
Queen Bess did gallantly 👋 her jewelled 🚹 to him from a window
of Greenwich Palace, as his bold 🚢 sailed down the Thames; "when Sir
Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees
he presented to her highness a prodigious long 🎺 of the Narwhale,
which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish
author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise
🎁 to her highness another 🎺, pertaining to a land 🐺 of the
unicorn nature.

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, 🐆-like look, being of a
milk-white ⚓ colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
His oil is very superior, 🔝 and 🆗; but there is little of it, and
he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.

📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER 4⃣. (KILLER).--Of this 🐳 little is
precisely known to the Nantucketer, and 0⃣ at all to the professed
naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very 🐺--a sort of
Feegee 🐟. He sometimes takes the great 🍃 whales by the 👄, and
hangs there like a leech, till the mighty 🐺 is 😟 to 🔚. The
Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception
might be taken to the 🔑 bestowed upon this 🐳, on the ⚓
of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on 🌊;
Bonapartes and Sharks included.

📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER 5⃣. (THRASHER).--This 👨 is famous for
his 💩, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts
the 🍃 🐳's 🔙, and as he swims, he works his passage by
flogging him; as some schoolmasters get 🔛 in the 👨 by a similar
process. 😯 less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both
are outlaws, 😳 in the lawless seas.

Thus ends 📖 2⃣. (OCTAVO), and begins 📖 3⃣. (DUODECIMO).

DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.
2⃣. The Algerine Porpoise. 3⃣. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.

To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding 4⃣ or 5⃣
feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the popular
sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures 👗
down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my
definition of what a 🐳 is--i.🇪🇸. a spouting 🐟, with a horizontal
💩.

📖 3⃣. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1⃣. (HUZZA PORPOISE).--This is the
common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The 🔑 is of my own
bestowal; for there are more than 1⃣ sort of porpoises, and something
must be done to 🔑 them. I ☎ him thus, because he always
swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad 🌊 keep tossing
themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
appearance is generally hailed with 😂 by the mariner. Full of 🆗
spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They
are the lads that always live before the 👃. They are accounted a
lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand 3⃣ cheers at beholding
these vivacious 🐟, then heaven help ye; the ♥ of godly
gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will
🐻 you 1⃣ 🔉 gallon of 🔉 oil. But the 🆗 and delicate fluid
extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise
♥ is 🔉 eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that
a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, ⌚ him; and
you will then 📅 the great Sperm 🐳 himself in miniature.

📖 3⃣. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 2⃣. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).--A pirate. Very
🐺. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger
than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general 💩. 🔥 him,
and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but
never yet saw him captured.

📖 3⃣. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 3⃣. (MEALY-MOUTHED PORPOISE).--The
largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is
known. The only English 🔑, by which he has hitherto been designated,
is that of the fishers--Right-🐳 Porpoise, from the circumstance that
he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that 🍃. In shape, he differs
in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly
girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and 👨-like figure. He has
no fins on his 🔙 (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely 💩,
and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-👄 spoils
all. Though his entire 🔙 down to his side fins is of a deep sable,
yet a boundary 🎶, distinct as the 🎶 in a 🚢's hull, called
the "bright waist," that 🎶 streaks him from 🙇 to 💩, with 2⃣
separate colours, black above and white below. The white comprises 🏢
of his ❓, and the whole of his 👄, which makes him look as if he
had just escaped from a felonious 📲 to a meal-👜. A most mean and
mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.


Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as
the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the
Leviathans of 🎶. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their
🙇-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If
any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then
he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his 🍃,
Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--The Bottle-👃 🐳; the Junk 🐳;
the Pudding-Headed 🐳; the Cape 🐳; the ⭐ 🐳; the Cannon
🐳; the Scragg 🐳; the Coppered 🐳; the 🐘 🐳; the
Iceberg 🐳; the Quog 🐳; the Blue 🐳; etc. From Icelandic,
Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of
uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit
them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for
mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying 0⃣.

Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be
here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly 📅 that I have
kept my word. But I now 🍃 my cetological System standing thus
unfinished, 😳 as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the
crane 😯 standing upon the 🔝 of the uncompleted tower. For small
erections may be finished by their first architects; Ⓜ ones, true
ones, ever 🍃 the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything. This whole 📖 is but a draught--nay, but the
draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!



CHAPTER 33. The Specksynder.


Concerning the officers of the 🐳-craft, this seems as 🔉 a 🚉
as any to 👗 down a little domestic peculiarity on 🚢-board, arising
from the existence of the harpooneer 👪 of officers, a 👪 👽
of 🏃 in any other marine than the 🐳-🎯.

The large importance attached to the harpooneer's 📲 is evinced
by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, 2⃣ centuries
and more ago, the command of a 🐳 🚢 was not wholly lodged in
the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter;
🛃, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In
those days, the captain's 🏢 was restricted to the navigation
and general management of the vessel; while over the 🐳-hunting
department and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer
reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted
title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is 😯 retained, but
his former dignity is sadly abridged. At 🎁 he ranks simply
as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but 1⃣ of the captain's more
inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the 🔉 🐻 of the
harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the ⛵,
but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ⚓) the
command of the 🚢's deck is also his; therefore the Ⓜ political
maxim of the 🌊 demands, that he should nominally live apart from
the 🚹 before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
their social equal.

Now, the Ⓜ 🎶 drawn between officer and 👨 at 🌊, is
this--the first lives aft, the 🔚 forward. Hence, in 🐳-ships and
merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and
so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
the after 🏢 of the 🚢. That is to say, they 🉑 their meals in the
captain's cabin, and 😴 in a 🚉 indirectly communicating with it.

Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
of all voyages now or ever made by 👨), the peculiar perils of it, and
the community of 😟 prevailing among a company, all of whom, high
or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and
hard 🏃; though all these things do in some cases 🏃 to beget a less
rigorous 🚋 than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind
how much like an old Mesopotamian 🏠 these whalemen may, in some
primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
externals, at least, of the 💩-deck are seldom materially ☺,
and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
which you will 📅 the skipper parading his 💩-deck with an elated
grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost
as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the
shabbiest of pilot-cloth.

And though of all 🚹 the moody captain of the Pequod was the least
given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage
he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he
required no 👨 to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon
the 💩-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he
addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or IN
TERROREM, or otherwise; yet 😳 Captain Ahab was by no means
unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the 🌊.

Nor, perhaps, will it 💣 to be eventually perceived, that 💺 those
forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
making use of them for other and more ㊙ ends than they were
legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,
which had otherwise in a 🔉 degree remained unmanifested; through
those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible
dictatorship. For be a 👨's intellectual superiority what it will,
it can never 🉑 the practical, available supremacy over other 🚹,
without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always,
in themselves, more or less paltry and 🐾. This it is, that for ever
keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the 👨's hustings; and
leaves the highest honours that this air can 🍃, to those 🚹 who
become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice
㊙ handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted
superiority over the dead 😳 of the mass. Such large virtue lurks
in these small things when extreme political superstitions 💺 them,
that in some royal instances 😳 to idiot imbecility they have imparted
potency. But when, as in the 🐚 of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed 🔝
of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian
herds 🙇 abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the
tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest
sweep and 🚋 swing, ever 🍃 a hint, incidentally so important in
his 🎨, as the 1⃣ now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, 😯 moves before me in all his Nantucket
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
🐳-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be Ⓜ in thee, it
must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
featured in the unbodied air!



CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.


It is noon; and 🍞-👦, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-🍞
face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and
master; who, sitting in the lee 💩-⛵, has just been taking an
observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the
smooth, 🎀-shaped 💊, reserved for that daily purpose on
the upper 🏢 of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the
tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
🔜, catching 📖 of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to
the deck, and in an 😳, unexhilarated 🔉, saying, "Dinner, Mr.
Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.

When the 🔚 🔁 of his sultan's 👣 has died away, and Starbuck, the
first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck
rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns 🔛 the planks, and, after
a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some 👻 of pleasantness,
"Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle. The 🔙 Emir lounges
about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main 👫, to
📅 whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise
takes up the old burden, and with a rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows
after his predecessors.

But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the 💩-deck,
seems to feel 😌 from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and 👢 off his
shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless 😢 of a hornpipe right
over the Ⓜ Turk's ❓; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching
his 👑 up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other
processions, by bringing up the 🌹 with music. But ere stepping into
the cabin 🚪 below, he pauses, ships a 🆕 face altogether, and,
then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's presence,
in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.

It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
artificialness of 🌊-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
some officers will, upon provocation, 🉑 themselves boldly and
defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ❌ to 1⃣, let those
very officers the next moment ❌ down to their customary dinner in that
same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the ❓ of
the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some 👻 of mundane grandeur. But he
who in the rightly regal and 🔉 ♥ presides over his own
㊙ dinner-table of invited guests, that 👨's unchallenged 🏢
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that 👨's royalty of
state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who
has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It
is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now,
if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a
🚢-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
peculiarity of 🌊-life just mentioned.

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a 🔇, maned
🌊-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but 😯
deferential cubs. In his own proper 🔧, each officer waited to be
served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,
there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With 1⃣ mind,
their intent eyes all fastened upon the old 👨's 👅, as he carved
the chief 🍑 before him. I do not suppose that for the 👨 they
would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, 😳
upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his
👅 and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby
motioned Starbuck's 🐚 towards him, the 👫 received his ♥ as
though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started
if, perchance, the 👅 grazed against the 🐚; and chewed it
noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like
the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly
dines with the 7⃣ Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
somehow solemn meals, eaten in 😨 😯; and yet at table old Ahab
forbade not conversation; only he himself was 🔇. What a relief it was
to choking Stubb, when a 🐀 made a sudden racket in the 📖 below. And
poor little Flask, he was the youngest 👦, and little 👦 of this 😩
🏠 party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have
been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this
must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had
he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have
been able to 📖 his ❓ up in this honest 👨; nevertheless,
strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,
the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did
Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners
of the 🚢 denied it to him, on account of its clotting his 🔝,
☀ complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for
him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless 👨!

Another thing. Flask was the 🔚 person down at the dinner, and Flask
is the first 👨 up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly
jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;
and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the 🌹. If Stubb
😳, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small
appetite, and 🔜 shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask
must bestir himself, he will not get more than 3⃣ mouthfuls that day;
for it is against holy 🛃 for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.
Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in ㊙, that ever since he
had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never
known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what
he ate did not so much 🆓 his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.
Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from
my 🐻. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could 🐟 a bit of
old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the
mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:
there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere
sailor of the Pequod had a 🍲 against Flask in Flask's official
capacity, all that sailor had to do, in ♣ to obtain ample vengeance,
was to ❌ aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin
sky-✨, sitting 💫 and dumfoundered before 😨 Ahab.

Now, Ahab and his 3⃣ mates formed what may be called the first table
in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking 🚉 in inverted
♣ to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was
restored to some hurried ♣ by the pallid steward. And then the 3⃣
harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees.
They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the high and mighty
cabin.

In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire 😟-😇
license and 😌, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows
the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
🔉 of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food
with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords;
they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.
Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to 😆 out
the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale 🍞-👦 was
fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of
the solid 🐂. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not ❌ with
a nimble hop-skip-and-🌹, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
accelerating him by darting a fork at his 🔙, harpoon-wise. And once
Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted 🍞-👦's memory by
snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his ❓ into a great empty
wooden trencher, while Tashtego, 👅 in 🚹, began laying out the
circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,
shuddering sort of little fellow, this 🍞-faced steward; the progeny
of a bankrupt baker and a 🏥 nurse. And what with the standing
👓 of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous
visitations of these 3⃣ savages, 🍞-👦's whole life was 1⃣
continual 👄-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished
with all things they demanded, he would 🏃 from their clutches into
his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the
blinds of its 🚪, till all was over.

It was a sight to 📅 Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing
his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the
floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed ❓ to the low
carlines; at every ❓ of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin
framework to shake, as when an African 🐘 goes passenger in a
🚢. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,
not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble 🐺 fed
strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his
dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by
beef or by 🍞, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a
mortal, barbaric smack of the 👄 in eating--an ugly 🔉 enough--so
much so, that the trembling 🍞-👦 almost looked to 📅 whether
any marks of teeth lurked in his own 🏃 arms. And when he would hear
Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be
picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the
whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their
lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they
would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating 🔉 did not at
all 🏃 to tranquillize poor 🍞-👦. How could he 🍃 that in his
Island days, Queequeg, for 1⃣, must certainly have been guilty of some
murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! 🍞-👦! hard fares the
white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he 🏃 on
his arm, but a buckler. In 🔉 time, though, to his great 😂,
the 3⃣ salt-🌊 warriors would 🌹 and 🍃; to his credulous,
fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every
👣, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.

But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
there; 😯, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before 😴-time,
when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.

In this 1⃣ matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American 🐳
captains, who, as a 👗, rather 🏃 to the opinion that by rights
the 🚢's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that
anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth,
the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to
have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it
was something as a street-🚪 enters a 🏠; turning inwards for
a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin
was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
included in the census of Christendom, he was 😯 an 👽 to it. He
lived in the 👨, as the 🔚 of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
Missouri. And as when ⛲ and Summer had departed, that 😠 Logan of
the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter
there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age,
Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the
sullen paws of its gloom!



CHAPTER 35. The Mast-❓.


It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
other seamen my first mast-❓ came round.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; 😳 though she may
have fifteen Ⓜ miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
cruising ⚓. And if, after a 3⃣, 4⃣, or 5⃣ years' voyage
she is drawing nigh 🏠 with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial
😳--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the 🔚; and not till her
skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether
🆓 the hope of capturing 1⃣ 🐳 more.

Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
ancient and interesting 1⃣, let us in some measure expatiate here.
I 🉑 it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
their tower, have intended to 🌹 the loftiest mast-❓ in all Asia,
or Africa either; yet (ere the final 🚚 was put to it) as that great
💎 mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the 😨
gale of God's 💢; therefore, we cannot 🍃 these Babel builders
priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of
mast-❓ standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among
archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical
purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like
formation of all 4⃣ sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious
long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to 🌹
to the apex, and 🍑 out for 🆕 stars; 😳 as the look-outs of a
modern 🚢 🍑 out for a sail, or a 🐳 just bearing in sight. In
👼 Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him
a lofty 💎 pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of
his life on its 🔝, hoisting his food from the ⚓ with a
tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless
stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his 🚉 by fogs
or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to
the 🔚, literally died at his 🚉. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads
we have but a lifeless 👗; mere 💎, iron, and bronze 🚹; who,
though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are 😯 entirely
incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange
sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the 🔝 of the column of Vendome,
stands with arms folded, some 1⃣ 💯 and fifty feet in the air;
careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis
Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on
his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like 1⃣ of Hercules' pillars,
his column marks that point of 👨 grandeur beyond which few mortals
will ❌. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of 🔫-metal, stands his
mast-❓ in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that
London 🚬, token is yet given that a ㊙ hero is there; for
where there is 🚬, must be 🔥. But neither great Washington, nor
Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a 1⃣ hail from below, however
madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks
upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits
penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals
and what rocks must be shunned.

It may seem unwarrantable to 👫 in any respect the mast-❓
standers of the land with those of the 🌊; but that in truth it is
not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole
historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,
that in the early times of the 🐳 fishery, ere ships were regularly
launched in pursuit of the 🔙, the people of that island erected lofty
spars 🔛 the 🌊-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means
of nailed cleats, something as fowls ❌ upstairs in a hen-🏠. A few
years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of 🆕 Zealand,
who, upon descrying the 🔙, gave 🎶 to the ready-manned boats nigh
the beach. But this 🛃 has now become obsolete; 🔧 we then to the
1⃣ proper mast-❓, that of a 🐳-🚢 at 🌊. The 3⃣ mast-heads
are kept manned from sun-🌹 to sun-👗; the seamen taking their
regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every 2⃣
hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant
the mast-❓; nay, to a dreamy 😔 👨 it is delightful. There
you 🐻, a 💯 feet above the 🔇 decks, striding 🔛 the
deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and
between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the 🌊, 😳
as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old
Rhodes. There you 🐻, 😖 in the infinite series of the 🌊, with
0⃣ ruffled but the waves. The tranced 🚢 indolently rolls; the
drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the
most 🏢, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests
you; you hear no news; ® no gazettes; extras with startling accounts
of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear
of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are
never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner--for
all your meals for 3⃣ years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and
your 🎶 of fare is immutable.

In 1⃣ of those southern whalesmen, on a long 3⃣ or 4⃣ years'
voyage, as often happens, the ♥ of the various hours you spend at the
mast-❓ would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be
deplored that the 🚉 to which you devote so considerable a portion
of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly 😇
of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a
comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,
a hearse, a ⌚ 📦, a pulpit, a 🚋, or any other of those small
and snug contrivances in which 🚹 temporarily isolate themselves. Your
most usual point of perch is the ❓ of the t' gallant-mast, where you
🐻 upon 2⃣ thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called
the t' gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the 🌊, the 🔰
feels about as cosy as he would standing on a 🐷's horns. To be sure,
in cold weather you may 🏃 your 🏠 aloft with you, in the shape of
a ⌚-🍰; but properly speaking the thickest ⌚-🍰 is no more
of a 🏠 than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its
fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely 🏃 about in it, nor 😳 🏃 out
of it, without 🏃 great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim
crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a ⌚-🍰 is not so much of
a 🏠 as it is a mere ✉, or additional skin encasing you. You
cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you
💩 a convenient closet of your ⌚-🍰.

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
southern 🐳 🚢 are unprovided with those enviable little tents
or pulpits, called 😤'S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a Greenland
whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the
Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland 🐳, and incidentally for the
re-discovery of the 😖 Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in
this admirable 📖, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with
a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
😤'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the 🔑 of Captain Sleet's 🔉
craft. He called it the SLEET'S 😤'S-NEST, in honour of himself; he
being the original inventor and patentee, and 😇 from all ridiculous
false delicacy, and holding that if we ☎ our own children after our
own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so
likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we
may beget. In shape, the Sleet's 😤's-nest is something like a large
3⃣ or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with
a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your ❓ in a hard gale.
Being fixed on the 🔝 of the mast, you 🌹 into it through a
little trap-hatch in the 💺. On the after side, or side next the
💩 of the 🚢, is a comfortable 💺, with a locker underneath for
umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which
to keep your speaking 🎺, pipe, 🔭, and other nautical
conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-❓ in this
😤's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him
(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for
the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant 🌊 unicorns
infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully 💨 at them from
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to 💨 down upon
them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love
for Captain Sleet to 🔑, as he does, all the little detailed
conveniences of his 😤's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many
of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his
experiments in this 😤's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for
the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called
the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to
the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the 🚢's planks, and in the
Glacier's 🐚, perhaps, to there having been so many 😕-down
blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very
discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle
deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors,"
he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed
in those 🔉 magnetic meditations, as to 💣 being attracted
occasionally towards that well replenished little 🐚-bottle, so nicely
tucked in on 1⃣ side of his 😤's nest, within easy ✋ of his 🚹.
Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and 😳 love the brave, the
honest, and learned Captain; yet I 🉑 it very ill of him that he
should so utterly ignore that 🐚-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend
and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded
❓ he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that 🐦's nest
within 3⃣ or 4⃣ perches of the pole.

But if we Southern 🐳-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For 1⃣, I used
to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the 🔝 to have a
chat with Queequeg, or any 1⃣ else off duty whom I might find there;
then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
🔝-sail Ⓜ, 🉑 a preliminary ⌚ of the watery pastures, and so at
🔚 🌹 to my ultimate destination.

Let me 💩 a clean breast of it here, and frankly 🉑 that I kept but
sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how
could I--being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering
altitude--how could I but lightly 📖 my obligations to 🎶 all
🐳-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather ♥ open, and 🍑 out
every time."

And let me in this 🚉 movingly ⚠ you, ye 🚢-owners of
Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
🏃 brow and hollow ♥; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
offers to 🚢 with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his ❓. Beware
of such an 1⃣, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
killed; and this sunken-eyed 🆕 Platonist will tow you ❌ wakes
round the 👨, and never 💩 you 1⃣ pint of sperm the richer. Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the 🐳-fishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
🆕 🚹, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
himself upon the mast-❓ of some luckless 😞 🐳-🚢, and
in moody phrase ejaculates:--

"👋 on, Ⓜ deep and dark blue 🌊, 👋! ❌ Ⓜ
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."

Very often do the captains of such ships 🉑 those absent-minded
🆕 philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
"😟" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly 😖
to all honourable ambition, as that in their ㊙ souls they would
rather not 📅 whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those 🆕
Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual ♥? They have
left their opera-glasses at 🏠.

"Why, Ⓜ 👿," said a harpooneer to 1⃣ of these lads, "we've been
cruising now hard upon 3⃣ years, and Ⓜ hast not raised a 🐳
yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever Ⓜ 🎨 up here."
Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at 🔚 he loses his identity;
takes the ㊙ 🌊 at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
blue, bottomless soul, pervading 👨 and nature; and every
strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
dimly-discovered, uprising 5⃣ of some undiscernible form, seems to him
the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy ♥ ebbs
away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like
Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at 🔚 a 🏢 of every
shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
gently rolling 🚢; by her, borrowed from the 🌊; by the 🌊, from
the inscrutable tides of God. But while this 😴, this dream is on ye,
🏃 your 🐾 or 🚹 an inch; slip your 📖 at all; and your identity
comes 🔙 in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps,
at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with 1⃣ half-throttled 😱 you
drop through that transparent air into the summer 🌊, no more to 🌹
for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!



CHAPTER 36. The 💩-Deck.


(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)


It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that 1⃣
🌅 🔜 after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
cabin-gangway to the deck. There most 🌊-captains usually 🚶 at that
hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, 🉑 a few turns in the
garden.

🔜 his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar 🎶 of his 🚶. Did
you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
you would 📅 😯 👽 🐾-prints--the 🐾-prints of his 1⃣
unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.

But on the occasion in ❓, those dents looked deeper, 😳 as
his nervous 👣 that 🌅 left a deeper 🎶. And, so full of his
thought was Ahab, that at every uniform 🔧 that he made, now at the
main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost 📅 that thought
🔧 in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every
outer movement.

"D'ye 🎶 him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the 🐦 that's in him pecks
the 🐚. 'Twill 🔜 be out."

The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the
deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.

It drew near the 🔚 of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with
1⃣ 🚹 grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to 🚢 everybody aft.

"Sir!" said the 👫, 😲 at an ♣ seldom or never given on
🚢-board except in some extraordinary 🐚.

"🚢 everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"

When the entire 🚢's company were assembled, and with curious and not
wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike
the weather horizon when a 😡 is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly
glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew,
started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him
resumed his 🔉 turns upon the deck. With bent ❓ and half-slouched
hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among
the 🚹; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But
this did not 🔚 long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:--

"What do ye do when ye 📅 a 🐳, 🚹?"

"🍑 out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
voices.

"🔉!" cried Ahab, with a 😠 approval in his tones; observing the
hearty animation into which his unexpected ❓ had so magnetically
thrown them.

"And what do ye next, 🚹?"

"😦 away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye 🔧 to, 🚹?"

"A dead 🐳 or a stove ⛵!"

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
countenance of the old 👨 at every 😢; while the mariners began
to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
pivot-hole, with 1⃣ 🚹 reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:--

"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me 🍃 orders about a white
🐳. Look ye! d'ye 📅 this Spanish ounce of gold?"--holding up a
broad bright coin to the sun--"it is a sixteen 💵 👨, 🚹. D'ye
📅 it? Mr. Starbuck, 🚹 me yon 🔝-maul."

While the 👫 was getting the 🔨, Ahab, without speaking, was
slowly rubbing the gold 👨 against the skirts of his 👑, as if
to 🌹 its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile
lowly humming to himself, producing a 🔉 so strangely muffled and
inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his
vitality in him.

Receiving the 🔝-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
with the 🔨 uplifted in 1⃣ 🚹, exhibiting the gold with the
other, and with a high raised 🔉 ❗: "Whosoever of ye
raises me a white-headed 🐳 with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed 🐳, with 3⃣ holes
punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
that same white 🐳, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"

"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

"It's a white 🐳, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:
"a white 🐳. Skin your eyes for him, 🚹; look sharp for white water;
if ye 📅 but a bubble, 🍑 out."

All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with 😳
more intense 😟 and surprise than the rest, and at the 🎶
of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was
separately touched by some specific recollection.

"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white 🐳 must be the same that
some ☎ Moby Dick."

"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white 🐳 then, Tash?"

"Does he fan-💩 a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the
☀-Header deliberately.

"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, 😳 for a
parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"

"And he have 1⃣, 2⃣, 3⃣--oh! 🔉 many iron in him hide, too,
Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like
him--him--" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his 🚹 round and
round as though uncorking a bottle--"like him--him--"

"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted
and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big 1⃣, like a whole
shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the
great annual 🐑-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a
split jib in a 😢. 🔚 and devils! 🚹, it is Moby Dick ye have
seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick!"

"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far
been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at 🔚 seemed
struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the ❓. "Captain
Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby Dick that took off
thy leg?"

"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my
hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that
brought me to this dead stump I 🐻 on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with
a terrific, loud, animal 😭, like that of a ♥-stricken moose;
"Aye, aye! it was that accursed white 🐳 that razeed me; made a poor
pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with
measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll 🐶 him
round 🔉 Hope, and round the 🎺, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and
round perdition's flames before I 🍃 him up. And this is what ye have
shipped for, 🚹! to 🐶 that white 🐳 on both sides of land, and
over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls 5⃣ out.
What say ye, 🚹, will ye 💒 hands on it, now? I think ye do look
brave."

"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, 🏃 closer to the
excited old 👨: "A sharp ♥ for the white 🐳; a sharp lance for
Moby Dick!"

"God bless ye," he seemed to half 😭 and half 😢. "God bless ye,
🚹. Steward! ❌ 🏃 the great measure of grog. But what's this long
face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt Ⓜ not 🐶 the white 🐳? 🎨 not
🔙 for Moby Dick?"

"I am 🔙 for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of 🔚 too, Captain
Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we ⌚; but I
came here to 🏃 whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels
will thy vengeance 🐻 thee 😳 if Ⓜ gettest it, Captain Ahab? it
will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

"Nantucket market! 🐦! But come closer, Starbuck; Ⓜ requirest
a little 😦 layer. If money's to be the measurer, 👨, and the
accountants have computed their great counting-🏠 the globe, by
girdling it with guineas, 1⃣ to every 3⃣ parts of an inch; then, let
me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!"

"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it
rings most vast, but hollow."

"Vengeance on a 🔇 🐺!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! 😡! To be enraged with a 🔇 thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again--the little 😦 layer. All visible objects, 👨,
are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the
undoubted deed--there, some 👽 but 😯 reasoning thing puts forth
the mouldings of its features from 💺 the unreasoning 😷. If 👨
will strike, strike through the 😷! How can the prisoner ✋ outside
except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white 🐳 is that
wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's 0⃣ beyond. But
'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I 📅 in him outrageous strength,
with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate; and be the white 🐳 agent, or be the white 🐳
🌠, I will wreak that hate upon him. 🍑 not to me of blasphemy,
👨; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that,
then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair 🏃
herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, 👨,
is 😳 that fair 🏃. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. 🉑 off
thine ♥! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish
stare! So, so; Ⓜ reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to
💢-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing
unsays itself. There are 🚹 from whom warm words are small indignity. I
meant not to incense thee. Let it ❌. Look! 📅 yonder Turkish cheeks of
spotted tawn--living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan
leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek,
and 🍃 no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, 👨, the
crew! Are they not 1⃣ and all with Ahab, in this matter of the 🐳?
📅 Stubb! he laughs! 📅 yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it.
🐻 up amid the general hurricane, thy 1⃣ tost sapling cannot,
Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a 5⃣; no
wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this 1⃣ poor 🏃,
then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang 🔙,
when every foremast-🚹 has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings
seize thee; I 📅! the 🎈 lifts thee! Speak, but speak!--Aye, aye!
thy 😯, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my
dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine;
cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

"God keep me!--keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.

But in his 😂 at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the 👫, Ahab
did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low 😆 from the
📖; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage;
nor yet the hollow 👋 of the sails against the masts, as for a moment
their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes lighted up with
the stubbornness of life; the subterranean 😆 died away; the winds
blew on; the sails filled out; the 🚢 heaved and rolled as before. Ah,
ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But
rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much
predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things
within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
necessities in our being, these 😯 🐏 us on.

"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.

Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near
the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his 3⃣ mates
stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the 🚢's company
formed a circle round the group; he stood for an 💓 searchingly
eyeing every 👨 of his crew. But those 😠 eyes met his, as the
bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves 😆 the ♥ of their leader, ere
he rushes on at their ❓ in the 🐶 of the bison; but, alas! only to
fall into the ㊙ snare of the Indian.

"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the 🔉 charged flagon to the
nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
draughts--long swallows, 🚹; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it
goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
🐍-snapping ♥. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
way it comes. 🚹 it me--here's a hollow! 🚹, ye seem the years; so
brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!

"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and
ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, 🐻 there
with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ☎ me in, that I may in some
sort revive a noble 🛃 of my fisherman fathers before me. ⭕ 🚹, you
will yet 📅 that--Ha! 👦, come 🔙? bad pennies come not sooner. 🚹
it me. Why, now, this pewter had 🏃 brimming again, were't not Ⓜ St.
Vitus' 👿--away, Ⓜ ague!

"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let
me 👻 the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
3⃣ 😳, radiating lances at their crossed ♥; while so doing,
suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the
same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic
life. The 3⃣ mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and ㊙
aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest ♥ of
Starbuck fell downright.

"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye 3⃣ but
once 🉑 the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, THAT had
perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye
dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do
appoint ye 3⃣ cupbearers to my 3⃣ pagan kinsmen there--yon 3⃣
most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain
the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using
his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, THAT
shall 🙇 ye to it. I do not ♣ ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings
and 🏃 the poles, ye harpooneers!"

Silently obeying the ♣, the 3⃣ harpooneers now stood with the
🆓 iron 🏢 of their harpoons, some 3⃣ feet long, held, barbs
up, before him.

"🔪 me not with that keen steel! 🏦 them; 🏦 them over! know ye
not the goblet 🔚? 🔧 up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,
advance. The irons! 🉑 them; 📖 them while I 😆!" Forthwith,
slowly going from 1⃣ officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.

"Now, 3⃣ to 3⃣, ye 🐻. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to 💺 upon
it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and 🏦, ye 🚹 that 👨 the deathful
whaleboat's 🙇--🔚 to Moby Dick! God 🏃 us all, if we do not 🏃
Moby Dick to his 🔚!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;
and to cries and maledictions against the white 🐳, the spirits were
simultaneously quaffed down with a 🐦. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
among the frantic crew; when, 👋 his 😇 🚹 to them, they all
dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.



CHAPTER 37. Sunset.


THE CABIN; BY THE 💩 WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.


I 🍃 a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I
sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my 🏃; let them;
but first I pass.

Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's 👄, the warm waves 😊 like wine.
The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun--slow dived from noon--goes
down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then,
the 🔝 too 🔉 that I 🐻? this Iron 🔝 of Lombardy. Yet is
it bright with many a 💎; I the wearer, 📅 not its far flashings; but
darkly feel that I 🐻 that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron--that
I know--not gold. 'Tis split, too--that I feel; the jagged edge galls
me so, my brain seems to 💓 against the solid metal; aye, steel 💀,
mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the 🌅 nobly spurred
me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely ✨, it lights not me;
all loveliness is 😧 to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with
the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying 🏢; damned, most subtly
and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! 🔉 night--🔉
night! (👋 HIS 🚹, HE MOVES FROM THE WINDOW.)

'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find 1⃣ stubborn, at the least;
but my 1⃣ cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
revolve. Or, if you will, like so many 🐜-hills of powder, they all
🐻 before me; and I their 👫. Oh, hard! that to 🔥 others, the
👫 itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and
what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad--Starbuck does; but I'Ⓜ
demoniac, I am 😡 maddened! That 😠 😡 that's only calm
to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered;
and--Aye! I 😖 this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller 1⃣. That's
more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I 😆 and 🐦 at ye, ye
cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes!
I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies--🉑 some 1⃣ of your own
size; don't pommel ME! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but
YE have 🏃 and ㊙. Come forth from 💺 your cotton bags! I have
no long 🔫 to ✋ ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and 📅
if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve
yourselves! 👨 has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is
laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to 🏃. Over unsounded
gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds,
unerringly I 👢! 0⃣'s an obstacle, 0⃣'s an 🐟 to the iron
way!



CHAPTER 38. Dusk.


BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT.


My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman!
Insufferable sting, that sanity should ⚓ arms on such a field! But
he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I 📅
his impious 🔚; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I,
the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no
👅 to cut. Horrible old 👨! Who's over him, he cries;--aye, he would
be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
plainly 📅 my miserable 🏢,--to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
to hate with 👻 of pity! For in his eyes I ® some lurid woe would
shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide 🏃 wide.
The hated 🐳 has the round watery 👨 to swim in, as the small
gold-🐟 has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may
wedge aside. I would up ♥, were it not like 🍃. But my whole
clock's 🏃 down; my ♥ the all-controlling weight, I have no 🔑 to
🌹 again.


[A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE.]


Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small 👻 of 👨
mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish 🌊. The white 🐳
is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward!
🎶 the unfaltering 😯 aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost
through the sparkling 🌊 shoots on the ☀, embattled, bantering
🙇, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his
sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further
on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through!
Peace! ye revellers, and 👗 the ⌚! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like
this, with soul 💓 down and held to knowledge,--as 😠, untutored
things are forced to 🏃--Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent
horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with the
soft feeling of the 👨 in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim,
phantom futures! 🐻 by me, 📖 me, bind me, ⭕ ye blessed influences!



CHAPTER 39. First Night ⌚.

🙇-🔝.

(STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A 👫.)


Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! 🔝 my throat!--I've been thinking over it
ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why so? Because a
😆's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what
will, 1⃣ comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all
predestinated. I heard not all his 🍑 with Starbuck; but to my poor
♥ Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure
the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the
🎁, might readily have prophesied it--for when I clapped my ♥ upon
his 💀 I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE Stubb--that's my title--well,
Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be
coming, but be it what it will, I'll ❌ to it 😆. Such a waggish
leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
skirra! What's my juicy little 🍐 at 🏠 doing now? Crying its eyes
out?--🎁 a party to the 🔚 arrived harpooneers, I dare say, ☀ as
a frigate's 👑, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--

We'll drink to-night with hearts as ✨, To love, as ☀ and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's 👄, And break on the lips while
meeting.


A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--(ASIDE) he's
my superior, he has his too, if I'Ⓜ not mistaken.--Aye, aye, sir, just
through with this job--coming.



CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

(FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE ⌚ STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING, AND
LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.)

     🍃 and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
     🍃 and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
     Our captain's commanded.--

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the
digestion! 🉑 a tonic, ⌚ me! (SINGS, AND ALL ⌚)

    Our captain stood upon the deck,
    A spy-👓 in his 🚹,
    A viewing of those gallant whales
    That blew at every strand.
    Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
    And by your braces 🐻,
    And we'll have 1⃣ of those 🆗 whales,
    🚹, boys, over 🚹!
    So, be ☀, my lads! may your hearts never 💣!
    While the bold harpooner is striking the 🐳!

👫'S 🔉 FROM THE 💩-DECK. 8⃣ bells there, forward!

2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! 8⃣ bells there! d'ye hear,
🔔-👦? Strike the 🔔 8⃣, Ⓜ Pip! Ⓜ blackling! and let me
☎ the ⌚. I've the sort of 👄 for that--the hogshead 👄.
So, so, (THRUSTS HIS ❓ DOWN THE SCUTTLE,) 🌠-bo-l-🇪🇸-🇪🇸-n-s, a-h-⭕-y!
8⃣ bells there below! Tumble up!

DUTCH SAILOR. Ⓜ snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I
🎶 this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as
filliping to others. We 🍑; they 😴--aye, lie down there, like
⚓-tier butts. At 'em again! There, 🉑 this 🐷-♥, and hail
'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em
it's the resurrection; they must 💋 their 🔚, and come to judgment.
That's the way--THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating
Amsterdam butter.

FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let's have a jig or 2⃣ before we ride to
⚓ in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other ⌚. 🐻
by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!

PIP. (SULKY AND 😪) Don't know where it is.

FRENCH SAILOR. 💓 thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, 🚹,
I say; merry's the word; hurrah! 💩 me, won't you dance? Form, now,
Indian-®, and gallop into the 🔁-shuffle? 😖 yourselves! Legs!
legs!

ICELAND SAILOR. I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my
taste. I'Ⓜ used to 🎇-floors. I'Ⓜ sorry to 😖 cold water on the
subject; but 😌 me.

MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would 🉑
his left 🚹 by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I
must have partners!

SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!--then I'll hop with ye; yea,
🔧 grasshopper!

LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us.
Hoe 🌽 when you may, say I. All legs ❌ to harvest 🔜. Ah! here
comes the music; now for it!

AZORE SAILOR. (ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.)
Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you 🌹! Now,
boys! (THE HALF OF THEM DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME ❌ BELOW; SOME
😴 OR LIE AMONG THE COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.)

AZORE SAILOR. (DANCING) ❌ it, Pip! 👏 it, 🔔-👦! Rig it, dig it,
stig it, quig it, 🔔-👦! 💩 🔥-flies; break the jinglers!

PIP. Jinglers, you say?--there goes another, dropped off; I 🔨 it so.

CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and 🔨 away; 💩 a pagoda of
thyself.


FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! 📖 up thy 🏀, Pip, till I 🌹 through it!
Split jibs! tear yourselves!

TASHTEGO. (QUIETLY 🚬) That's a white 👨; he calls that fun:
humph! I 😌 my 😓.

OLD MANX SAILOR. I ❓ whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will--that's
the bitterest threat of your night-women, that 💓 ❓-winds round
corners. ⭕ Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled
crews! Well, well; belike the whole 👨's a 🍳, as you scholars have
it; and so 'tis right to 💩 1⃣ ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're
🆕; I was once.

3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!--whew! this is worse than pulling after
whales in a calm--🍃 us a whiff, Tash.

(THEY 🔚 DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY
DARKENS--THE 👃 RISES.)

LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail 🔜. The sky-born,
high-tide Ganges turned to 👃! Ⓜ showest thy black brow, Seeva!

MALTESE SAILOR. (RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS 👑.) It's the waves--the
snow's caps 🔧 to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels 🔜. Now
would all the waves were women, then I'd ❌ drown, and chassee with them
evermore! There's 0⃣ so sweet on earth--heaven may not 👫
it!--as those swift glances of warm, 😠 bosoms in the dance, when the
over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.

SICILIAN SAILOR. (RECLINING.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad--🎯
interlacings of the limbs--lithe swayings--coyings--flutterings! 👄!
♥! hip! all graze: unceasing 👻 and ❌! not taste, 🎶 ye,
else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.)

TAHITAN SAILOR. (RECLINING ON A MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our
dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I
😯 rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven
in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
and wilted quite. Ah me!--not Ⓜ nor I can 🉑 the change! How
then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the 💥 streams from
Pirohitee's 🔝 of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the
villages?--The 🐚! the 🐚! Up, 🔙, and 😆 it! (LEAPS TO HIS
FEET.)

PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the 🌊 rolls swashing 'gainst the side! 🐻
by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
they'll ❌ lunging 🔜.

DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old 🚢! so long as Ⓜ crackest, Ⓜ
holdest! Well done! The 👫 there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more
afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic
with 😡-lashed guns, on which the 🌊-salt cakes!

4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old
Ahab tell him he must always kill a 😢, something as they burst a
waterspout with a pistol--🔥 your 🚢 right into it!

ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old 👨's a Ⓜ old cove! We are the
lads to 🏃 him up his 🐳!

ALL. Aye! aye!

OLD MANX SAILOR. How the 3⃣ pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort
of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there's none
but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort
of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at 🌊.
Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the
sky--lurid-like, ye 📅, all else pitch black.

DAGGOO. What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'Ⓜ quarried
out of it!

SPANISH SAILOR. (ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!--the old 🍲 makes
me touchy (ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy 🏃 is the undeniable dark
side of 👨--devilish dark at that. No offence.

DAGGOO (GRIMLY). None.

ST. JAGO'S SAILOR. That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or
else in his 1⃣ 🐚 our old Mogul's 🔥-waters are somewhat long in
🏃.

5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What's that I saw--lightning? Yes.

SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.

DAGGOO (SPRINGING). 🉑 thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!

SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM). 👅 thee heartily! big frame, small
♥!

ALL. A row! a row! a row!

TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF). A row a'low, and a row aloft--Gods and
🚹--both brawlers! Humph!

BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge
in with ye!

ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair 🏃! Snatch the Spaniard's 👅! A ☎, a ☎!

OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ☎
Cain struck Abel. Sweet 🏃, right 🏃! No? Why then, God, mad'st Ⓜ
the ☎?

👫'S 🔉 FROM THE 💩-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in
🔝-gallant sails! 🐻 by to reef topsails!

ALL. The 😢! the 😢! 🌹, my jollies! (THEY SCATTER.)


PIP (SHRINKING UNDER THE WINDLASS). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
Crish, 💨! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck 😦,
Pip, here comes the royal Ⓜ! It's worse than being in the whirled
woods, the 🔚 day of the year! Who'd ❌ climbing after chestnuts now?
But there they ❌, all cursing, and here I don't. 🆗 prospects to 'em;
they're on the road to heaven. 📖 on hard! Jimmini, what a 😢!
But those chaps there are worse yet--they are your white squalls, they.
White squalls? white 🐳, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their
chat just now, and the white 🐳--shirr! shirr!--but spoken of
once! and only this evening--it makes me jingle all over like my
tambourine--that anaconda of an old 👨 swore 'em in to 🏃 him! Oh,
Ⓜ big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
this small black 👦 down here; preserve him from all 🚹 that have no
bowels to feel fear!



CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.


I, Ishmael, was 1⃣ of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
did I 🔨 and clinch my oath, because of the 😨 in my soul. A
😠, ㊙, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud
seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous
monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
violence and revenge.

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
㊙ White 🐳 had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm 🐳 fishermen. But not all of them knew of his
existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;
while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to
him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of 🐳-cruisers;
the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery
circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest 🔛
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or
more on a stretch, to encounter a 1⃣ news-telling sail of any sort;
the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the
times of sailing from 🏠; all these, with other circumstances, 🚋
and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole 👨-wide
whaling-🎯 of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby
Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have
encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a 🔝,
a Sperm 🐳 of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which 🐳, after
doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to
some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the 🐳 in
❓ must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the
Sperm 🐳 fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent
instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most 🏢, were
content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to
the perils of the Sperm 🐳 fishery at large, than to the individual
cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and
the 🐳 had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White 🐳, by chance
caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every 1⃣ of
them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
🐳 of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, 😕 limbs, or
devouring amputations--but fatal to the 🔚 degree of fatality; those
repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors
upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many
brave hunters, to whom the story of the White 🐳 had eventually come.

Nor did 😠 rumors of all sorts 💣 to exaggerate, and 😯 the more
horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
fabulous rumors naturally 🌹 out of the very body of all surprising
😨 events,--as the smitten tree gives 🐻 to its fungi; but, in
maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, 😠 rumors abound,
wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the
🌊 surpasses the land in this matter, so the 🐳 fishery surpasses
every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness
of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen
as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary
to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most
directly brought into 🔗 with whatever is appallingly astonishing
in the 🌊; face to face they not only ♥ its greatest marvels, but,
🚹 to jaw, 🍃 battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
though you sailed a Ⓜ miles, and passed a Ⓜ shores, you
would not come to any chiseled hearth-💎, or 0⃣ hospitable beneath
that 🏢 of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
such a 📲 as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all
tending to 💩 his fancy pregnant with many a mighty 🐻.

No ❓, then, that ever gathering 📖 from the mere transit over
the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White 🐳 did
in the 🔚 incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
eventually invested Moby Dick with 🆕 terrors unborrowed from anything
that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally
strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White
🐳, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his
jaw.

But there were 😯 other and more vital practical influences at 🏃.
Not 😳 at the 🎁 day has the original prestige of the Sperm
🐳, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are
those this day among them, who, though 🔉 and courageous
enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right 🐳, would
perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm 🐳; at any rate, there are
plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing
under the American 🎏, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm
🐳, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to
the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their
hatches, these 🚹 will hearken with a childish fireside 😟
and awe, to the 😠, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the
pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm 🐳 anywhere more
feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which 🙇 him.

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some 📖
naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm 🐳 not only to
be a consternation to every other creature in the 🌊, but also to be so
incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for 👨 blood. Nor
😳 down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar
impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself
affirms that at sight of the Sperm 🐳, all 🐟 (sharks included) are
"struck with the most lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of
their flight 💨 themselves against the rocks with such violence as to
cause instantaneous 🔚." And however the general experiences in the
fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness,
😳 to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in
them is, in some vicissitudes of their 📲, revived in the minds of
the hunters.

So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
of the Sperm 🐳 fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
practised Right whalemen to 🚢 in the perils of this 🆕 and daring
warfare; such 🚹 protesting that although other leviathans might be
hopefully pursued, yet to 🐶 and point lance at such an apparition
as the Sperm 🐳 was not for mortal 👨. That to attempt it, would
be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this ❓, there are
some remarkable documents that may be consulted.

Nevertheless, some there were, who 😳 in the face of these things
were ready to 🍃 🐶 to Moby Dick; and a 😯 greater number who,
chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
offered.

1⃣ of the 😠 suggestions referred to, as at 🔚 coming to be linked
with the White 🐳 in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,
was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had
actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at 1⃣ and the same
💓 of time.

Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
without some faint ® of superstitious probability. For as the secrets
of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, 😳 to
the most erudite research; so the ㊙ ways of the Sperm 🐳
when beneath the 🌹 remain, in great 🏢, unaccountable to his
pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and
contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the
㊙ modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports
himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English 🐳-ships, and
as well a thing placed upon authoritative 📖 years ago by Scoresby,
that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose
bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has
been declared that the interval of time between the 2⃣ assaults could
not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been
believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem
to 👨, was never a problem to the 🐳. So that here, in the real
living experience of living 🚹, the prodigies related in old times of
the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose 🔝 there was said
to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the 🌹);
and that 😯 more wonderful story of the Arethusa ⛲ near
Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land
by an 🚇 passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully
equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White 🐳 had escaped
alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should
❌ 😯 further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only
ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that
though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would 😯
swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in
unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied ⛲ would
once more be seen.

But 😳 stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
the earthly 💩 and incontestable character of the monster to strike
the imagination with unwonted 🏢. For, it was not so much his
uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,
but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar snow-white wrinkled
forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent
features; the tokens whereby, 😳 in the limitless, uncharted seas, he
revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with
the same shrouded hue, that, in the 🔚, he had gained his distinctive
appellation of the White 🐳; a 🔑, indeed, literally justified by
his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
🌊, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy ✨, all spangled with golden
gleamings.

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
deformed 😦 jaw, that so much invested the 🐳 with natural terror,
as that 🆕, 🔉 malignity which, according to specific
accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than
all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps 0⃣
else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every
apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to 🔧
round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to
splinters, or 🐏 them 🔙 in consternation to their 🚢.

Already several fatalities had attended his 🐶. But though similar
disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual
in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White 🐳's
infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or 🔚
that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an
unintelligent agent.

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted 😡 the minds of
his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed
boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
white curds of the 🐳's 😨 💢 into the serene, exasperating
sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a 🐻 or a bridal.

His 3⃣ boats stove around him, and oars and 🚹 both whirling in the
eddies; 1⃣ captain, seizing the 🎶-👅 from his 😕 🙇, had
dashed at the 🐳, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
with a 6⃣ inch blade to ✋ the 🔉-deep life of the 🐳.
That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
sickle-shaped 😦 jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's
leg, as a mower a blade of 🐀 in the field. No turbaned Turk, no
hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.
Small reason was there to ❓, then, that ever since that almost fatal
encounter, Ahab had cherished a 😠 vindictiveness against the 🐳,
all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at 🔚 came
to 🔑 with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White 🐳 swam before
him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which
some deep 🚹 feel eating in them, till they are left living on with
half a ♥ and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been
from the beginning; to whose dominion 😳 the modern Christians ascribe
1⃣-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the 🇪🇸 reverenced
in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them;
but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white 🐳, he
pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and
torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice
in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
the 🐳's white hump the ♥ of all the general 😡 and hate felt
by his whole 🏃 from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a
mortar, he burst his hot ♥'s 🐚 upon it.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its 💓 🌹 at
the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the
monster, 👅 in 🚹, he had but given 🆓 to a sudden, passionate,
corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he
probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but 0⃣ more.
Yet, when by this 💥 forced to 🔧 towards 🏠, and for long
months of days and weeks, Ahab and 😧 lay stretched together in 1⃣
hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape;
then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into 1⃣ another;
and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward
voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,
he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified
by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, 😳
there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a 🔉-👑, he swung
to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when 🏃 into more sufferable
latitudes, the 🚢, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the
tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old 👨's delirium seemed
left 💺 him with the Cape 🎺 swells, and he came forth from his
dark den into the blessed ✨ and air; 😳 then, when he bore that
🏠, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once
again; and his mates thanked God the 😨 😡 was now gone; 😳
then, Ahab, in his ㊙ self, raved on. 👨 😡 is oftentimes a
cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but
become transfigured into some 😯 subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy
subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson,
when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the
Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not 1⃣ jot of
Ahab's broad 😡 had been left 💺; so in that broad 😡, not
1⃣ jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living
agent, now became the living instrument. If such a 😠 trope may
🐻, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it,
and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad 🎶; so that far
from having 😖 his strength, Ahab, to that 1⃣ 🔚, did now possess a
Ⓜ fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to 🉑 upon
any 1⃣ reasonable object.

This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper 🏢 remains unhinted.
But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is 🔉. Winding
far down from within the very ♥ of this spiked 🏨 de Cluny where
we here 🐻--however Ⓜ and wonderful, now quit it;--and 🉑 your
way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
where far beneath the fantastic towers of 👨's upper earth, his root
of grandeur, his whole 😨 ♥ sits in bearded state; an antique
buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a 😕
🚽, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of
ages. 👃 ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! ❓ that proud,
sad king! A 🏠 likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye 🆕 exiled
royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-㊙ come.

Now, in his ♥, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means
are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without 🏢 to kill, or
change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to 👨 he did long
😷; in some sort, did 😯. But that thing of his dissembling
was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.
Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when
with ivory leg he stepped ashore at 🔚, no Nantucketer thought him
otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
😨 casualty which had overtaken him.

The report of his undeniable delirium at 🌊 was likewise popularly
ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the
🎁 voyage, sat 😔 on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,
that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on
account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent
isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he
was all the better qualified and 👗 on edge, for a pursuit so full
of 😡 and wildness as the bloody 🏃 of whales. Gnawed within and
scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable
idea; such an 1⃣, could he be found, would seem the very 👨 to 💨
his iron and 🌹 his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.
Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,
yet such an 1⃣ would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on
his underlings to the 🔥. But be all this as it may, certain it is,
that with the mad ㊙ of his unabated 😡 bolted up and keyed in
him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the 🎁 voyage with the 1⃣ only
and all-engrossing object of hunting the White 🐳. Had any 1⃣ of his
old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him
then, how 🔜 would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the
🚢 from such a fiendish 👨! They were bent on profitable cruises, the
profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an
audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old 👨, chasing with curses a
Job's 🐳 round the 👨, at the ❓ of a crew, too, chiefly made
up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled
also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in
Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in
Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered,
seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him
to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded
to the old 👨's 💢--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White 🐳 as much
their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be--what the White
🐳 was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon
of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than
Ishmael can ❌. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can 1⃣
tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled 🔉 of his
pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow
of a seventy-4⃣ can 🐻 😯? For 1⃣, I gave myself up to the
abandonment of the time and the 🚉; but while yet all a-👢 to
encounter the 🐳, could 📅 0⃣ in that 🐺 but the deadliest
ill.



CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The 🐳.


What the white 🐳 was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
could not but occasionally awaken in any 👨's soul some alarm, there
was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and
yet so ㊙ and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of
putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the 🐳
that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself
here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
these chapters might be 0⃣.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances 🍑, as
if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas,
and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a
certain royal 🎶 in this hue; 😳 the barbaric, Ⓜ old
kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all
their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings
of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard;
and the Hanoverian 🎏 bearing the 1⃣ figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,
having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this
pre-🎶 in it applies to the 👨 🏃 itself, 🎁 the white
👨 ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all
this, whiteness has been 😳 made significant of gladness, for among
the Romans a white 💎 marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal
sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age;
though among the 😳 🚹 of America the 🎁 of the white belt
of 🍞 was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes,
whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
milk-white steeds; though 😳 in the higher mysteries of the most
august religions it has been made the 🔣 of the divine spotlessness
and 🏢; by the Persian 🔥 worshippers, the white forked 🔥 being
held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
himself being made incarnate in a snow-white 🐷; and though to the
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White 🐶 was
by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest envoy they could 🚢 to the Great ♥
with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from
the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the 🔑 of
1⃣ 🏢 of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
specially employed in the celebration of the 😡 of our Lord; though
in the Vision of St. 🚽, white robes are given to the redeemed, and
the 4⃣-and-twenty elders 🐻 clothed in white before the great-white
🚽, and the Holy 1⃣ that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable,
and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea
of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness
which affrights in blood.

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
😨 in itself, to 🌹 that terror to the furthest bounds.
Witness the white 🉑 of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;
what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent
horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an
abhorrent mildness, 😳 more loathsome than terrific, to the 🔇
gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged 🐯 in his
heraldic 🍰 can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded 🉑 or
shark.*


*With reference to the Polar 🉑, it may possibly be urged by him
who would fain ❌ 😯 deeper into this matter, that it is not
the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
hideousness of that 🐺; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,
it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the
irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together
2⃣ such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar 🉑 frightens us
with so unnatural a contrast. But 😳 assuming all this to be true;
yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified
terror.

As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly
💥 by the French in the 🔑 they bestow upon that 🐟. The Romish
mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence
REQUIEM denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now,
in allusion to the white, 🔇 stillness of 🔚 in this shark, and
the mild deadliness of his habits, the French ☎ him REQUIN.


Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
wonderment and pale 😨, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
unflattering laureate, Nature.*


*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon ⌚
below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman 🎶 sublime. At intervals, it arched forth
its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous
flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
cries, as some king's 👻 in supernatural distress. Through its
inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took
📖 of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white
thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
waters, I had 😖 the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only
hint, the things that darted through me then. But at 🔚 I awoke; and
turning, asked a sailor what 🐦 was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!
never had heard that 🔑 before; is it conceivable that this glorious
thing is utterly 👽 to 🚹 ashore! never! But some time after, I
learned that goney was some seaman's 🔑 for albatross. So that by no
possibility could Coleridge's 😠 Rhyme have had 0⃣ to do with those
㊙ impressions which were mine, when I saw that 🐦 upon our
deck. For neither had I then ® the Rhyme, nor knew the 🐦 to be
an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little
brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.

I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the 🐦
chiefly lurks the ㊙ of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,
that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;
and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I
beheld the Antarctic 🐦.

But how had the ㊙ thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
tell; with a treacherous 👮 and 🎶, as the 🐦 floated on the 🌊.
At 🔚 the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern
tally round its neck, with the 🚢's time and 🚉; and then letting
it 🏃. But I ❓ not, that leathern tally, meant for 👨, was
taken off in Heaven, when the white 🐦 flew to 🔗 the wing-folding,
the invoking, and adoring cherubim!


Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of
the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
Ⓜ monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
elected Xerxes of vast herds of 😠 horses, whose pastures in those
days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
their 🔥 ❓ he westward trooped it like that chosen 🌠 which
every evening leads on the hosts of ✨. The flashing 🚿 of his
mane, the curving comet of his 💩, invested him with housings more
resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
👨, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his
🆒 milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the
bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor
can it be questioned from what stands on legendary 📖 of this noble
🐴, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him
with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.

But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
Albatross.

What is it that in the Albino 👨 so peculiarly repels and often shocks
the ♥, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and 👪! It
is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the 🔑
he bears. The Albino is as well made as other 🚹--has no substantive
deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?

Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but
not the less malicious agencies, 💣 to enlist among her forces
this crowning attribute of the 😨. From its snowy aspect, the
gauntleted 👻 of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
😢. Nor, in some historic instances, has the 🎨 of 👨 malice
omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy 🔣 of their
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-🚉!

Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
👨 💣 to 🉑 witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
cannot well be doubted, that the 1⃣ visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
consternation in the other 👨, as of mortal trepidation here. And
from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud
in which we wrap them. Nor 😳 in our superstitions do we 💣 to
😖 the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a
milk-white ☁--Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that 😳
the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his
pallid 🐴.

Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever Ⓜ or gracious
thing he will by whiteness, no 👨 can deny that in its profoundest
idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.

But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal 👨 to
account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then,
by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in great 🏢 stripped
of all 🚋 associations calculated to 🍃 to it 0⃣ 😨,
but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified;--can we thus hope to ✨ upon some chance clue to 🐻 us
to the ㊙ cause we seek?

Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
and without imagination no 👨 can ⌚ another into these halls. And
though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
to be presented may have been shared by most 🚹, yet few perhaps were
entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to
recall them now.

Why to the 👨 of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare 🎶
of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-🐱 and hooded with
🆕-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the
♥ American States, why does the passing 🎶 of a White Friar or
a White Nun, 🔥 such an eyeless statue in the soul?

Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White
Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of
an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
neighbors--the Byward Tower, or 😳 the Bloody? And those sublimer
towers, the White Mountains of 🆕 Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods,
comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare 🎶 of
that 🔑, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft,
dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and
longitudes, does the 🔑 of the White 🌊 exert such a spectralness
over the fancy, while that of the 🐔 🌊 lulls us with mortal
thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by
the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly
unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading
the old fairy tales of 🔑 Europe, does "the tall pale 👨" of the
Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the
green of the groves--why is this phantom more 😨 than all the
whooping imps of the Blocksburg?

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop
(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of
🏠-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed 💍 of cards;--it
is not these things alone which 💩 tearless Lima, the strangest,
saddest city Ⓜ can'st 📅. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever 🆕; admits not the cheerful
greenness of complete decay; spreads over her 😕 ramparts the rigid
pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness
is not confessed to be the 🌼 agent in exaggerating the terror of
objects otherwise 😨; nor to the unimaginative mind is there 0⃣
of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost
solely consists in this 1⃣ phenomenon, especially when exhibited under
any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean
by these 2⃣ statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the
following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of 👽 lands, if by
night he hear the 💥 of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just
enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely
similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to ⌚ his
🚢 sailing through a midnight 🌊 of milky whiteness--as if from
encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round
him, then he feels a 🔇, superstitious 😨; the shrouded phantom
of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real 👻; in vain the
🍃 assures him he is 😯 off soundings; ♥ and helm they both ❌
down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is
the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of
striking ㊙ rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so
stirred me?"

🔙: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
snowhowdahed Andes conveys 0⃣ of 😨, except, perhaps, in the
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be
to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick
of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
views what seems a boundless churchyard 😁 upon him with its 🏃
🎇 monuments and splintered crosses.

But Ⓜ sayest, methinks that white-🍃 chapter about whiteness is but
a white 🎏 hung out from a craven soul; Ⓜ surrenderest to a hypo,
Ishmael.

Tell me, why this strong 🆕 colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the
sunniest day, if you but shake a 🆕 buffalo robe 💺 him, so that
he cannot 😳 📅 it, but only smells its 😠 animal muskiness--why
will he start, 🐦, and with bursting eyes ✋ the ⚓ in phrensies
of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of 😠
creatures in his green northern 🏠, so that the strange muskiness he
smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
former perils; for what knows he, this 🆕 England colt, of the black
bisons of distant Oregon?

No; but here Ⓜ beholdest 😳 in a 🔇 🐺, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in the 👨. Though thousands of miles from
Oregon, 😯 when he smells that 🐺 musk, the rending, goring bison
herds are as 🎁 as to the deserted 😠 foal of the prairies, which
this 💓 they may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky 🌊; the bleak rustlings
of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the ㊙
🏠 gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
👨 seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
learned why it appeals with such 🏢 to the soul; and more strange
and far more portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the
most meaning 🔣 of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to 👨.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from 💺 with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in ♥ whiteness is not so much a colour as
the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a 🔇 blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour
of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory
of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately
or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
🆕 girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements 🔝 0⃣ but
the charnel-🏠 within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
the ㊙ cosmetic which produces every 1⃣ of her hues, the great
principle of ✨, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and
if operating without medium upon matter, would 👻 all objects, 😳
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--😔 all this, the
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to 🐻 coloured and colouring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things the Albino 🐳 was the 🔣. ❓ ye then at the fiery
🏃?



CHAPTER 43. Hark!


"HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"

It was the ♥-⌚; a fair 🌔; the seamen were standing in a
cordon, extending from 1⃣ of the 🆕-water butts in the waist, to the
scuttle-🐐 near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets
to 😆 the scuttle-🐐. Standing, for the most 🏢, on the hallowed
precincts of the 💩-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle
their feet. From 🚹 to 🚹, the buckets went in the deepest 😯,
only 😕 by the occasional 👋 of a sail, and the steady hum of the
unceasingly advancing keel.

It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, 1⃣ of the cordon, whose
🚉 was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the
words above.

"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"

"🉑 the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"

"There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--it
sounded like a cough."

"Cough be damned! Pass 🔛 that return bucket."

"There again--there it is!--it sounds like 2⃣ or 3⃣ sleepers turning
over, now!"

"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the 3⃣ soaked biscuits
ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--0⃣ else. Look to the
bucket!"

"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."

"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old
Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at 🌊 from Nantucket; you're
the chap."

"😁 away; we'll 📅 what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
down in the after-📖 that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect
our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, 1⃣
🌅 ⌚, that there was something of that sort in the 👃."

"Tish! the bucket!"



CHAPTER 44. The 💹.


Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the 😢 that
took 🚉 on the night succeeding that 😠 ratification of his purpose
with his crew, you would have seen him ❌ to a locker in the transom,
and bringing out a large wrinkled 👋 of yellowish 🌊 charts, spread
them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before
it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and
shadings which there met his ♥; and with slow but steady 📝 👻
additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he
would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were 👗 down
the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various
ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.

While thus employed, the 🔉 pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
❓, continually rocked with the ❓ of the 🚢, and for ever threw
shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it
almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses
on the wrinkled charts, some invisible 📝 was also tracing lines and
courses upon the deeply marked 💹 of his forehead.

But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
brought out; almost every night some 📝 marks were effaced, and
others were substituted. For with the charts of all 4⃣ oceans before
him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a ⌚ to
the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.

Now, to any 1⃣ not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out 1⃣ solitary
creature in the unhooped oceans of this 📡. But not so did it
seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
calculating the driftings of the sperm 🐳's food; and, also, 📲
to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular
latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ⚓
in search of his prey.

So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
sperm 🐳's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that,
could he be closely observed and studied throughout the 👨; were the
logs for 1⃣ voyage of the entire 🐳 🎯 carefully collated,
then the migrations of the sperm 🐳 would be found to correspond in
invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
charts of the sperm 🐳.*

     *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
     out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
     the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
     that circular, it appears that precisely such a 💹 is in
     🏃 of completion; and portions of it are presented in
     the circular. "This 💹 divides the 🌊 into districts
     of 5⃣ degrees of latitude by 5⃣ degrees of longitude;
     perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
     columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
     of which districts are 3⃣ lines; 1⃣ to ® the number
     of days that have been spent in each month in every
     district, and the 2⃣ others to ® the number of days in
     which whales, sperm or right, have been seen."

Besides, when making a passage from 1⃣ feeding-⚓ to another, the
sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather, ㊙
intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in VEINS, as they are called;
continuing their way 🔛 a given 🌊-🎶 with such undeviating
exactitude, that no 🚢 ever sailed her 🏃, by any 💹, with
1⃣ tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
direction taken by any 1⃣ 🐳 be straight as a surveyor's parallel,
and though the 🎶 of advance be strictly confined to its own
unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these
times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
(more or less, as the vein is presumed to 💥 or contract); but
never exceeds the visual sweep from the 🐳-🚢's mast-heads,
when circumspectly gliding 🔛 this magic zone. The ♥ is, that at
particular seasons within that breadth and 🔛 that path, migrating
whales may with great confidence be looked for.

And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
🎨, so 🚉 and time himself on his way, as 😳 then not to be wholly
without prospect of a meeting.

There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but 😯 methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
say, will 🔧 out to be identically the same with those that were found
there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
same 🎶, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
Seychelle ⚓ in the Indian 🌊, or 🌋 Bay on the Japanese
Coast; yet it did not ⌚, that were the Pequod to 📲 either of
those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where
he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
stopping-places and 🌊-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged
abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have
hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular
👗 time or 🚉 were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next
thing to a certainty. That particular 👗 time and 🚉 were conjoined
in the 1⃣ technical phrase--the Season-on-the-🎶. For there and then,
for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,
lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,
loiters for a predicted interval in any 1⃣ 🏠 of the Zodiac. There
it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white 🐳 had
taken 🚉; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic 🏢 where the monomaniac old 👨 had found the 😨 motive
to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
vigilance with which Ahab threw his 😔 soul into this unfaltering
🏃, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the 1⃣
crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
unquiet ♥ as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-🎶. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
to 💩 the great passage southwards, 🔁 Cape 🎺, and then 🏃
down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time
to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been
correctly selected by Ahab, with a ⌚ to this very complexion of
things. Because, an interval of 3⃣ 💯 and sixty-5⃣ days
and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently
enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous 🏃; if by chance
the White 🐳, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
periodical feeding-grounds, should 🔧 up his wrinkled brow off the
Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
waters haunted by his 🏃. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers,
Harmattans, Trades; any 👃 but the Levanter and Simoon, might
blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag 👨-circle of the Pequod's
circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless 🌊, 1⃣ solitary
🐳, 😳 if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
recognition from his hunter, 😳 as a white-bearded Mufti in the
thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar
snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but
be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the 🐳, Ahab would mutter
to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he
would 😖 himself 🔙 in reveries--tallied him, and shall he 🏃?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a 😖 🐑's 👂! And
here, his mad mind would 🏃 on in a breathless 🏃; till a weariness
and faintness of 😔 came over him; and in the open air of the
deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances
of torments does that 👨 🏃 who is consumed with 1⃣ unachieved
revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own
bloody nails in his palms.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through
the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them
round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
of his life-🏢 became insufferable 😧; and when, as was sometimes
the 🐚, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its
🐾, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among
them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a 😠 😢 would be
heard through the 🚢; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his
state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on 🔥. Yet these,
perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens
of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,
unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white 🐳; this Ahab that had
gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from
it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or
soul in him; and in 😴, being for the time dissociated from the
characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought 🏃 from the scorching
contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no
longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's 🐚, yielding up
all his thoughts and fancies to his 1⃣ supreme purpose; that purpose,
by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and
devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay,
could grimly live and 🔥, while the common vitality to which it was
conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered 🐻.
Therefore, the 😧 ♥ that glared out of bodily eyes, when
what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated
thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living ✨, to be
sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in
itself. God help thee, old 👨, thy thoughts have created a creature
in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
vulture feeds upon that ♥ for ever; that vulture the very creature
he creates.



CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.


So far as what there may be of a narrative in this 📖; and, indeed, as
indirectly touching 1⃣ or 2⃣ very interesting and curious particulars
in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier
🏢, is as important a 1⃣ as will be found in this 📖; but the
⭐ matter of it requires to be 😯 further and more familiarly
enlarged upon, in ♣ to be adequately understood, and moreover to
🉑 away any incredulity which a 🔉 ignorance of the entire
subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main
points of this affair.

I 😟 not to perform this 🏢 of my task methodically; but shall
be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these
citations, I 🉑 it--the 🔚 aimed at will naturally ⌚ of
itself.

First: I have personally known 3⃣ instances where a 🐳, after
receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete 🏃; and, after an
interval (in 1⃣ instance of 3⃣ years), has been again struck by
the same 🚹, and slain; when the 2⃣ irons, both marked by the same
㊙ 0⃣, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
3⃣ years intervened between the flinging of the 2⃣ harpoons; and I
think it may have been something more than that; the 👨 who darted
them happening, in the interval, to ❌ in a trading 🚢 on a voyage to
Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far
into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly 2⃣ years,
often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas,
with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the ♥ of
👽 regions. Meanwhile, the 🐳 he had struck must also have
been on its travels; no ❓ it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.
This 👨 and this 🐳 again came together, and the 1⃣ vanquished the
other. I say I, myself, have known 3⃣ instances similar to this; that
is in 2⃣ of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the 🔙 🔥,
saw the 2⃣ irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards
taken from the dead 🐟. In the 3⃣-year instance, it so fell out
that I was in the ⛵ both times, first and 🔚, and the 🔚 time
distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the 🐳's
♥, which I had observed there 3⃣ years previous. I say 3⃣ years,
but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are 3⃣ instances,
then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many
other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
🔉 ⚓ to impeach.

Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm 🐳 Fishery, however ignorant
the 👨 ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
historical instances where a particular 🐳 in the 🌊 has been at
distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a 🐳 became
thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar
in that respect any chance 🐳 may be, they 🔜 put an 🔚 to his
peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences
of the fishery there hung a 😨 prestige of perilousness about
such a 🐳 as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that
most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their
tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the 🌊,
without seeking to 🏫 a more intimate acquaintance. Like some
poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great 👨, they
💩 distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they
pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary 💷 for
their presumption.

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
celebrity--Nay, you may ☎ it an 🌊-wide renown; not only was he
famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after 🔚,
but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of
a 🔑; had as much a 🔑 indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so,
⭕ Timor Tom! Ⓜ famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long
did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that 🔑, whose spout was oft
seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, ⭕ 🆕 Zealand 💩!
Ⓜ terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of
the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, ⭕ Morquan! King of 🗾, whose lofty
⛲ they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross
against the sky? Was it not so, ⭕ Don Miguel! Ⓜ Chilian 🐳, marked
like an old tortoise with ㊙ hieroglyphics upon the 🔙! In plain
prose, here are 4⃣ whales as well known to the students of Cetacean
History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.

But this is not all. 🆕 Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed
by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with
that express object as much in ⌚, as in setting out through the
Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture
that notorious murderous 🐺 Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
Indian King Philip.

I do not know where I can find a better 🚉 than just here, to 💩
🎶 of 1⃣ or 2⃣ other things, which to me seem important, as in
printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
whole story of the White 🐳, more especially the catastrophe. For
this is 1⃣ of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
the plainest and most palpable wonders of the 👨, that without
some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
fishery, they might ⌚ at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or 😯
worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

First: Though most 🚹 have some vague flitting ideas of the general
perils of the Ⓜ fishery, yet they have 0⃣ like a fixed, vivid
conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they 🔁.
1⃣ reason perhaps is, that not 1⃣ in fifty of the actual disasters and
deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public 📖 at 🏠,
however transient and immediately forgotten that 📖. Do you suppose
that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
🐳-🎶 off the coast of 🆕 Guinea, is being carried down to the
💺 of the 🌊 by the sounding leviathan--do you suppose that that
poor fellow's 🔑 will appear in the 📰 obituary you will ®
to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
between here and 🆕 Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be
called regular news 🚋 or indirect from 🆕 Guinea? Yet I tell you
that upon 1⃣ particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many
others we spoke thirty different ships, every 1⃣ of which had had a
🔚 by a 🐳, some of them more than 1⃣, and 3⃣ that had each
😖 a ⛵'s crew. For God's 🍶, be economical with your lamps and
candles! not a gallon you 🔥, but at least 1⃣ drop of 👨's blood was
spilled for it.

Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a 🐳 is
an enormous creature of enormous 🏢; but I have ever found that when
narrating to them some specific example of this 2⃣-fold enormousness,
they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I
declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.

But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
🐳 is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
malicious, as with 🚋 aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and
sink a large 🚢; and what is more, the Sperm 🐳 HAS done it.

First: In the year 1820 the 🚢 Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket,
was cruising in the Pacific 🌊. 1⃣ day she saw spouts, lowered her
boats, and gave 🐶 to a 🏫 of sperm whales. Ere long, several of
the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large 🐳 escaping
from the boats, issued from the 🏫, and bore directly down upon the
🚢. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in
less than "❌ minutes" she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving
plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, 🏢 of
the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned 🏠 at 🔚,
Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another
🚢, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon 👽 rocks and
breakers; for the 🔙 time his 🚢 was utterly 😖, and forthwith
forswearing the 🌊, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain
Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was
chief 👫 of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have ® his
plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his 👦; and all
this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*


*The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed
to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which
directed his operations; he made 2⃣ several attacks upon the 🚢, at
a short interval between them, both of which, according to their
direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made
ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the 2⃣ objects for the shock;
to effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His
aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and 😡. He
came directly from the 🏫 which we had just before entered, and in
which we had struck 3⃣ of his companions, as if fired with revenge
for their sufferings." Again: "At all events, the whole circumstances
taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the
time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the
🏢 of the 🐳 (many of which impressions I cannot now recall),
induce me to be 😆 that I am correct in my opinion."

Here are his reflections some time after quitting the 🚢, during
a black night in an open ⛵, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore. "The dark 🌊 and swelling waters were 0⃣; the
fears of being swallowed up by some 😨 tempest, or dashed
upon ㊙ rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of 😨
contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the
dismal looking wreck, and THE HORRID ASPECT AND REVENGE OF THE 🐳,
wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance."

In another 🚉--p. 45,--he speaks of "THE ㊙ AND MORTAL 🔥
OF THE ANIMAL."


Secondly: The 🚢 Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807
totally 😖 off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic
particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,
though from the 🐳 hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions
to it.

Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J---, then
commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first 👪, happened to be
dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket 🚢 in
the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,
the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen 🎁. He peremptorily
denied for example, that any 🐳 could so smite his stout sloop-of-war
as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very 🔉; but there
is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore 👗 sail in this
impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a
portly sperm 🐳, that begged a few moments' ㊙ business
with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such
a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider
the Commodore's ❓ with that 🐳 as providential. Was not Saul
of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the
sperm 🐳 will 🐻 no nonsense.

I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance
in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you
must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's
famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the 🎁 💯.
Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:

"By the thirteenth of May our 🚢 was ready to sail, and the next day
we were out in the open 🌊, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very
🔝 and 🆗, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on
our fur clothing. For some days we had very little 👃; it was not
till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An
uncommon large 🐳, the body of which was larger than the 🚢 itself,
lay almost at the 🌹 of the water, but was not perceived by any
1⃣ on board till the moment when the 🚢, which was in full sail,
was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking
against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this
gigantic creature, setting up its 🔙, raised the 🚢 3⃣ feet at
least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,
while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding
that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster
sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D'🐺
applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily
it had escaped entirely uninjured."

Now, the Captain D'🐺 here alluded to as commanding the 🚢 in
❓, is a 🆕 Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
adventures as a 🌊-captain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I
have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
He substantiates every word. The 🚢, however, was by no means a large
1⃣: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from 🏠.

In that up and down manly 📖 of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,
of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer, 1⃣ of ancient Dampier's
old chums--I found a little matter 👗 down so like that just quoted
from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed.

Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "🚽 Ferdinando," as he calls
the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says, "about 4⃣
⭕'clock in the 🌅, when we were about 1⃣ 💯 and fifty leagues
from the Main of America, our 🚢 felt a 😨 shock, which put our
🚹 in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were
or what to think; but every 1⃣ began to 🚋 for 🔚. And, indeed,
the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the
🚢 had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little
over, we 🐱 the 🍃, and sounded, but found no ⚓..... The
suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and
several of the 🚹 were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who
lay with his ❓ on a 🔫, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then
goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate
the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about
that time, did actually do great mischief 🔛 the Spanish land. But
I should not much ❓ if, in the darkness of that early hour of the
🌅, the shock was after all caused by an unseen 🐳 vertically
bumping the hull from beneath.

I might proceed with several more examples, 1⃣ way or another known to
me, of the great 🏢 and malice at times of the sperm 🐳. In more
than 1⃣ instance, he has been known, not only to 🐶 the assailing
boats 🔙 to their ships, but to pursue the 🚢 itself, and long
withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English 🚢
Pusie Hall can tell a story on that ❓; and, as for his strength,
let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a
🏃 sperm 🐳 have, in a calm, been transferred to the 🚢, and
secured there; the 🐳 towing her great hull through the water, as a
🐴 walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if
the sperm 🐳, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,
not so often with blind 😡, as with wilful, deliberate designs of
🔚 to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently
open his 👄, and retain it in that 😨 expansion for several
consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only 1⃣ more and a
concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant 1⃣, by which
you will not 💣 to 📅, that not only is the most marvellous event in
this 📖 corroborated by plain facts of the 🎁 day, but that these
marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for
the millionth time we say amen with Solomon--Verily there is 0⃣ 🆕
under the sun.

In the sixth Christian 💯 lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate
of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius
general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a 🏃
every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in
some 1⃣ or 2⃣ particulars, not at all affecting the matter 🔜
to be mentioned.

Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term
of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great 🌊-monster was captured
in the neighboring Propontis, or 🌊 of Marmora, after having destroyed
vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
years. A fact thus 👗 down in substantial history cannot easily be
gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species
this 🌊-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as
well as for other reasons, he must have been a 🐳; and I am strongly
inclined to think a sperm 🐳. And I will tell you why. For a long
time I fancied that the sperm 🐳 had been always 👽 in the
Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. 😳 now I am
certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the
🎁 constitution of things, a 🚉 for his habitual gregarious
resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
sperm 🐳 in the Mediterranean. I am told, on 🔉 🏢, that
on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found
the skeleton of a sperm 🐳. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm 🐳 could, by the same route,
pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.

In the Propontis, as far as I can ⌚, none of that peculiar ♥
called BRIT is to be found, the aliment of the right 🐳. But I have
every reason to believe that the food of the sperm 🐳--squid or
cuttle-🐟--lurks at the 💺 of that 🌊, because large creatures,
but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its
🌹. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and
reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all
👨 reasoning, Procopius's 🌊-monster, that for half a 💯 stove
the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
🐳.



CHAPTER 46. Surmises.


Though, consumed with the hot 🔥 of his purpose, Ahab in all his
thoughts and actions ever had in ⌚ the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that 1⃣
😡; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long
habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to
abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if
this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, 😳
considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the
White 🐳 might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered 🐳 would
🌹 to be the hated 1⃣ he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed
exceptionable, there were 😯 additional considerations which, though
not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling 😡, yet
were by no means incapable of swaying him.

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in
the shadow of the 🌔, 🚹 are most apt to get out of ♣. He knew,
for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not 🔝 the complete spiritual
👨 any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but 🐻 in a
sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will
were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; 😯
he knew that for all this the chief 👫, in his soul, abhorred his
captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from
it, or 😳 frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse
ere the White 🐳 was seen. During that long interval Starbuck
would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
influences were brought to 🉑 upon him. Not only that, but the subtle
insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
manifested than in his 🔝 sense and shrewdness in foreseeing
that, for the 🎁, the 🏃 should in some way be stripped of that
strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that
the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the ☁
background (for few 🚹's courage is proof against protracted meditation
unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches,
his officers and 🚹 must have some nearer things to think of than Moby
Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the 🐺 crew had hailed the
announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
capricious and unreliable--they live in the varying outer weather, and
they inhale its fickleness--and when retained for any object remote and
blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and 😡 in the
🔚, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and
employments should intervene and 📖 them healthily suspended for the
final 💨.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
👨 disdain all 🐾 considerations; but such times are evanescent.
The permanent constitutional 🚋 of the manufactured 👨, thought
Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White 🐳 fully incites the
hearts of this my 🐺 crew, and playing round their savageness 😳
breeds a certain generous 🐴-errantism in them, 😯, while for the
love of it they 🍃 🐶 to Moby Dick, they must also have food
for their more common, daily appetites. For 😳 the high lifted and
chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse 2⃣
Ⓜ miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their 1⃣ final
and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have
turned from in disgust. I will not strip these 🚹, thought Ahab, of all
hopes of cash--aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months
❌ by, and no perspective 📲 of it to them, and then this same
quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would 🔜
cashier Ahab.

Nor was there wanting 😯 another precautionary motive more related
to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
somewhat prematurely revealed the 🌼 but ㊙ purpose of the
Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,
he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable 👢 of
usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and 🔉, his crew
if so disposed, and to that 🔚 competent, could refuse all further
obedience to him, and 😳 violently wrest from him the command. From
😳 the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ⚓, Ahab must
of 🏃 have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
could only consist in his own predominating brain and ♥ and 🚹,
backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute
atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected
to.

For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be
verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must 😯 in a 🔉
degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's
voyage; 🎶 all customary usages; and not only that, but 🐏
himself to evince all his well known passionate 😟 in the general
pursuit of his profession.

Be all this as it may, his 🔉 was now often heard hailing the 3⃣
mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
reporting 😳 a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.



CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.


It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the 🍃-coloured waters.
Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
for an additional lashing to our ⛵. So 😯 and 😯 and yet
somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie
lurked in the air, that each 🔇 sailor seemed resolved into his own
invisible self.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I
kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between
the long yarns of the warp, using my own 🚹 for the 🐦, and as
Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his 🔉 oaken sword
between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and
unthinkingly drove 🏠 every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did
there then reign all over the 🚢 and all over the 🌊, only 😕 by
the intermitting 🔇 🔉 of the sword, that it seemed as if this were
the Loom of Time, and I myself were a 🐦 mechanically weaving
and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp
subject to but 1⃣ 1⃣, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and
that vibration merely enough to 🉑 of the crosswise interblending
of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here,
thought I, with my own 🚹 I 🏃 my own 🐦 and weave my own
destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly,
or strongly, or weakly, as the 🐚 might be; and by this difference
in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final
aspect of the completed fabric; this 🐺's sword, thought I,
which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this
easy, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, 😇 will, and
necessity--nowise incompatible--all interweavingly 🏃 together.
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate
🏃--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
😇 will 😯 😇 to 🏃 her 🐦 between given threads; and
chance, though restrained in its 🏃 within the right lines of
necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by 😇 will, though
thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
🔚 featuring blow at events.


Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a 🔉 so
strange, long drawn, and musically 😠 and unearthly, that the 🍳
of 😇 will dropped from my 🚹, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
whence that 🔉 dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was
that mad ☀-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward,
his 🚹 stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he
continued his cries. To be sure the same 🔉 was that very moment
perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's
look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could
that accustomed old 😢 have derived such a marvellous cadence as from
Tashtego the Indian's.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and
eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some
prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those 😠 cries
announcing their coming.

"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"

"Where-away?"

"On the lee-beam, about 2⃣ miles off! a 🏫 of them!"

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm 🐳 blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen 🔑 this 🐟 from
other tribes of his genus.

"There ❌ flukes!" was now the 😢 from Tashtego; and the whales
disappeared.

"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"

🍞-👦 hurried below, glanced at the ⌚, and reported the exact
minute to Ahab.

The 🚢 was now kept away from the 👃, and she went gently rolling
before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
leeward, we confidently looked to 📅 them again directly in advance of
our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm 🐳
when, sounding with his ❓ in 1⃣ direction, he nevertheless, while
concealed beneath the 🌹, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
opposite 💩--this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action;
for there was no reason to suppose that the 🐟 seen by Tashtego had
been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. 1⃣ of
the 🚹 selected for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the
boats, by this time 😌 the Indian at the main-mast ❓. The
sailors at the 🙇 and mizzen had come down; the 🎶 tubs were fixed
in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed,
and the 3⃣ boats swung over the 🌊 like 3⃣ samphire baskets over
high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with 1⃣ 🚹
clung to the 🚋, while 1⃣ 🐾 was expectantly poised on the gunwale.
So look the long 🎶 of 👨-of-war's 🚹 about to 😖 themselves on
board an enemy's 🚢.

But at this critical 💓 a sudden ❗ was heard that took
every ♥ from the 🐳. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
surrounded by 5⃣ dusky phantoms that seemed 🆕 formed out of air.



CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.


The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side
of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting 🆓 the
tackles and bands of the ⛵ which swung there. This ⛵ had always
been deemed 1⃣ of the 🆓 boats, though technically called the
captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard 💩. The
figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with 1⃣ white
tooth evilly 😌 from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese
👑 of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers
of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a
glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled
round and round upon his ❓. Less swart in aspect, the companions of
this figure were of that vivid, 🐯-🐔 complexion peculiar to
some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;--a 🏃 notorious for
a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners
supposed to be the paid spies and ㊙ ㊙ agents on the
water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be
elsewhere.

While yet the wondering 🚢's company were gazing upon these strangers,
Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old 👨 at their ❓, "All ready
there, Fedallah?"

"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.

"😦 away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "😦 away
there, I say."

Such was the 💥 of his 🔉, that spite of their amazement the 🚹
sprang over the 🚋; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a
😤, the 3⃣ boats dropped into the 🌊; while, with a dexterous,
off-handed daring, 👽 in any other 📲, the sailors,
🐐-like, leaped down the rolling 🚢's side into the tossed boats
below.

Hardly had they pulled out from under the 🚢's lee, when a fourth
keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the 💩, and
showed the 5⃣ strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the 💩,
loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely,
so as to 🔝 a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again
riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other
boats obeyed not the command.

"Captain Ahab?--" said Starbuck.

"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "🍃 way, all 4⃣ boats. Ⓜ, Flask,
🔧 out more to leeward!"

"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-🚉, sweeping round
his great steering oar. "Lay 🔙!" addressing his crew.
"There!--there!--there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay
🔙!"

"Never heed yonder 🐔 boys, Archy."

"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.
Didn't I hear 'em in the 📖? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What
say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."

"🔧, 🔧, my 🆗 hearts-alive; 🔧, my children; 🔧, my little
ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom
😯 showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break your backbones,
my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder ⛵? Tut! They
are only 5⃣ more hands come to help us--never mind from where--the
more the merrier. 🔧, then, do 🔧; never mind the brimstone--devils
are 🔉 fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke
for a Ⓜ pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah
for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! 3⃣ cheers, 🚹--all hearts
alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--don't be in a hurry. Why don't
you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so,
then:--softly, softly! That's it--that's it! long and strong. 🍃 way
there, 🍃 way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are
all asleep. 🔚 snoring, ye sleepers, and 🔧. 🔧, will ye? 🔧,
can't ye? 🔧, won't ye? Why in the 🔑 of gudgeons and ginger-cakes
don't ye 🔧?--🔧 and break something! 🔧, and start your eyes out!
Here!" whipping out the sharp 👅 from his girdle; "every mother's 👦
of ye 🏃 his 👅, and 🔧 with the blade between his teeth. That's
it--that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits.
Start her--start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"

Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had
rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
🎶 so strangely compounded of fun and 😡, and the 😡 seemed so
calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such
queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for
the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and
indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly
gaped--open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning
commander, by sheer 🐏 of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.
Then again, Stubb was 1⃣ of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity
is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their
guard in the matter of obeying them.

In obedience to a 🏠 from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
across Stubb's 🙇; and when for a minute or so the 2⃣ boats were
pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the 👫.

"Mr. Starbuck! larboard ⛵ there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
please!"

"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a 1⃣ inch as he
spoke; 😯 earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face 👗
like a flint from Stubb's.

"What think ye of those 🐔 boys, sir!

"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the 🚢 sailed. (Strong, strong,
boys!)" in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: "A sad
business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew 🔧 strong, come what
will. (⛲, my 🚹, ⛲!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (🔧, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the
🏃! This at least is duty; duty and profit 🚹 in 🚹."

"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
diverged, "as 🔜 as I clapt ♥ on 'em, I thought so. Aye, and that's
what he went into the after 📖 for, so often, as 🍞-👦 long
suspected. They were ㊙ down there. The White 🐳's at the 💺
of it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! 🍃 way, 🚹!
It ain't the White 🐳 to-day! 🍃 way!"

Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical 💓
as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the 🚢's
company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time previous got
abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some
small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
of their ❓; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way
of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
superstitious surmisings; though the affair 😯 left abundant room for
all manner of 😠 conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise 🏢 in the
matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the ㊙
shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket
🌅, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.

Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
furthest to windward, was 😯 ranging ahead of the other boats; a
circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those 🐯
🐔 creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like 5⃣
trip-hammers they 🌹 and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
periodically started the ⛵ 🔛 the water like a horizontal burst
boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black 👑, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole 🏢 of his body above the
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
horizon; while at the other 🔚 of the ⛵ Ahab, with 1⃣ arm, like a
fencer's, thrown half 🔙 into the air, as if to counterbalance any
tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in
a Ⓜ ⛵ lowerings ere the White 🐳 had torn him. All at once
the outstretched arm gave a peculiar ❓ and then remained fixed,
while the ⛵'s 5⃣ oars were seen simultaneously peaked. ⛵ and
crew sat motionless on the 🌊. Instantly the 3⃣ spread boats in the
🌹 paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily
down into the blue, thus 🎁 no distantly discernible token of the
movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.

"Every 👨 look out 🔛 his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Ⓜ, Queequeg,
🐻 up!"

Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised 📦 in the 🙇, the 🐺
stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
🏢 where the 🐶 had 🔚 been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
💩 of the ⛵ where it was also triangularly platformed 😳 with
the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing
himself to the jerking tossings of his 🍟 of a craft, and silently
eyeing the vast blue ♥ of the 🌊.

Not very far distant Flask's ⛵ was also lying breathlessly 😯; its
commander recklessly standing upon the 🔝 of the loggerhead, a stout
sort of 🚉 rooted in the keel, and rising some 2⃣ feet above the
😳 of the 💩 platform. It is used for catching turns with the
🐳 🎶. Its 🔝 is not more spacious than the 🎀 of a 👨's 🚹,
and standing upon such a 🐾 as that, Flask seemed perched at the
mast-❓ of some 🚢 which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little
King-🚉 was small and short, and at the same time little King-🚉 was
full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead 🐻-point
of his did by no means 😆 King-🚉.

"I can't 📅 3⃣ seas off; 🔝 us up an oar there, and let me on to
that."

Upon this, Daggoo, with either 🚹 upon the gunwale to steady his
way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
shoulders for a pedestal.

"🔉 a mast-❓ as any, sir. Will you 🌹?"

"That I will, and thank ye very much, my 🆗 fellow; only I wish you
fifty feet taller."

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against 2⃣ opposite planks of the
⛵, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat 🎀 to
Flask's 🐾, and then putting Flask's 🚹 on his hearse-plumed ❓
and bidding him ⛲ as he himself should toss, with 1⃣ dexterous
fling landed the little 👨 high and dry on his shoulders. And here was
Flask now standing, Daggoo with 1⃣ lifted arm furnishing him with a
breastband to 🏃 against and steady himself by.

At any time it is a strange sight to the 🔰 to 📅 with what wondrous
habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
posture in his ⛵, 😳 when pitched about by the most riotously
perverse and cross-🏃 seas. 😯 more strange to 📅 him giddily
perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the
sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;
for sustaining himself with a 🆒, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every 👋 of the 🌊 harmoniously
rolled his 🆗 form. On his broad 🔙, flaxen-haired Flask seemed
a snow-❄. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly
vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then
stamp with impatience; but not 1⃣ added heave did he thereby 🍃 to
the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen 😡 and Vanity stamping the
living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her
seasons for that.

Meanwhile Stubb, the third 👫, betrayed no such far-gazing
solicitudes. The whales might have made 1⃣ of their regular soundings,
not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the 🐚,
Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
🏠 the loading with his thumb-🔚; but hardly had he ignited his 👫
across the rough sandpaper of his 🚹, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,
whose eyes had been setting to windward like 2⃣ fixed stars, suddenly
dropped like ✨ from his erect attitude to his 💺, crying out in a
quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and 🍃 way!--there they are!"

To a landsman, no 🐳, nor any 🏠 of a herring, would have been
visible at that moment; 0⃣ but a troubled bit of greenish white
water, and thin 😕 puffs of vapour hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the 😖 💨 from white
rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
atmospheric 👋 and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning
couriers and 🆓 flying outriders.

All 4⃣ boats were now in keen pursuit of that 1⃣ 🏢 of troubled
water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on,
as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the
hills.

"🔧, 🔧, my 🔉 boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
intensest concentrated whisper to his 🚹; while the sharp fixed glance
from his eyes darted straight ahead of the 🙇, almost seemed as 2⃣
visible needles in 2⃣ unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the
😯 of the ⛵ was at intervals startlingly pierced by 1⃣ of his
peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.

How different the loud little King-🚉. "🍑 out and say something,
my hearties. 💥 and 🔧, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll 🏠 over to you my
Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.
Lay me on--lay me on! ⭕ Lord, Lord! but I shall ❌ stark, staring mad!
📅! 📅 that white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his
❓, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far
off upon the 🌊; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the ⛵'s
💩 like a crazed colt from the prairie.

"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a
short distance, followed after--"He's got fits, that Flask has. Fits?
yes, 🍃 him fits--that's the very word--pitch fits into 'em. Merrily,
merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--merry's the word.
🔧, babes--🔧, sucklings--🔧, all. But what the devil are you
hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my 🚹. Only 🔧, and
keep pulling; 0⃣ more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your
knives in 2⃣--that's all. 🉑 it easy--why don't ye 🉑 it easy, I
say, and burst all your livers and lungs!"

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that 🐯-🐔 crew of
his--these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed
✨ of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious
seas may 🍃 👂 to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
😳 murder, and ✨-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.

Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of
Flask to "that 🐳," as he called the fictitious monster which
he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his ⛵'s 🙇 with its
💩--these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
they would cause some 1⃣ or 2⃣ of his 🚹 to snatch a 😨 look
over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen
must put out their eyes, and 🐏 a skewer through their necks; 🛃
pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but
arms, in these critical moments.

It was a sight full of quick ❓ and awe! The vast swells of the
omnipotent 🌊; the surging, hollow 💥 they made, as they rolled 🔛
the 8⃣ gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless 🎳-green;
the brief suspended agony of the ⛵, as it would 🔝 for an 💓 on
the 👅-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening
to cut it in 2⃣; the sudden 🔉 dip into the watery glens and
hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the 🔝 of the opposite
hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these,
with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps
of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing
down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a 😠 hen after her
😱 🍲;--all this was thrilling.

Not the 🆕 recruit, marching from the ♥ of his wife into the fever
heat of his first battle; not the dead 👨's 👻 encountering the
first 👽 phantom in the other 👨;--neither of these can feel
👽 and stronger emotions than that 👨 does, who for the first
time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the
hunted sperm 🐳.

The dancing white water made by the 🐶 was now becoming more and more
visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun ☁-shadows
flung upon the 🌊. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted
everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck 🎁 🐶 to 3⃣ whales
🏃 dead to leeward. Our sail was now 👗, and, with the 😯
rising 👃, we rushed 🔛; the ⛵ going with such 😡 through
the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
🏃 being torn from the row-locks.

🔜 we were 🏃 through a suffusing wide veil of ☁; neither 🚢
nor ⛵ to be seen.

"🍃 way, 🚹," whispered Starbuck, drawing 😯 further aft the sheet
of his sail; "there is time to kill a 🐟 yet before the 😢 comes.
There's white water again!--🔚 to! ⛲!"

🔜 after, 2⃣ cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: "🐻 up!" and
Queequeg, harpoon in 🚹, sprang to his feet.

Though not 1⃣ of the oarsmen was then facing the life and 🔚 peril
so 🔚 to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
of the 👫 in the 💩 of the ⛵, they knew that the imminent
💓 had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing 🔉 as of
fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the ⛵ was 😯
booming through the ☁, the waves curling and hissing around us like
the erected crests of enraged serpents.

"That's his hump. THERE, THERE, 🍃 it to him!" whispered Starbuck.

A short rushing 🔉 leaped out of the ⛵; it was the darted iron of
Queequeg. Then all in 1⃣ welded commotion came an invisible push from
astern, while forward the ⛵ seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by;
something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curdling cream of the 😢. 😢, 🐳, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the 🐳, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

Though completely swamped, the ⛵ was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
tumbled 🔙 to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the 🌊, the
water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
the suspended craft seemed a coral ⛵ grown up to us from the 💺
of the 🌊.

The 👃 increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole 😢 roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
🔥 upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
in these jaws of 🔚! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well 💥
to the live coals down the chimney of a 🔥 furnace as hail those
boats in that 😡. Meanwhile the driving 💨, rack, and ☁, grew
darker with the shadows of night; no 🏠 of the 🚢 could be seen.
The rising 🌊 forbade all attempts to bale out the ⛵. The oars were
useless as propellers, performing now the 🏢 of life-preservers.
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof 👫 keg, after many failures
Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the 🏮; then stretching
it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this
forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile 💿 in
the ♥ of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the 🏠
and 🔣 of a 👨 without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the
midst of despair.

Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of 🚢 or ⛵,
we lifted up our eyes as the 🌅 came on. The ☁ 😯 spread over
the 🌊, the empty 🏮 lay crushed in the 💺 of the ⛵.
Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his 🚹 to his 👂.
We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by
the 😡. The 🔉 came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly
parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the 🌊 as
the 🚢 at 🔚 loomed into ⌚, bearing right down upon us within a
distance of not much more than its length.

Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned ⛵, as for 1⃣ 💓 it
tossed and gaped beneath the 🚢's bows like a 🍟 at the 🐾 of a
cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no
more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
against it by the seas, and were at 🔚 taken up and safely landed on
board. Ere the 😢 came 🔚 to, the other boats had cut 🆓 from
their 🐟 and returned to the 🚢 in 🔉 time. The 🚢 had given us
up, but was 😯 cruising, if haply it might ✨ upon some token of
our perishing,--an oar or a lance pole.



CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.


There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
we ☎ life when a 👨 takes this whole universe for a vast practical
joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than
suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However,
0⃣ dispirits, and 0⃣ seems worth while disputing. He bolts
down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard
things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of
potent digestion gobbles down bullets and 🔫 flints. And as for small
difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of
life and limb; all these, and 🔚 itself, seem to him only sly,
🔉-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen
and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking
of, comes over a 👨 only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes
in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might
have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a 🏢 of the
general joke. There is 0⃣ like the perils of whaling to breed this
😇 and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now
regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White 🐳 its
object.

"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the 🔚 👨, to the deck,
and I was 😯 shaking myself in my 👑 to fling off the water;
"Queequeg, my 🆗 friend, does this sort of thing often happen?"
Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to
understand that such things did often happen.

"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
oil-👑, was now calmly 🚬 his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I
think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
👫, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
then, that going plump on a flying 🐳 with your sail 👗 in a 🌁
😢 is the 🔝 of a whaleman's discretion?"

"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking 🚢 in a gale off Cape
🎺."

"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-🚉, who was standing 🔚
by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell
me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an
oarsman to break his own 🔙 pulling himself 🔙-foremost into 🔚's
jaws?"

"Can't you 🚧 that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law.
I should like to 📅 a ⛵'s crew backing water up to a 🐳 face
foremost. Ha, ha! the 🐳 would 🍃 them squint for squint, mind
that!"

Here then, from 3⃣ impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
of the entire 🐚. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters
of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
superlatively critical 💓 of going on to the 🐳 I must 🆓 my
life into the hands of him who steered the ⛵--oftentimes a fellow who
at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling
the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the
particular disaster to our own particular ⛵ was chiefly to be imputed
to Starbuck's driving on to his 🐳 almost in the teeth of a 😢,
and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his
great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this
uncommonly prudent Starbuck's ⛵; and finally considering in what a
devil's 🐶 I was implicated, touching the White 🐳: taking all
things together, I say, I thought I might as well ❌ below and 💩 a
rough draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come 🔛, you shall be my
lawyer, executor, and legatee."

It may seem strange that of all 🚹 sailors should be tinkering at their
🔚 wills and testaments, but there are no people in the 👨 more
fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life
that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon
the 🎁 occasion, I felt all the easier; a 💎 was rolled away
from my ♥. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as 🔉
as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary
clean gain of so many months or weeks as the 🐚 might be. I survived
myself; my 🔚 and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked
round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a 😯 👻 with a clean
conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug 🏠 vault.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my 👗,
here goes for a 🆒, collected dive at 🔚 and 🔚, and the
devil fetch the hindmost.



CHAPTER 50. Ahab's ⛵ and Crew. Fedallah.


"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but 1⃣ leg
you would not ⌚ me in a ⛵, unless maybe to 🔚 the 👊-hole
with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old 👨!"

"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask.
"If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
That would disable him; but he has 1⃣ knee, and 🔉 🏢 of the other
left, you know."

"I don't know that, my little 👨; I never yet saw him kneel."


Among 🐳-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is
right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils
of the 🐶. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their
eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the
thickest of the fight.

But with Ahab the ❓ assumed a modified aspect. Considering
that with 2⃣ legs 👨 is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any
maimed 👨 to enter a 🐳-⛵ in the 🏃? As a general thing, the
joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at 🏠 would think little of
his entering a ⛵ in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
the 🐶, for the 🍶 of being near the scene of action and 🎁
his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a ⛵ actually
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the 🏃--above all for
Captain Ahab to be supplied with 5⃣ extra 🚹, as that same ⛵'s
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a ⛵'s
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that ❓.
Nevertheless he had taken ㊙ measures of his own touching all
that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out
of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
own hands for what was thought to be 1⃣ of the 🆓 boats, and 😳
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the 🎶 is
🏃 out are pinned over the groove in the 🙇: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
🍰 of sheathing in the 💺 of the ⛵, as if to 💩 it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
sometimes called, the horizontal 👨 in the ⛵'s 🙇 for bracing the
knee against in darting or stabbing at the 🐳; when it was observed
how often he stood up in that ⛵ with his solitary knee fixed in the
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
things, I say, had awakened much 😟 and curiosity at the time. But
almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness
in Ahab must only be with a ⌚ to the ultimate 🐶 of Moby Dick;
for he had already revealed his intention to 🏃 that mortal monster
in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest
suspicion as to any ⛵'s crew being assigned to that ⛵.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what ❓ remained 🔜 waned
away; for in a whaler wonders 🔜 wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the 👽
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to 👨 these floating outlaws of
whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
creatures found tossing about the open 🌊 on planks, bits of wreck,
oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
Beelzebub himself might 🌹 up the side and 👣 down into the cabin
to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms 🔜 found their 🚉 among the crew, though 😯 as it were
somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained
a muffled ㊙ to the 🔚. Whence he came in a mannerly 👨 like
this, by what sort of unaccountable 👔 he 🔜 evinced himself to be
linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been 😳
🏢 over him; all this none knew. But 1⃣ cannot sustain
an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as
civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only 📅 in their
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide
among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
to the 🇪🇸 of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable
countries, which 😳 in these modern days 😯 preserve much of the
ghostly aboriginalness of earth's 🔑 generations, when the memory of
the first 👨 was a distinct recollection, and all 🚹 his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of
the sun and the 🌔 why they were created and to what 🔚; when though,
according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of
🚹, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane
amours.



CHAPTER 51. The ♥-Spout.


Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly
swept across 4⃣ several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the
Cape de Verdes; on the 🐚 (so called), being off the 👄 of the
Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol ⚓, an unstaked, watery locality,
southerly from St. Helena.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that 1⃣ serene and
🌔 night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;
and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery
😯, not a solitude; on such a 🔇 night a silvery ⛲ was seen
far in advance of the white bubbles at the 🙇. Lit up by the 🌔, it
looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
the 🌊. Fedallah first descried this ⛲. For of these 🌔
nights, it was his wont to 🌹 to the main-mast ❓, and 🐻 a
look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,
though herds of whales were seen by night, not 1⃣ whaleman in a 💯
would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions,
then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual
hours; his turban and the 🌔, companions in 1⃣ sky. But when, after
spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights
without uttering a 1⃣ 🔉; when, after all this 😯, his
unearthly 🔉 was heard announcing that silvery, 🌔-lit ⛲, every
reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged ♥ had
lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!"
Had the 🎺 of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet
😯 they felt no terror; rather 😂. For though it was a most
unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the 😢, and so deliriously
exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a
lowering.

🚶 the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
t'gallant sails and royals to be 👗, and every stunsail spread. The
best 👨 in the 🚢 must 🉑 the helm. Then, with every mast-❓
manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the 👃. The strange,
upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows
of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air
beneath the feet; while 😯 she rushed 🔛, as if 2⃣ antagonistic
influences were struggling in her--1⃣ to 🌹 🚋 to heaven, the
other to 🐏 yawingly to some horizontal 🔚. And had you watched
Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also 2⃣
different things were warring. While his 1⃣ live leg made lively echoes
🔛 the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-🐛.
On life and 🔚 this old 👨 walked. But though the 🚢 so swiftly
sped, and though from every ♥, like arrows, the eager glances shot,
yet the silvery ⛲ was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he
saw it once, but not a 🔙 time.

This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
after, lo! at the same 🔇 hour, it was again announced: again it
was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
night, till no 1⃣ heeded it but to ❓ at it. Mysteriously
jetted into the 🔝 🌔, or starlight, as the 🐚 might be;
disappearing again for 1⃣ whole day, or 2⃣ days, or 3⃣; and somehow
seeming at every distinct 🔁 to be advancing 😯 further and
further in our van, this solitary ⛲ seemed for ever alluring us on.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their 🏃, and in accordance
with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested
the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that
whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was 🐱
by 1⃣ self-same 🐳; and that 🐳, Moby Dick. For a time, there
reigned, too, a sense of peculiar 😨 at this flitting apparition,
as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in ♣ that the
monster might 🔧 round upon us, and rend us at 🔚 in the remotest
and most 🐺 seas.

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so 😨, derived a wondrous
potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath
all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as
for days and days we voyaged 🔛, through seas so wearily, lonesomely
mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed
vacating itself of life before our urn-like 🙇.

But, at 🔚, when turning to the 🇪🇸, the Cape winds began howling
around us, and we 🌹 and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are
there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the 🐚, and
gored the dark waves in her 😡, till, like showers of silver chips,
the ✨-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity
of life went away, but gave 🚉 to sights more dismal than before.

🔚 to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
before us; while thick in our 🌹 flew the inscrutable 🌊-ravens. And
every 🌅, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
as though they deemed our 🚢 some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing
appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-🚉 for their
homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, 😯 unrestingly heaved the
black 🌊, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane
soul were in 😧 and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had
bred.

Cape of 🔉 Hope, do they ☎ ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had
attended us, we found ourselves launched into this 😧 🌊,
where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these 🐟, seemed
condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or 💓
that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying;
😯 directing its ⛲ of feathers to the sky; 😯 beckoning us
on from before, the solitary ⛲ would at times be descried.

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
manifested the gloomiest 📖; and more seldom than ever addressed
his mates. In 😠 times like these, after everything above and
aloft has been secured, 0⃣ more can be done but passively to await
the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.
So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with 1⃣
🚹 firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would 🐻
gazing dead to windward, while an occasional 😢 of sleet or snow
would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew
driven from the forward 🏢 of the 🚢 by the perilous seas that
burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a 🎶 🔛 the bulwarks in
the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each 👨
had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the 🚋, in which
he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the
🔇 🚢, as if manned by painted sailors in 🌹, day after day tore
on through all the swift 😡 and gladness of the demoniac waves.
By night the same muteness of 👨 before the shrieks of the
🌊 prevailed; 😯 in 😯 the 🚹 swung in the bowlines; 😯
🔇 Ahab stood up to the 🐚. 😳 when wearied nature seemed
demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never
could Starbuck 🍃 the old 👨's aspect, when 1⃣ night going down
into the cabin to 🎶 how the barometer stood, he saw him with
closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain
and half-melted sleet of the 😡 from which he had some time before
emerged, 😯 slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and 🍰. On the
table beside him lay unrolled 1⃣ of those charts of tides and currents
which have previously been spoken of. His 🏮 swung from his tightly
clenched 🚹. Though the body was erect, the ❓ was thrown 🔙 so
that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale
that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*


*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
🏃 of the 🚢.


😨 old 👨! thought Starbuck with a shudder, 😴 in this
gale, 😯 Ⓜ steadfastly eyest thy purpose.



CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.


South-🇪🇸 from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a 🔉 cruising
⚓ for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
by 🔑. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
🙇-mast-❓, I had a 🔉 ⌚ of that sight so remarkable to a 🔰
in the far 🌊 fisheries--a whaler at 🌊, and long absent from 🏠.

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
appearance was traced with long channels of 😳 rust, while all her
spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
with hoar-frost. Only her 😦 sails were 👗. A 😠 sight it was to
📅 her long-bearded look-outs at those 3⃣ mast-heads. They seemed
clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the 👗 that had
survived nearly 4⃣ years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to
the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless 🌊; and though, when
the 🚢 slowly glided 🔚 under our 💩, we 6⃣ 🚹 in the air
came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
mast-heads of 1⃣ 🚢 to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking
fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not 1⃣ word to our own
look-outs, while the 💩-deck hail was being heard from below.

"🚢 ahoy! Have ye seen the White 🐳?"

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
act of putting his 🎺 to his 👄, it somehow fell from his 🚹
into the 🌊; and the 👃 now rising amain, he in vain strove to 💩
himself heard without it. Meantime his 🚢 was 😯 increasing the
distance between. While in various 🔇 ways the seamen of the Pequod
were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first
mere 🎶 of the White 🐳's 🔑 to another 🚢, Ahab for a
moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a ⛵
to board the 👽, had not the threatening 👃 forbade. But taking
advantage of his windward 🏢, he again seized his 🎺, and
knowing by her aspect that the 👽 vessel was a Nantucketer and
🔜 bound 🏠, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod,
bound round the 👨! Tell them to 📲 all future letters to the
Pacific 🌊! and this time 3⃣ years, if I am not at 🏠, tell them
to 📲 them to--"

At that moment the 2⃣ wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,
in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless 🐟,
that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted
away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves 🙇 and
aft with the 👽's flanks. Though in the 🏃 of his continual
voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to
any monomaniac 👨, the veriest trifles capriciously 🏃 meanings.

"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
There seemed but little in the words, but the 🎶 conveyed more of deep
helpless sadness than the insane old 👨 had ever before evinced. But
turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the 🚢 in the
👃 to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion 🔉,--"Up
helm! Keep her off round the 👨!"

Round the 👨! There is much in that 🔉 to inspire proud feelings;
but whereto does all that circumnavigation 🐻? Only through
numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that
we left 💺 secure, were all the time before us.

Were this 👨 an endless plain, and by sailing 🇪🇸 we could for
ever ✋ 🆕 distances, and 🔑 sights more sweet and strange
than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were 📲
in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
😧 🐶 of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims
before all 👨 hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
either 🍃 us on in 😇 mazes or midway 🍃 us whelmed.



CHAPTER 53. The Gam.


The ostensible reason why Ahab did not ❌ on board of the whaler we had
spoken was this: the 👃 and 🌊 betokened storms. But 😳 had
this not been the 🐚, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
her--judging by his subsequent 🐻 on similar occasions--if so it
had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative
answer to the ❓ he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he
cared not to 🏃, 😳 for 5⃣ minutes, with any 👽 captain,
except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly
sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not
something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when
meeting each other in 👽 seas, and especially on a common
cruising-⚓.

If 2⃣ strangers crossing the 💴 Barrens in 🆕 York State, or the
equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering
each other in such inhospitable wilds, these 👫, for the life of
them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment
to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while
and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
illimitable 💴 Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the 🌊, 2⃣ whaling
vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth--off lone
Fanning's Island, or the far away King's Mills; how much more natural,
I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only
interchange hails, but come into 😯 closer, more friendly and
sociable 🔗. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
🏃, in the 🐚 of vessels owned in 1⃣ seaport, and whose captains,
officers, and not a few of the 🚹 are personally known to each other;
and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to 🍑 about.

For the long absent 🚢, the outward-🐶, perhaps, has letters on
board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a
📅 a year or 2⃣ later than the 🔚 1⃣ on her 🌁 and thumb-worn
files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound 🚢 would
receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-⚓ to
which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And
in degree, all this will 📖 true concerning whaling vessels crossing
each other's 🏃 on the cruising-⚓ itself, 😳 though they
are equally long absent from 🏠. For 1⃣ of them may have received a
transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and
some of those letters may be for the people of the 🚢 she now meets.
Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable
chat. For not only would they 😆 with all the sympathies of sailors,
but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common
pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.

Nor would difference of country 💩 any very essential difference;
that is, so long as both parties speak 1⃣ language, as is the 🐚
with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they
do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
whalers; regarding the long, 🏃 Nantucketer, with his nondescript
provincialisms, as a sort of 🌊-peasant. But where this superiority
in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
seeing that the Yankees in 1⃣ day, collectively, kill more whales than
all the English, collectively, in ❌ years. But this is a harmless
little foible in the English 🐳-hunters, which the Nantucketer does
not 🉑 much to ♥; probably, because he knows that he has a few
foibles himself.

So, then, we 📅 that of all ships separately sailing the 🌊, the
whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so. Whereas, some
merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
oftentimes pass on without so much as a 1⃣ word of recognition,
mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a 👫 of dandies in
Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon
each other's rig. As for 🚹-of-War, when they chance to 😆 at 🌊,
they first ❌ through such a 🚋 of 💫 bowings and scrapings, such
a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down
hearty 🔉-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching
Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they 🏃
away from each other as 🔜 as possible. And as for Pirates, when they
chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is--"How many
skulls?"--the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?" And that
❓ once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are
infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to 📅 overmuch of each
other's villanous likenesses.

But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
😇-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a "GAM," a thing so
utterly 👽 to all other ships that they never heard of the 🔑
😳; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only 😁 at it, and
🔁 gamesome stuff about "spouters" and "blubber-boilers," and such
like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also
all Pirates and 👨-of-War's 🚹, and Slave-🚢 sailors, cherish such
a scornful feeling towards 🐳-ships; this is a ❓ it would be
hard to answer. Because, in the 🐚 of pirates, say, I should like to
know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about
it. It sometimes ends in uncommon 🔝, indeed; but only at the
gallows. And besides, when a 👨 is elevated in that odd fashion, he has
no proper 🐾 for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude,
that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that
assertion the pirate has no solid basis to 🐻 on.

But what is a GAM? You might 🐻 out your index-finger 🏃 up and
down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson
never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not 📖 it.
Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
constant use among some fifteen Ⓜ true born Yankees. Certainly,
it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With
that ⌚, let me learnedly define it.

GAM. NOUN--A SOCIAL MEETING OF 2⃣ (OR MORE) WHALESHIPS, GENERALLY ON A
CRUISING-⚓; WHEN, AFTER EXCHANGING HAILS, THEY EXCHANGE VISITS BY
BOATS' CREWS; THE 2⃣ CAPTAINS REMAINING, FOR THE TIME, ON BOARD OF 1⃣
🚢, AND THE 2⃣ CHIEF MATES ON THE OTHER.

There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
has the 🐳 fishery. In a pirate, 👨-of-war, or slave 🚢, when
the captain is rowed anywhere in his ⛵, he always sits in the 💩
sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned 💺 there, and often
steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller decorated with
☀ cords and ribbons. But the 🐳-⛵ has no 💺 astern, no sofa of
that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling
captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen
in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the 🐳-⛵ never admits of
any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete ⛵'s crew
must 🍃 the 🚢, and hence as the ⛵ steerer or harpooneer is of
the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and
the captain, having no 🚉 to 💺 in, is pulled off to his 📲
all standing like a 💴 tree. And often you will 🎶 that being
conscious of the eyes of the whole visible 👨 resting on him from
the sides of the 2⃣ ships, this standing captain is all alive to the
importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is
this any very easy matter; for in his 🌹 is the immense 😌
steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his 🔙, the
after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
completely wedged before and 💺, and can only 💥 himself
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent
pitch of the ⛵ will often ❌ far to topple him, because length of
🐾 is 0⃣ without corresponding breadth. Merely 💩 a
spread 🐟 of 2⃣ poles, and you cannot 🐻 them up. Then, again,
it would never do in plain sight of the 👨's riveted eyes, it would
never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying
himself the slightest particle by catching 📖 of anything with
his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being
generally very large, 🔉 hands, he carries them there for ballast.
Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,
where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or
2⃣, in a sudden 😢 say--to seize 📖 of the nearest oarsman's
hair, and 📖 on there like grim 🔚.



CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story.


(AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN)


The Cape of 🔉 Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
much like some noted 4⃣ corners of a great highway, where you 😆
more travellers than in any other 🏢.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave
us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general 😟 in the White
🐳 was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's
story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the 🐳 a certain
wondrous, inverted visitation of 1⃣ of those so called judgments of God
which at times are said to overtake some 🚹. This latter circumstance,
with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the
㊙ 🏢 of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears
of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that ㊙ 🏢 of the story was
👽 to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the ㊙
property of 3⃣ confederate white seamen of that 🚢, 1⃣ of whom, it
seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,
but the following night Tashtego rambled in his 😴, and revealed
so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well
withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing
have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of
it, and by such a strange delicacy, to ☎ it so, were they governed in
this matter, that they kept the ㊙ among themselves so that it never
transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
🚉 this darker 🎀 with the story as publicly narrated on the
🚢, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting
📖.


*The ancient 🐳-😢 upon first sighting a 🐳 from the mast-❓,
😯 used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.


For my humor's 🍶, I shall preserve the 💨 in which I once narrated
it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, 1⃣ 👼's eve,
🚬 upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those
🆗 cavaliers, the 🆕 Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer
terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally
put, and which are duly answered at the time.

"Some 2⃣ years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail 🇪🇸
from the eaves of this 🔉 Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
northward of the 🎶. 1⃣ 🌅 upon handling the pumps, according to
daily 🛃, it was observed that she made more water in her 📖 than
common. They supposed a sword-🐟 had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the
captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare 🔉 luck
awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit
them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though,
indeed, they could not find it after searching the 📖 as low down
as was possible in rather 🔉 weather, the 🚢 😯 continued her
cruisings, the mariners 🏃 at the pumps at wide and easy intervals;
but no 🔉 luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet
undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking
some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest
harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.

"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favoured, he did not at all fear that his 🚢 would 🔰 by the way,
because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically 😌 at
them, those 6⃣-and-thirty 🚹 of his could easily keep the 🚢 😇;
never mind if the leak should 🔁 on her. In truth, well nigh the
whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the
Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the
brutal overbearing of Radney, the 👫, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.

"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! 🙏, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of 🐀.

"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your
courtesy--may be, you shall 🔜 hear further of all that. Now,
gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and 3⃣-masted ships, well-nigh as
large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked ♥ of our America, had yet
been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
connected with the open 🌊. For in their interflowing aggregate,
those Ⓜ 🆕-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
Superior, and Michigan,--possess an 🌊-like expansiveness, with many
of the 🌊's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
races and of climes. They 🐻 round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
😳 as the Polynesian waters do; in large 🏢, are shored by 2⃣ great
contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime
approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the 🇪🇸, dotted
all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries,
and by the 🐐-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the
🎯 thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they 🐻 their
beaches to 😠 barbarians, whose 😳 painted faces 💓 from out
their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient
and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines 🐻 like serried lines
of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring 😠 Afric
beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs 🍃 robes
to 🐉 Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
full-rigged merchant 🚢, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
😨 as any that lash the salted 👋; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many
a midnight 🚢 with all its 😱 crew. Thus, gentlemen, though
an inlander, Steelkilt was 😠-🌊 born, and 😠-🌊 nurtured;
as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his
infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse
at his maternal 🌊; though in after life he had long followed our
austere Atlantic and your 😔 Pacific; yet was he quite as
vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, 🆕
from the latitudes of 🐴-🎺 handled bowie-knives. Yet was this
Nantucketer a 👨 with some 🔉-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
firmness, only tempered by that common decency of 👨 recognition
which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had
long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved
so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt--but,
gentlemen, you shall hear.

"It was not more than a day or 2⃣ at the furthest after pointing
her 🙇 for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized 🌊 like our
Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole
way across it; though of a 😯, 😪 night, should the officer of
the deck happen to 🍃 his duty in that respect, the probability
would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on
account of all hands gently subsiding to the 💺. Nor in the
solitary and 🐺 seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it
altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their ♥-handles in
full chorus 😳 for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie
🔛 a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat
is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of
the way 🏢 of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her
captain begins to feel a little anxious.

"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
gaining once more, there was in truth some small 😟 manifested by
several of her company; especially by Radney the 👫. He commanded
the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted 🏠 anew, and every way
expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a
coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or
on 🌊 that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when
he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the 🚢, some of the
seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a 🏢 owner in
her. So when they were 🏃 that evening at the pumps, there was on
this ❓ no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood
with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling 🔝 water;
🔝 as any mountain ⛲, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps
ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee
scupper-holes.

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the 🐚 in this conventional
👨 of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command
over his fellow-🚹 finds 1⃣ of them to be very significantly his
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that 👨 he
conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a
chance he will 🔧 down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and
💩 a little 🚌 of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
❓ like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings
of your 🔚 viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a ♥, and
a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he
been born 👦 to Charlemagne's 🔰. But Radney, the 👫, was ugly
as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love
Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.

"Espying the 👫 drawing near as he was toiling at the ♥ with the
rest, the Lakeman affected not to 🎶 him, but unawed, went on with
his ☀ banterings.

"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; 📖 a cannikin, 1⃣
of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell
ye what, 🚹, old Rad's investment must ❌ for it! he had best cut away
his 🏢 of the hull and tow it 🏠. The fact is, boys, that sword-🐟
only began the job; he's come 🔙 again with a 💍 of 🚢-carpenters,
saw-🐟, and ®-🐟, and what not; and the whole posse of 'em
are now hard at 🏃 cutting and slashing at the 💺; making
improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to 🌹
overboard and scatter 'em. They're playing the devil with his estate, I
can tell him. But he's a simple old soul,--Rad, and a 🍑 too. Boys,
they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I
❓ if he'd 🍃 a poor devil like me the model of his 👃.'

"'💩 your eyes! what's that ♥ stopping for?' roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors' 🍑. '💥 away at it!'

"'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys,
lively, now!' And with that the ♥ clanged like fifty 🔥-engines;
the 🚹 tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's
utmost energies.

"Quitting the ♥ at 🔚, with the rest of his 💍, the Lakeman went
forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
fiery 😳, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse 😓 from his
brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney
to meddle with such a 👨 in that corporeally exasperated state, I know
not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding 🔛 the deck, the 👫
commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a
shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a 🐷
to 🏃 at large.

"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a 🚢's deck at 🌊 is a 👨 of 🏠
🏃 which in all times but 😠 gales is regularly attended to every
evening; it has been known to be done in the 🐚 of ships actually
foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
🌊-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,
if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger 🚹 in the Town-Ho
that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being
the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly
assigned captain of 1⃣ of the gangs; consequently he should have
been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical
duties, such being the 🐚 with his comrades. I 🎶 all these
particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
between the 2⃣ 🚹.

"But there was more than this: the ♣ about the shovel was almost as
plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had 👏
in his face. Any 👨 who has gone sailor in a 🐳-🚢 will
understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
comprehended when the 👫 uttered his command. But as he sat 😯 for
a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the 👫's malignant ♥ and
perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-👫
silently burning 🔛 towards them; as he instinctively saw all
this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper
passionateness in any already ireful being--a repugnance most felt, when
felt at all, by really valiant 🚹 😳 when aggrieved--this nameless
phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.

"Therefore, in his ordinary 🎶, only a little 😕 by the bodily
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping
the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without
at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to 3⃣ lads as the customary
sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or
0⃣ all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his
command; meanwhile advancing upon the 😯 seated Lakeman, with an
uplifted cooper's ♣ 🔨 which he had snatched from a cask near by.

"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
could but ill 🐻 this bearing in the 👫; but somehow 😯
smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
doggedly rooted to his 💺, till at 🔚 the incensed Radney shook the
🔨 within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
his bidding.

"Steelkilt 🌹, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
followed by the 👫 with his menacing 🔨, deliberately repeated his
intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not
the slightest effect, by an 😨 and unspeakable intimation with his
twisted 🚹 he warned off the foolish and infatuated 👨; but it was to
no purpose. And in this way the 2⃣ went once slowly round the windlass;
when, resolved at 🔚 no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had
now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on
the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:

"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. 🉑 that 🔨 away, or look to
yourself.' But the predestinated 👫 coming 😯 closer to him, where
the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the 🔉 🔨 within an inch of
his teeth; meanwhile repeating a 🚋 of insufferable maledictions.
Retreating not the thousandth 🏢 of an inch; stabbing him in the ♥
with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching
his right 🚹 💺 him and creepingly drawing it 🔙, told his
persecutor that if the 🔨 but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
by the gods. Immediately the 🔨 touched the cheek; the next 💓
the 😦 jaw of the 👫 was stove in his ❓; he fell on the hatch
spouting blood like a 🐳.

"Ere the 😢 could ❌ aft Steelkilt was shaking 1⃣ of the backstays
⭐ far aloft to where 2⃣ of his comrades were standing their
mastheads. They were both Canallers.

"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many 🐳-ships in our
harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
they?'

"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our Ⓜ Erie Canal. You
must have heard of it.'

"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this 🔇, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'

"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very 🆗; and
ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
information may 😖 side-✨ upon my story.'

"For 3⃣ 💯 and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
breadth of the state of 🆕 York; through numerous populous cities and
most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
affluent, cultivated fields, 1⃣ for fertility; by billiard-room
and 🍰-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
arches over Indian rivers; through sun and 😎; by happy hearts or
😕; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
🐻 almost like milestones, flows 1⃣ continual stream of Venetianly
☁ and often lawless life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next 🚪 to you;
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches.
For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
freebooters that they ever ⛺ around the halls of justice, so
sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.

"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
crowded plazza, with humorous 😟.

"'Well for our northern friend, 🐦 Isabella's Inquisition wanes in
Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'

"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the 🔑 of all
us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by
no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting 🎁 Lima
for distant Venice in your ☁ comparison. Oh! do not 🙇 and look
surprised; you know the proverb all 🔛 this coast--"☁ as
Lima." It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
billiard-tables, and for ever open--and "☁ as Lima." So, too,
Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
🎶!--St. Dominic, 🐱 it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you
pour out again.'

"Freely depicted in his own 📲, gentlemen, the Canaller would 💩
a 🆗 dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like
🎶 Antony, for days and days 🔛 his green-turfed, flowery Nile,
he indolently floats, openly toying with his 😳-cheeked Cleopatra,
ripening his 🍑 thigh upon the ☀ deck. But ashore, all this
effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly
sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his Ⓜ features.
A terror to the 😁 innocence of the villages through which he
floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received 🔉 turns from 1⃣ of
these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful;
but it is often 1⃣ of the 🌼 redeeming qualities of your 👨 of
violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to 🔙 a poor 👽
in a 🔉, as to plunder a wealthy 1⃣. In ♥, gentlemen, what the
wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that
our 😠 🐳-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates,
and that scarce any 🏃 of 👨, except Sydney 🚹, are so much
distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the
curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and
🆕 🚹 born 🔛 its 🎶, the probationary life of the Ⓜ Canal
furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian
🌽-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas.

"'I 📅! I 📅!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha
upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel! The 👨's 1⃣ Lima. I
had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold
and holy as the hills.--But the story.'

"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
had he done so, when he was surrounded by the 3⃣ junior mates and the
4⃣ harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the
ropes like baleful comets, the 2⃣ Canallers rushed into the uproar, and
sought to drag their 👨 out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the
sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued;
while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and down
with a 🐳-pike, 📲 upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
scoundrel, and 🚬 him 🔛 to the 💩-deck. At intervals, he ran
🔚 up to the revolving 💍 of the confusion, and prying into
the ♥ of it with his pike, sought to 😭 out the object of his
resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them
all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily
slewing about 3⃣ or 4⃣ large casks in a 🎶 with the windlass,
these 🌊-Parisians entrenched themselves 💺 the barricade.

"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them
with a pistol in each 🚹, just brought to him by the steward. 'Come
out of that, ye cut-throats!'

"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to
understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) 🔚 would be the signal
for a murderous mutiny on the 🏢 of all hands. Fearing in his ♥
lest this might 🌹 but too true, the captain a little desisted, but
😯 commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.

"'Will you 📲 not to 👻 us, if we do?' demanded their
ringleader.

"'🔧 to! 🔧 to!--I 💩 no 📲;--to your duty! Do you want to
sink the 🚢, by knocking off at a time like this? 🔧 to!' and he
once more raised a pistol.

"'Sink the 🚢?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink. Not a 👨 of us
turns to, unless you 🏦 not to 🔥 a rope-yarn against us. What say
ye, 🚹?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.

"The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his ♥
on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's not our
fault; we didn't want it; I told him to 🉑 his 🔨 away; it was
👦's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to
😭 the buffalo; I believe I have 😕 a finger here against his
cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
🚹? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to
yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; 🍃 it all; we are ready
to 🔧 to; treat us decently, and we're your 🚹; but we won't be
flogged.'

"'🔧 to! I 💩 no promises, 🔧 to, I say!'

"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
'there are a few of us here (and I am 1⃣ of them) who have shipped
for the cruise, d'ye 📅; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
🔥 as 🔜 as the ⚓ is down; so we don't want a row; it's
not our 😟; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to 🏃, but we
won't be flogged.'

"'🔧 to!' roared the Captain.

"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell you what
it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby
👿, we won't 🌹 a 🚹 against ye unless ye 🔥 us; but till
you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a 🚹's 🔧.'

"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till
ye're 🐱 of it. Down ye ❌.'

"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his 🚹. Most of them were against
it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down
into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.

"As the Lakeman's bare ❓ was just 😳 with the planks, the Captain
and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide
of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called
for the steward to bring the 🔉 brass padlock belonging to the
companionway.

"Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something
down the crack, closed it, and turned the 🔑 upon them--❌ in
number--leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained
neutral.

"All night a wide-awake ⌚ was kept by all the officers, forward and
aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and 🙇 hatchway; at which
🔚 🚉 it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking
through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace;
the 🚹 who 😯 remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps,
whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night
dismally resounded through the 🚢.

"At 🌅 the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned
the prisoners to 🏃; but with a 😢 they refused. Water was then
lowered down to them, and a 👫 of handfuls of 🍪 were tossed
after it; when again turning the 🔑 upon them and pocketing it, the
Captain returned to the 💩-deck. Twice every day for 3⃣ days
this was repeated; but on the fourth 🌅 a 😖 wrangling, and
then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and
suddenly 4⃣ 🚹 burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready
to 🔧 to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united
perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to
surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his
demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to
🔚 his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth
🌅 3⃣ others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the
desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only 3⃣ were left.

"'Better 🔧 to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.

"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.

"'Oh certainly,' said the Captain, and the 🔑 clicked.

"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of 7⃣
of his former associates, and stung by the mocking 🔉 that had 🔚
hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a 🚉 as black as
the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the 2⃣
Canallers, thus far apparently of 1⃣ mind with him, to burst out of
their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their
keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, 🔉 implements with a handle
at each 🔚) 🏃 amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any
devilishness of desperation possible, seize the 🚢. For himself, he
would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the
🔚 night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no
opposition on the 🏢 of the other 2⃣; they swore they were ready for
that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender.
And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first 👨 on deck,
when the time to 💩 the 👢 should come. But to this their leader as
fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as
his 2⃣ comrades would not 🐻, the 1⃣ to the other, in the matter;
and both of them could not be first, for the 🏃 would but 🉑 1⃣
👨 at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul 🏃 of these miscreants
must come out.

"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same 👨
of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in ♣ to be
the first of the 3⃣, though the 🔚 of the ❌, to surrender; and
thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such 🐻 might merit.
But when Steelkilt made known his determination 😯 to 🍃 them to
the 🔚, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed
their before ㊙ treacheries together; and when their leader
fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in 3⃣
sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords;
and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.

"Thinking murder at 🚹, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and
all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a
few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound 🚹 and 🐾, the 😯
struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious
allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a 👨 who had been
fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged 🔛
the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
mizzen rigging, like 3⃣ quarters of ♥, and there they hung till
🌅. '💩 ye,' cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,
'the vultures would not 👻 ye, ye villains!'

"At 🌅 he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
from those who had taken no 🏢 in the mutiny, he told the former that
he had a 🔉 mind to flog them all round--thought, upon the whole,
he would do so--he ought to--justice demanded it; but for the 🎁,
considering their timely surrender, he would let them ❌ with a
reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.

"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the 3⃣ 🚹 in the
rigging--'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;' and,
seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the
2⃣ traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads
sideways, as the 2⃣ crucified thieves are drawn.

"'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at 🔚; 'but there is 😯
rope enough left for you, my 🆗 bantam, that wouldn't 🍃 up. 🉑
that gag from his 👄, and let us hear what he can say for himself.'

"For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous ❓ of his
cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his ❓, said in a sort
of 🐦, 'What I say is this--and mind it well--if you flog me, I murder
you!'

"'Say ye so? then 📅 how ye frighten me'--and the Captain drew off with
the rope to strike.

"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman.

"'But I must,'--and the rope was once more drawn 🔙 for the stroke.

"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
who, to the amazement of all hands, started 🔙, paced the deck rapidly
2⃣ or 3⃣ times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, 'I
won't do it--let him ❌--cut him down: d'ye hear?'

"But as the junior mates were hurrying to 🏃 the ♣, a pale 👨,
with a bandaged ❓, arrested them--Radney the chief 👫. Ever since
the blow, he had lain in his 🏢; but that 🌅, hearing the tumult
on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
scene. Such was the state of his 👄, that he could hardly speak;
but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the
captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his
pinioned foe.

"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman.

"'So I am, but 🉑 that.' The 👫 was in the very act of striking,
when another 🐦 stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing
no more, made 🔉 his word, spite of Steelkilt's threat, whatever that
might have been. The 3⃣ 🚹 were then cut down, all hands were turned
to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as
before.

"Just after dark that day, when 1⃣ ⌚ had retired below, a clamor
was heard in the forecastle; and the 2⃣ trembling traitors 🏃 up,
besieged the cabin 🚪, saying they durst not 🏃 with the crew.
Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not 🐏 them 🔙, so at their own
instance they were put down in the 🚢's 🏃 for salvation. 😯, no
🏠 of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed,
that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain
the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the 🔚, and, when the
🚢 reached port, desert her in a body. But in ♣ to insure the
speediest 🔚 to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing--namely,
not to 🍑 out for whales, in 🐚 any should be discovered. For,
spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho 😯
maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to
😦 for a 🐟 that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the
cruising ⚓; and Radney the 👫 was quite as ready to change his
🏢 for a ⛵, and with his bandaged 👄 seek to gag in 🔚 the
vital jaw of the 🐳.

"But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
passiveness in their 🐻, he kept his own counsel (at least till all
was over) concerning his own proper and ㊙ revenge upon the 👨 who
had stung him in the ventricles of his ♥. He was in Radney the chief
👫's ⌚; and as if the infatuated 👨 sought to 🏃 more than
half way to 😆 his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted,
against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the ❓
of his ⌚ at night. Upon this, and 1⃣ or 2⃣ other circumstances,
Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.

"During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
bulwarks of the 💩-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of
the ⛵ which was hoisted up there, a little above the 🚢's side.
In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a
considerable vacancy between the ⛵ and the 🚢, and down between
this was the 🌊. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next
trick at the helm would come round at 2⃣ ⭕'clock, in the 🌅 of the
third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure,
he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his
watches below.

"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.

"'What do you think? what does it look like?'

"'Like a lanyard for your 👜; but it's an odd 1⃣, seems to me.'

"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length
before him; 'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough
twine,--have you any?'

"But there was none in the forecastle.

"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he 🌹 to ❌ aft.

"'You don't mean to ❌ a begging to HIM!' said a sailor.

"'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a 🔧, when it's to help himself
in the 🔚, shipmate?' and going to the 👫, he looked at him
quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given
him--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night
an iron 🍳, closely netted, partly rolled from the 👝 of the
Lakeman's 👿 👑, as he was tucking the 🍰 into his hammock for
a pillow. Twenty-4⃣ hours after, his trick at the 🔇 helm--nigh
to the 👨 who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to
the seaman's 🚹--that fatal hour was then to come; and in the
🙇-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the 👫 was already stark and
stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.

"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
avenger. For by a ㊙ fatality, Heaven itself seemed to 👣 in
to 🉑 out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
done.

"It was just between 🌅 and 🌅 of the 🌅 of the 🔙
day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe 👨,
drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, 'There she
rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a 🐳! It was Moby Dick.

"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
whales have christenings? Whom ☎ you Moby Dick?'

"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--but
that would be too long a story.'

"'How? how?' cried all the 🆕 Spaniards, crowding.

"'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more
into the air, Sirs.'

"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks
faint;--😆 up his empty 👓!'

"No need, gentlemen; 1⃣ moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen,
so suddenly perceiving the snowy 🐳 within fifty yards of the
🚢--forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the
moment, the Teneriffe 👨 had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
his 🔉 for the monster, though for some little time past it had been
plainly beheld from the 3⃣ sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.
'The White 🐳--the White 🐳!' was the 😢 from captain, mates,
and harpooneers, who, undeterred by 😨 rumours, were all anxious
to capture so famous and precious a 🐟; while the dogged crew eyed
askance, and with curses, the appalling 🍑 of the vast milky mass,
that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like
a living opal in the blue 🌅 🌊. Gentlemen, a strange fatality
pervades the whole 📲 of these events, as if verily mapped out
before the 👨 itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the
👫, and when fast to a 🐟, it was his duty to 💺 next him, while
Radney stood up with his lance in the 🙇, and haul in or ☺
the 🎶, at the word of command. Moreover, when the 4⃣ boats were
lowered, the 👫's got the start; and none howled more fiercely with
😂 than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff
🔧, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in 🚹, Radney sprang to
the 🙇. He was always a 😠 👨, it seems, in a ⛵. And now his
bandaged 😢 was, to beach him on the 🐳's topmost 🔙. 0⃣
loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding ✨ that
blent 2⃣ whitenesses together; till of a sudden the ⛵ struck as
against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing 👫.
That 💓, as he fell on the 🐳's slippery 🔙, the ⛵ righted,
and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the
🌊, on the other flank of the 🐳. He struck out through the spray,
and, for an 💓, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to
remove himself from the ♥ of Moby Dick. But the 🐳 rushed round
in a sudden maelstrom; seized the 🏊 between his jaws; and rearing
high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.

"Meantime, at the first 🐛 of the ⛵'s 💺, the Lakeman had
slackened the 🎶, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
downward jerking of the ⛵, quickly brought his 👅 to the 🎶. He
cut it; and the 🐳 was 😇. But, at some distance, Moby Dick 🌹
again, with some tatters of Radney's 😳 woollen 👕, caught in the
teeth that had destroyed him. All 4⃣ boats gave 🐶 again; but the
🐳 eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.

"In 🔉 time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a 🐺, solitary
🚉--where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
Lakeman, all but 5⃣ or 6⃣ of the foremastmen deliberately deserted
among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large 🔁
war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.

"The 🚢's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving
down the 🚢 to 🔚 the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over
their dangerous allies was this small 💍 of whites necessitated, both
by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard 🏃 they underwent,
that upon the vessel being ready again for 🌊, they were in such a
weakened 🚋 that the captain durst not put off with them in so
🔉 a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the
🚢 as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his 2⃣ cannon
from the bows; stacked his muskets on the 💩; and ⚠ the
Islanders not to approach the 🚢 at their peril, took 1⃣ 👨 with
him, and setting the sail of his best 🐳-⛵, steered straight
before the 👃 for Tahiti, 5⃣ 💯 miles distant, to procure a
reinforcement to his crew.

"On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed
to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but
the 🐺 craft bore down on him; and 🔜 the 🔉 of Steelkilt
hailed him to heave to, or he would 🏃 him under water. The captain
presented a pistol. With 1⃣ 🐾 on each 🙇 of the yoked war-canoes,
the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so
much as clicked in the 🔒, he would bury him in bubbles and ✨.

"'What do you want of me?' cried the captain.

"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;
'no lies.'

"'I am bound to Tahiti for more 🚹.'

"'Very 🔉. Let me board you a moment--I come in peace.' With that he
leaped from the canoe, swam to the ⛵; and climbing the gunwale, stood
face to face with the captain.

"'Cross your arms, sir; 😖 🔙 your ❓. Now, 🔁 after me.
As 🔜 as Steelkilt leaves me, I 🏦 to beach this ⛵ on yonder
island, and remain there 6⃣ days. If I do not, may lightning strike
me!'

"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and leaping
into the 🌊, he swam 🔙 to his comrades.

"Watching the ⛵ till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
roots of the cocoa-🍳 trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time
arrived at Tahiti, his own 🚉 of destination. There, luck befriended
him; 2⃣ ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially
in want of precisely that number of 🚹 which the sailor headed. They
embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he
been at all minded to 🏃 them 🔉 retribution.

"Some ❌ days after the French ships sailed, the 🐳-⛵ arrived,
and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the 🌊. Chartering a small
native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
right there, again resumed his cruisings.

"Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
Nantucket, the widow of Radney 😯 turns to the 🌊 which refuses
to 🍃 up its dead; 😯 in dreams sees the 😨 white 🐳 that
destroyed him.

"'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.

"'I am, Don.'

"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this your story is in ♥ really true? It is so passing wonderful!
Did you get it from an unquestionable source? 🉑 with me if I seem to
press.'

"'Also 🉑 with all of us, sir sailor; for we all 🔗 in Don
Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding 😟.

"'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'

"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who
will quickly procure 1⃣ for me. I ❌ for it; but are you well advised?
this may 🌹 too serious.'

"'Will you be so 🔉 as to bring the priest also, Don?'

"'Though there are no 🚗-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said 1⃣ of the company
to another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.
Let us withdraw more out of the 🌔. I 📅 no need of this.'

"'😌 me for 🏃 after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also 🙏
that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists
you can.'

"'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian,
gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.

"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the ✨,
and 📖 the Holy 📖 before me that I may 👻 it.

"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,
gentlemen, is in ♥ and its great items, true. I know it to be
true; it happened on this 🍳; I trod the 🚢; I knew the crew; I have
seen and talked with Steelkilt since the 🔚 of Radney.'"



CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.


I shall ere long 🔑 to you as well as 1⃣ can without canvas,
something like the true form of the 🐳 as he actually appears to the
♥ of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the 🐳 is moored
alongside the 🐳-🚢 so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.
It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those
curious imaginary portraits of him which 😳 down to the 🎁 day
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to 👗 the
👨 right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the 🐳 all
wrong.

It may be that the 🔑 source of all those pictorial delusions will
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For
ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble
panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,
medallions, cups, and coins, the 🐬 was drawn in scales of
chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted ❓ like St. George's; ever
since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
only in most popular pictures of the 🐳, but in many scientific
presentations of him.

Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to
be the 🐳's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta,
in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of
that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
avocation of 👨, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came
into being. No ❓ then, that in some sort our noble profession of
whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo 🐳
referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the
incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the
Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half 👨 and half 🐳, so
as only to 🍃 the 💩 of the latter, yet that small section of him is
all wrong. It looks more like the tapering 💩 of an anaconda, than the
broad palms of the true 🐳's majestic flukes.

But ❌ to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's
portrait of this 🐟; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian
Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the
🌊-monster or 🐳. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his
own "Perseus Descending," 💩 out 1⃣ whit better. The huge corpulence
of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the 🌹, scarcely drawing
1⃣ inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its 🔙, and its
distended tusked 👄 into which the billows are rolling, might be
taken for the Traitors' Gate ⭐ from the Thames by water into the
Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and
Jonah's 🐳, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of
old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the 📖-binder's 🐳
winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending ⚓--as
stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both
old and 🆕--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,
imitated, I 🉑 it, from the like figures on antique vases.
Though universally denominated a 🐬, I nevertheless ☎ this
📖-binder's 🐟 an attempt at a 🐳; because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old
Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th 💯, during the Revival
of Learning; and in those days, and 😳 down to a comparatively
late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the
Leviathan.

In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
at times 😆 with very curious touches at the 🐳, where all manner
of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden,
come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the
original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some
curious whales.

But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some
plates of whales extracted from a Dutch 📖 of voyages, A.D. 1671,
entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the 🚢 Jonas in the
🐳, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In 1⃣ of those plates the
whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among 🎇-isles,
with white bears 🏃 over their living backs. In another 🐚, the
prodigious blunder is made of representing the 🐳 with perpendicular
flukes.

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by 1⃣ Captain Colnett,
a 🚉 Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape 🎺
into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti 🐳
Fisheries." In this 📖 is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of
a Physeter or Spermaceti 🐳, drawn by 🐚 from 1⃣ killed on the
coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I ❓ not the
captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.
To 🎶 but 1⃣ thing about it, let me say that it has an ♥ which
applied, according to the accompanying 🐚, to a full grown sperm
🐳, would 💩 the ♥ of that 🐳 a 🙇-window some 5⃣ feet
long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not 🍃 us Jonah looking out
of that ♥!

Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for
the benefit of the 🆕 and tender, 😇 from the same heinousness of
mistake. Look at that popular 🏃 "Goldsmith's Animated Nature." In the
abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "🐳"
and a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly
🐳 looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, 1⃣
glimpse at it is enough to 😲 1⃣, that in this nineteenth 💯
such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any 🔉
public of schoolboys.

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great
naturalist, published a scientific systemized 🐳 📖, wherein are
several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these
are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland
🐳 (that is to say, the Right 🐳), 😳 Scoresby, a long
experienced 👨 as touching that species, declares not to have its
counterpart in nature.

But the placing of the 👑-sheaf to all this blundering business was
reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he
gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm 🐳. Before showing that
picture to any Nantucketer, you had best 🍃 for your summary
retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm 🐳 is not
a Sperm 🐳, but a squash. Of 🏃, he never had the benefit of
a whaling voyage (such 🚹 seldom have), but whence he derived that
picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor
in the same field, Desmarest, got 1⃣ of his authentic abortions; that
is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the 📝
those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.

As for the 🏠-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the
shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
Richard 3⃣. whales, with dromedary humps, and very 🐺; breakfasting
on 3⃣ or 4⃣ sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners:
their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue 🔑.

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the 🐳 are not so very
surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
been taken from the stranded 🐟; and these are about as correct as a
drawing of a wrecked 🚢, with 😕 🔙, would correctly represent
the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.
Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan
has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living 🐳,
in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at 🌊 in
unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,
like a launched 🎶-of-battle 🚢; and out of that element it is a
thing eternally impossible for mortal 👨 to hoist him bodily into the
air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not
to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a 🆕
sucking 🐳 and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, 😳 in the
🐚 of 1⃣ of those 🆕 sucking whales hoisted to a 🚢's deck, such
is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that
his precise 🚧 the devil himself could not ⌚.

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
🐳, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all.
For it is 1⃣ of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that
his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy
Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of 1⃣ of
his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian
old 👨, with all Jeremy's other ⭐ personal characteristics;
yet 0⃣ of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's
articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton
of the 🐳 bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded
animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the ❓, as in some
🏢 of this 📖 will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously
displayed in the side 5⃣, the bones of which almost exactly answer to
the bones of the 👨 🚹, minus only the thumb. This 5⃣ has 4⃣
regular bone-fingers, the index, ♥, ☎, and little finger. But
all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the 👨
fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the 🐳 may
sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb 1⃣ day, "he can never be truly
said to handle us without mittens."

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
conclude that the great Leviathan is that 1⃣ creature in the 👨
which must remain unpainted to the 🔚. True, 1⃣ portrait may 💥
the 🎶 much nearer than another, but none can 💥 it with any very
considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding
out precisely what the 🐳 really looks like. And the only mode in
which you can derive 😳 a tolerable idea of his living contour, is
by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you 🏃 no small risk of
being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had
best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.



CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes.


In 🔗 with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
tempted here to enter upon those 😯 more monstrous stories of
them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass
that matter by.

I know of only 4⃣ published outlines of the great Sperm 🐳;
Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous
chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far
better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's
drawings of this 🐳 are 🔉, excepting the ♥ figure in the
picture of 3⃣ whales in various attitudes, capping his 🔙
chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no
❓ calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor 🚹, is
admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm
🐳 drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they
are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.

Of the Right 🐳, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
are drawn on too small a 🐚 to convey a desirable impression. He has
but 1⃣ picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because
it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
anything like a truthful idea of the living 🐳 as seen by his living
hunters.

But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to
be anywhere found, are 2⃣ large French engravings, well executed,
and taken from paintings by 1⃣ Garnery. Respectively, they represent
attacks on the Sperm and Right 🐳. In the first engraving a noble
Sperm 🐳 is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath
the ⛵ from the profundities of the 🌊, and bearing high in the air
upon his 🔙 the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The 🙇 of
the ⛵ is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon
the monster's 🔙; and standing in that 🙇, for that 1⃣ 1⃣
incomputable 💓 of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
incensed boiling spout of the 🐳, and in the act of leaping, as if
from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully 🔉 and
true. The half-emptied 🎶-🛀 floats on the whitened 🌊; the wooden
poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
swimming crew are 😕 about the 🐳 in contrasting expressions
of affright; while in the black stormy distance the 🚢 is bearing down
upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details
of this 🐳, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not
🏃 so 🔉 a 1⃣.

In the 🔙 engraving, the ⛵ is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large 🏃 Right 🐳, that rolls his black
weedy bulk in the 🌊 like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian
cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so
abounding a 🚬 in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave
supper cooking in the great bowels below. 🌊 fowls are pecking at the
small crabs, 🐚-🐟, and other 🌊 candies and maccaroni, which the
Right 🐳 sometimes carries on his pestilent 🔙. And all the while
the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight ⛵ to rock
in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an 🌊
steamer. Thus, the foreground is all 😠 commotion; but 💺, in
admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy 😳 of a 🌊 becalmed, the
drooping unstarched sails of the powerless 🚢, and the inert mass of
a dead 🐳, a conquered fortress, with the 🎏 of capture lazily
hanging from the 🐳-pole inserted into his spout-hole.

Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for
painting action. ❌ and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and
where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion
on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder
fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
France; where every sword seems a 💓 of the Northern Lights, and the
successive armed kings and Emperors 💨 by, like a 👢 of crowned
centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a 🚉 in that gallery, are these 🌊
battle-pieces of Garnery.

The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
they have of their whaling scenes. With not 1⃣ tenth of England's
experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth 🏢 of that of the
Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real ♥ of
the 🐳 🏃. For the most 🏢, the English and American 🐳
draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline
of things, such as the vacant profile of the 🐳; which, so far as
picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching
the profile of a pyramid. 😳 Scoresby, the justly renowned Right
whaleman, after 🎁 us a stiff full length of the Greenland 🐳,
and 3⃣ or 4⃣ delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats
us to a series of classical engravings of ⛵ hooks, chopping knives,
and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck
submits to the inspection of a shivering 👨 ninety-6⃣ fac-similes of
magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent
voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it
was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a
sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.

In addition to those 🆗 engravings from Garnery, there are 2⃣ other
French engravings worthy of 🎶, by some 1⃣ who subscribes himself
"H. Durand." 1⃣ of them, though not precisely adapted to our 🎁
purpose, nevertheless deserves 🎶 on other accounts. It is a 😯
noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,
inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails
of the 🚢, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both
drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very 🆗, when
considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under
1⃣ of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is
quite a different affair: the 🚢 hove-to upon the open 🌊, and in the
very ♥ of the Leviathanic life, with a Right 🐳 alongside; the
vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a
quay; and a ⛵, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is
about 🎁 🐶 to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances
lie levelled for use; 3⃣ oarsmen are just setting the mast in its
hole; while from a sudden 👋 of the 🌊, the little craft stands
half-erect out of the water, like a rearing 🐴. From the 🚢, the
🚬 of the torments of the boiling 🐳 is going up like the 🚬
over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black ☁, rising up
with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the
excited seamen.



CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in 🔑; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
💎; in Mountains; in Stars.


On Tower-hill, as you ❌ down to the London docks, you may have seen a
crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board
before him, representing the tragic scene in which he 😖 his leg.
There are 3⃣ whales and 3⃣ boats; and 1⃣ of the boats (presumed
to 🐻 the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being
crunched by the jaws of the foremost 🐳. Any time these ❌ years,
they tell me, has that 👨 held up that picture, and exhibited that
stump to an incredulous 👨. But the time of his justification has
now come. His 3⃣ whales are as 🔉 whales as were ever published in
Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you
will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on
that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman 💩; but, with
downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and 🆕 Bedford, and
🎏 Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm 🐳-teeth,
or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right 🐳-bone, and other
like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen ☎ the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material,
in their hours of 🌊 leisure. Some of them have little boxes
of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
💩-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
they will 🔧 you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's
fancy.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a 👨
to that 🚋 in which God placed him, i.🇪🇸. what is called savagery.
Your true 🐳-hunter is as much a 🐺 as an Iroquois. I myself am a
🐺, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready
at any moment to 🌹 against him.

Now, 1⃣ of the peculiar characteristics of the 🐺 in his domestic
hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian
war-♣ or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
carving, is as great a 🏆 of 👨 perseverance as a Latin lexicon.
For, with but a bit of 😕 🌊-🐚 or a shark's tooth, that
miraculous intricacy of wooden net-🏃 has been achieved; and it has
cost steady years of steady application.

As with the Hawaiian 🐺, so with the white sailor-🐺. With the
same marvellous patience, and with the same 1⃣ shark's tooth, of
his 1⃣ poor 💩-👅, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
quite as workmanlike, but as 🔚 packed in its maziness of design,
as the Greek 🐺, Achilles's 🐚; and full of barbaric ♥
and suggestiveness, as the prints of that 🆗 old Dutch 🐺, Albert
Durer.

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
the noble South 🌊 war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles
of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.

At some old gable-roofed country houses you will 📅 brass whales hung
by the 💩 for knockers to the road-side 🚪. When the porter is
😪, the anvil-headed 🐳 would be best. But these knocking
whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
old-fashioned churches you will 📅 sheet-iron whales placed there for
weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot examine
them closely enough to decide upon their merit.

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the 🐾 of high 😕
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
plain, you will often 🔑 images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in 🐀, which of a windy day breaks against
them in a surf of green surges.

Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky
point of ⌚ you will ⌚ passing glimpses of the profiles of
whales defined 🔛 the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to 📅 these sights; and not only that, but if you wish
to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and 🉑 the exact
intersecting latitude and longitude of your first 🐻-point, else
so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,
previous 🐻-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the
Soloma Islands, which 😯 remain incognita, though once high-ruffed
Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you 💣 to 👻 out
great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as
when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies
locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased
Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright
points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic
skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the 🐶 against the
starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying
🐟.

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
spurs, would I could 🌹 that 🐳 and leap the topmost skies, to
📅 whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie
encamped beyond my mortal sight!



CHAPTER 58. Brit.


Steering north-🇪🇸 from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows
of brit, the minute, 🐔 ♥, upon which the Right 🐳
largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we
seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.

On the 🔙 day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
the 🔥 of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that
wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
from the water that escaped at the 👄.

As 🌅 mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance
their scythes through the long wet 🐀 of marshy meads; 😳 so these
monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting 🔉; and leaving
💺 them endless swaths of blue upon the 🐔 🌊.*


*That 🏢 of the 🌊 known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does
not 🉑 that 🔑 as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there
being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually
floating in those latitudes, where the Right 🐳 is often chased.


But it was only the 🔉 they made as they parted the brit which at all
reminded 1⃣ of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked
more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the
great hunting countries of India, the 👽 at a distance will
sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them
to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; 😳
so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the
leviathans of the 🌊. And 😳 when recognised at 🔚, their immense
magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses
of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort
of life that lives in a 🐶 or a 🐴.

Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though
some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are
of their kind in the 🌊; and though taking a broad general ⌚ of
the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for
example, does the 🌊 furnish any 🐟 that in disposition answers to
the sagacious kindness of the 🐶? The accursed shark alone can in any
generic respect be said to 🉑 comparative analogy to him.

But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the
seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
repelling; though we know the 🌊 to be an everlasting terra incognita,
so that Columbus sailed over numberless 👽 worlds to 🔑 his
1⃣ superficial western 1⃣; though, by vast odds, the most terrific
of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen
tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however 👶 👨
may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,
to the crack of doom, the 🌊 will insult and murder him, and pulverize
the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can 💩; nevertheless, by the
continual 🔁 of these very impressions, 👨 has 😖 that sense
of the full awfulness of the 🌊 which aboriginally belongs to it.

The first ⛵ we ® of, floated on an 🌊, that with Portuguese
vengeance had whelmed a whole 👨 without leaving so much as a widow.
That same 🌊 rolls now; that same 🌊 destroyed the wrecked ships
of 🔚 year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;
2⃣ thirds of the fair 👨 it yet covers.

Wherein differ the 🌊 and the land, that a miracle upon 1⃣ is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ⚓ opened
and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
precisely the same manner the live 🌊 swallows up ships and crews.

But not only is the 🌊 such a foe to 👨 who is an 👽 to it, but it
is also a fiend to its own off-⛲; worse than the Persian host who
murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
spawned. Like a 🐺 tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her
own cubs, so the 🌊 dashes 😳 the mightiest whales against the rocks,
and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No
mercy, no 🏢 but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad
battle steed that has 😖 its rider, the masterless 🌊 overruns the
globe.

Consider the subtleness of the 🌊; how its most 😨 creatures glide
under water, unapparent for the most 🏢, and treacherously ㊙
beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
brilliance and 🍑 of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,
the universal cannibalism of the 🌊; all whose creatures prey upon each
other, carrying on eternal war since the 👨 began.

Consider all this; and then 🔧 to this green, gentle, and most docile
earth; consider them both, the 🌊 and the land; and do you not find a
strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling 🌊
surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of 👨 there lies 1⃣ insular
Tahiti, full of peace and 😂, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, Ⓜ canst
never return!


CHAPTER 59. Squid.


Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod 😯 held on her
way north-🇪🇸 towards the island of ☕; a gentle air impelling
her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her 3⃣ tall tapering
masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as 3⃣ mild palms on a
plain. And 😯, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
alluring ⛲ would be seen.

But 1⃣ transparent blue 🌅, when a stillness almost preternatural
spread over the 🌊, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered
together as they softly ran on; in this 🔉 😯 of the visible
sphere a strange 👻 was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-❓.

In the distance, a great white mass lazily 🌹, and rising higher and
higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at 🔚 gleamed before
our 🙇 like a snow-slide, 🆕 slid from the hills. Thus glistening
for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
and silently gleamed. It seemed not a 🐳; and yet is this Moby Dick?
thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
more, with a stiletto-like 😢 that startled every 👨 from his nod, the
negro yelled out--"There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead!
The White 🐳, the White 🐳!"

Upon this, the seamen rushed to the Ⓜ-arms, as in swarming-time the
bees 👢 to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on
the bowsprit, and with 1⃣ 🚹 pushed far 💺 in readiness to 👋
his orders to the helmsman, 🐱 his eager glance in the direction
indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.

Whether the flitting attendance of the 1⃣ 😯 and solitary ⛲ had
gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to 🔗 the
ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular
🐳 he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
orders for lowering.

The 4⃣ boats were 🔜 on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all
swiftly pulling towards their prey. 🔜 it went down, and while, with
oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same
🏢 where it sank, once more it slowly 🌹. Almost forgetting for
the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
phenomenon which the ㊙ seas have hitherto revealed to 👨.
A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating
from its ♥, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within ✋. No perceptible
face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either 🌠 or
instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,
chance-like apparition of life.

As with a low sucking 🔉 it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck 😯
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a 😠 🔉
exclaimed--"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to
have seen thee, Ⓜ white 👻!"

"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.

"The great live squid, which, they say, few 🐳-ships ever beheld, and
returned to their ports to tell of it."

But Ahab said 0⃣; turning his ⛵, he sailed 🔙 to the vessel;
the rest as silently following.

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being
so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to 💺 it with
portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though 1⃣ and all of them
declare it to be the largest animated thing in the 🌊, yet very few
of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm 🐳
his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above
water, and may be seen by 👨 in the act of feeding, the spermaceti
🐳 obtains his whole food in 👽 zones below the 🌹; and
only by inference is it that any 1⃣ can tell of what, precisely, that
food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will 🐱 what
are supposed to be the 🆓 arms of the squid; some of them thus
exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that
the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to
the bed of the 🌊; and that the sperm 🐳, unlike other species, is
supplied with teeth in ♣ to 🔥 and tear it.

There seems some ⚓ to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
some other particulars he narrates, in all this the 2⃣ correspond.
But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he
assigns it.

By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the ㊙
creature, here spoken of, it is included among the 👪 of cuttle-🐟,
to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,
but only as the Anak of the tribe.



CHAPTER 60. The 🎶.


With reference to the whaling scene 🔜 to be described, as well as
for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,
I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible 🐳-🎶.

The 🎶 originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the 🐚 of ordinary
ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to
the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
sailor for common 🚢 use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity
too much stiffen the 🐳-🎶 for the 🔚 coiling to which it must
be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to ⌚, tar in general
by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it
may 🍃 it compactness and gloss.

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
entirely superseded hemp as a material for 🐳-lines; for, though not
so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and
I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more
handsome and becoming to the ⛵, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark
fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian
to behold.

The 🐳-🎶 is only 2⃣-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first
sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment
its 1⃣ and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of 1⃣ 💯 and
twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will 🉑 a strain nearly equal
to 3⃣ tons. In length, the common sperm 🐳-🎶 measures something
over 2⃣ 💯 fathoms. Towards the 💩 of the ⛵ it is spirally
coiled away in the 🛀, not like the worm-pipe of a 😯 though, but so
as to form 1⃣ round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or
layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "♥,"
or minute vertical 🚇 formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least
tangle or kink in the coiling would, in 🏃 out, infallibly 🉑
somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used
in stowing the 🎶 in its 🛀. Some harpooneers will consume almost an
entire 🌅 in this business, carrying the 🎶 high aloft and then
reeving it downwards through a block towards the 🛀, so as in the act
of coiling to 😇 it from all possible wrinkles and twists.

In the English boats 2⃣ tubs are used instead of 1⃣; the same 🎶
being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this;
because these 👫-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the
⛵, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American 🛀, nearly
3⃣ feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky
freight for a craft whose planks are but 1⃣ half-inch in thickness; for
the 💺 of the 🐳-⛵ is like critical 🎇, which will 🉑 up
a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated
1⃣. When the painted canvas 🔝 is clapped on the American 🎶-🛀,
the ⛵ looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great
💒-🍰 to 🎁 to the whales.

Both ends of the 🎶 are exposed; the 😦 🔚 terminating in an
♥-💒 or ➿ coming up from the 💺 against the side of the
🛀, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything.
This arrangement of the 😦 🔚 is necessary on 2⃣ accounts. First:
In ♣ to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional 🎶 from a
neighboring ⛵, in 🐚 the stricken 🐳 should 🔉 so deep as
to threaten to 🏃 off the entire 🎶 originally attached to the
harpoon. In these instances, the 🐳 of 🏃 is shifted like a mug
of ale, as it were, from the 1⃣ ⛵ to the other; though the
first ⛵ always hovers at 🚹 to assist its 🏃. 🔙: This
arrangement is indispensable for common safety's 🍶; for were the
😦 🔚 of the 🎶 in any way attached to the ⛵, and were the
🐳 then to 🏃 the 🎶 out to the 🔚 almost in a 1⃣, 🚬
minute as he sometimes does, he would not 🔚 there, for the doomed
⛵ would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of
the 🌊; and in that 🐚 no town-crier would ever find her again.

Before lowering the ⛵ for the 🐶, the upper 🔚 of the 🎶 is
taken aft from the 🛀, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again
carried forward the entire length of the ⛵, resting crosswise upon
the loom or handle of every 👨's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist
in rowing; and also passing between the 🚹, as they alternately 💺 at
the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme
pointed 🙇 of the ⛵, where a wooden 🎏 or skewer the size of a
common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs
in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the ⛵
again; and some ❌ or twenty fathoms (called 📦-🎶) being coiled
upon the 📦 in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale 😯 a
little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--the rope
which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that
🔗, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious
to detail.

Thus the 🐳-🎶 folds the whole ⛵ in its complicated coils,
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the
oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
♥ of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any 👦 of mortal
👩, for the first time, 💺 himself amid those hempen intricacies,
and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
👽 💓 the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
contortions be put in 🏃 like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very ♥ in his bones
to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit--strange thing! what
cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes,
and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you
will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the 🐳-⛵, when thus
hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the 6⃣ burghers of Calais before
King Edward, the 6⃣ 🚹 composing the crew 🔧 into the jaws of 🔚,
with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for
those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are casually
chronicled--of this 👨 or that 👨 being taken out of the ⛵ by the
🎶, and 😖. For, when the 🎶 is darting out, to be seated then in
the ⛵, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings
of a steam-engine in full 🏃, when every flying beam, and shaft, and
🚲, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot 💺 motionless in the
♥ of these perils, because the ⛵ is rocking like a cradle, and
you are pitched 1⃣ way and the other, without the slightest ⚠;
and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of
volition and action, can you 🏃 being made a Mazeppa of, and 🏃
away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.

Again: as the 🔉 calm which only apparently precedes and
prophesies of the 😡, is perhaps more 😨 than the 😡 itself;
for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and ✉ of the 😡; and
contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
powder, and the 🍳, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the
🎶, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
into actual 🏃--this is a thing which carries more of true terror than
any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All 🚹
live enveloped in 🐳-lines. All are born with halters round their
necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden 🔧 of 🔚,
that mortals realize the 🔇, subtle, ever-🎁 perils of life.
And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the 🐳-⛵, you would
not at ♥ feel 1⃣ whit more of terror, than though seated before
your evening 🔥 with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.



CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a 🐳.


If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
Queequeg it was quite a different object.

"When you 📅 him '💷," said the 🐺, honing his harpoon in the 🙇
of his hoisted ⛵, "then you quick 📅 him 'parm 🐳."

The next day was exceedingly 😯 and sultry, and with 0⃣ special
to 🔒 them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of 😴
induced by such a vacant 🌊. For this 🏢 of the Indian 🌊 through
which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen ☎ a lively ⚓;
that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-🐟,
and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the
Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ⚓ off Peru.

It was my 🔧 to 🐻 at the foremast-❓; and with my shoulders
leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in
what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that
dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at 🔚 my soul went out of my
body; though my body 😯 continued to sway as a pendulum will, long
after the 🏢 which first moved it is withdrawn.

Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen
at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at 🔚
all 3⃣ of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing
that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman.
The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance
of the 🌊, 🇪🇸 nodded to west, and the sun over all.

Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious 🏢 preserved me;
with a shock I came 🔙 to life. And lo! 🔚 under our lee, not forty
fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm 🐳 lay rolling in the water like the
capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy 🔙, of an Ethiopian hue,
glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in
the trough of the 🌊, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury
⛲, the 🐳 looked like a portly burgher 🚬 his pipe of a warm
afternoon. But that pipe, poor 🐳, was thy 🔚. As if struck by some
enchanter's wand, the 😪 🚢 and every sleeper in it all at once
started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts
of the vessel, simultaneously with the 3⃣ notes from aloft, shouted
forth the accustomed 😢, as the great 🐟 slowly and regularly spouted
the sparkling brine into the air.

"🔝 away the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his own ♣, he
dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.

The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the 🐳; and ere
the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he
swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave
orders that not an oar should be used, and no 👨 must speak but in
whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
we swiftly but silently paddled 🔛; the calm not admitting of the
noiseless sails being 👗. 🔜, as we thus glided in 🐶, the
monster perpendicularly flitted his 💩 forty feet into the air, and
then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.

"There ❌ flukes!" was the 😢, an announcement immediately followed by
Stubb's producing his 👫 and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was
granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the 🐳
🌹 again, and being now in advance of the smoker's ⛵, and much
nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour
of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the 🐳 had at length become
aware of his pursuers. All 😯 of cautiousness was therefore no
longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into 🏃. And
😯 puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.

Yes, a mighty change had come over the 🐟. All alive to his jeopardy,
he was going "❓ out"; that 🏢 obliquely 😌 from the mad
yeast which he brewed.*


*It will be seen in some other 🚉 of what a very ✨ ♥
the entire interior of the sperm 🐳's enormous ❓ consists. Though
apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant 🏢 about
him. So that with 😌 he elevates it in the air, and invariably does
so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the
upper 🏢 of the front of his ❓, and such the tapering cut-water
formation of the 😦 🏢, that by obliquely elevating his ❓, he
thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
galliot into a sharppointed 🆕 York pilot-⛵.


"Start her, start her, my 🚹! Don't hurry yourselves; 🉑 plenty of
time--but start her; start her like 💥-claps, that's all," cried
Stubb, spluttering out the 🚬 as he spoke. "Start her, now; 🍃 'em
the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my 👦--start
her, all; but keep 🆒, keep 🆒--cucumbers is the word--easy,
easy--only start her like grim 🔚 and 😁 devils, and 🔥 the
buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--that's all. Start
her!"

"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the ☀-Header in reply, raising some
old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained ⛵
involuntarily bounced forward with the 1⃣ tremendous ⭐ stroke
which the eager Indian gave.

But his 😠 screams were answered by others quite as 😠. "Kee-hee!
Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and 🔙 on his 💺,
like a pacing 🐯 in his cage.

"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a
mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels
cut the 🌊. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his 🚉 in the van, 😯
encouraged his 🚹 to the onset, all the while puffing the 🚬 from
his 👄. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
welcome 😢 was heard--"🐻 up, Tashtego!--🍃 it to him!" The
harpoon was hurled. "💩 all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same
moment something went hot and hissing 🔛 every 1⃣ of their wrists.
It was the magical 🎶. An 💓 before, Stubb had swiftly caught 2⃣
additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its
increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue 🚬 now jetted up and mingled
with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the 🎶 passed round and
round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from
which the 🚹-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at
these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's
sharp 2⃣-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving
to wrest it out of your clutch.

"Wet the 🎶! wet the 🎶!" cried Stubb to the 🛀 oarsman (him seated
by the 🛀) who, snatching off his hat, dashed 🌊-water into it.* More
turns were taken, so that the 🎶 began holding its 🚉. The ⛵ now
flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego
here changed places--🙇 for 💩--a staggering business truly in that
rocking commotion.


*Partly to ® the indispensableness of this act, it may here be
stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to 💨 the
🏃 🎶 with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or
bailer, is 👗 apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most
convenient.


From the vibrating 🎶 extending the entire length of the upper 🏢 of
the ⛵, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would
have thought the craft had 2⃣ keels--1⃣ cleaving the water, the other
the air--as the ⛵ churned on through both opposing elements at once.
A continual 🚿 played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in
her wake; and, at the slightest ❓ from within, 😳 but of a little
finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale
into the 🌊. Thus they rushed; each 👨 with might and main clinging
to his 💺, to prevent being tossed to the ✨; and the tall form of
Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost 🔁, in ♣ to bring
down his ♥ of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed
as they shot on their way, till at length the 🐳 somewhat slackened
his flight.

"Haul in--haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
towards the 🐳, all hands began pulling the ⛵ up to him, while yet
the ⛵ was being towed on. 🔜 ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly
planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted 💨 after 💨 into the
flying 🐟; at the word of command, the ⛵ alternately sterning
out of the way of the 🐳's horrible 😤, and then ranging up for
another fling.

The 😳 tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
hill. His 😧 body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled
and seethed for furlongs 💺 in their wake. The slanting sun playing
upon this 😊 pond in the 🌊, sent 🔙 its reflection into every
face, so that they all glowed to each other like 😳 🚹. And all
the while, ⛲ after ⛲ of white 🚬 was agonizingly shot from the
spiracle of the 🐳, and vehement puff after puff from the 👄 of
the excited headsman; as at every 💨, hauling in upon his crooked
lance (by the 🎶 attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and
again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again
sent it into the 🐳.

"🔧 up--🔧 up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning 🐳
☺ in his 💢. "🔧 up!--🔚 to!" and the ⛵ ranged 🔛
the 🐟's flank. When reaching far over the 🙇, Stubb slowly churned
his long sharp lance into the 🐟, and kept it there, carefully
churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold
⌚ that the 🐳 might have swallowed, and which he was 😨 of
breaking ere he could 👮 it out. But that gold ⌚ he sought was the
innermost life of the 🐟. And now it is struck; for, starting from
his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "😕," the monster
horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable,
mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping
astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied
twilight into the 🔝 air of the day.

And now abating in his 😕, the 🐳 once more rolled out into ⌚;
surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his
spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At 🔚, gush
after gush of clotted 😳 gore, as if it had been the purple lees of 😳
wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling 🔙 again, ran dripping
down his motionless flanks into the 🌊. His ♥ had burst!

"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.

"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his 👄,
Stubb 😕 the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood
thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.



CHAPTER 62. The 💨.


A word concerning an incident in the 🔚 chapter.

According to the invariable 🛃 of the fishery, the 🐳-⛵ pushes
off from the 🚢, with the headsman or 🐳-killer as temporary
steersman, and the harpooneer or 🐳-fastener pulling the foremost
oar, the 1⃣ known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous
arm to strike the first iron into the 🐟; for often, in what is called
a long 💨, the 🔉 implement has to be flung to the distance of
twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the 🐶,
the harpooneer is expected to 🔧 his oar meanwhile to the uttermost;
indeed, he is expected to 👗 an example of superhuman activity to the
rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid
exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the 🔝 of 1⃣'s
compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what
that is none know but those who have tried it. For 1⃣, I cannot bawl
very heartily and 🏃 very recklessly at 1⃣ and the same time. In this
straining, bawling state, then, with his 🔙 to the 🐟, all at once
the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting 😢--"🐻 up, and 🍃 it
to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, 🔧 round on his
♥ half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little
strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the 🐳. No
❓, taking the whole 🎯 of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty
fair chances for a 💨, not 5⃣ are successful; no ❓ that so many
hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no ❓ that some
of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the ⛵; no ❓ that
some sperm whalemen are absent 4⃣ years with 4⃣ barrels; no ❓
that to many 🚢 owners, whaling is but a losing 😟; for it is the
harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you 🉑 the breath out of his
body how can you 🐻 to find it there when most wanted!

Again, if the 💨 be successful, then at the 🔙 critical 💓,
that is, when the 🐳 starts to 🏃, the boatheader and harpooneer
likewise start to 🏃 🙇 and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
themselves and every 1⃣ else. It is then they change places; and
the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper
🚉 in the bows of the ⛵.

Now, I 😟 not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to
🔚; he should both 💨 the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing
whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious
to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss
of speed in the 🐶; but long experience in various whalemen of more
than 1⃣ nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures
in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the
🐳 as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has
caused them.

To insure the greatest efficiency in the 💨, the harpooneers of this
👨 must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of
toil.



CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.


Out of the trunk, the branches 🌹; out of them, the twigs. So, in
productive subjects, 🌹 the chapters.

The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent 🎶.
It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some 2⃣ feet in length, which
is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the 🙇,
for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the
harpoon, whose other naked, barbed 🔚 slopingly projects from the 🙇.
Thereby the weapon is instantly at 🚹 to its hurler, who snatches it
up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from
the wall. It is customary to have 2⃣ harpoons reposing in the crotch,
respectively called the first and 🔙 irons.

But these 2⃣ harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
the 🎶; the object being this: to 💨 them both, if possible, 1⃣
instantly after the other into the same 🐳; so that if, in the coming
drag, 1⃣ should 🏃 out, the other may 😯 retain a 📖. It is a
doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the
instantaneous, violent, convulsive 🏃 of the 🐳 upon receiving
the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however
lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the 🔙 iron into him.
Nevertheless, as the 🔙 iron is already connected with the 🎶,
and the 🎶 is 🏃, hence that weapon must, at all events, be
anticipatingly tossed out of the ⛵, somehow and somewhere; else the
most 😨 jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,
it accordingly is in such cases; the 🆓 coils of 📦 🎶 (mentioned
in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently
practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the
saddest and most fatal casualties.

Furthermore: you must know that when the 🔙 iron is thrown
overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
skittishly curvetting about both ⛵ and 🐳, entangling the lines,
or cutting them, and making a prodigious 🌠 in all directions.
Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the 🐳 is
fairly captured and a corpse.

Consider, now, how it must be in the 🐚 of 4⃣ boats all engaging
1⃣ unusually strong, active, and knowing 🐳; when owing to these
qualities in him, as well as to the Ⓜ concurring accidents of
such an audacious enterprise, 8⃣ or ❌ 🆓 🔙 irons may be
simultaneously dangling about him. For, of 🏃, each ⛵ is supplied
with several harpoons to 🙇 on to the 🎶 should the first 1⃣
be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
faithfully narrated here, as they will not 💣 to elucidate several
most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be
painted.



CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper.


Stubb's 🐳 had been killed some distance from the 🚢. It was
a calm; so, forming a tandem of 3⃣ boats, we commenced the slow
business of towing the 🏆 to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen 🚹
with our thirty-6⃣ arms, and 1⃣ 💯 and eighty thumbs and fingers,
slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the
🌊; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals;
🔉 evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we
moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they ☎
it, in China, 4⃣ or 5⃣ laborers on the 🐾-path will 🏃 a bulky
freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this Ⓜ argosy we
towed heavily forged 🔛, as if laden with 🐷-🍃 in bulk.

Darkness came on; but 3⃣ lights up and down in the Pequod's
main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
dropping 1⃣ of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
the heaving 🐳 for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing
it for the night, and then handing his 🏮 to a seaman, went his way
into the cabin, and did not come forward again until 🌅.

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this 🐳, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to ☎ it so; yet now that the creature
was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed
🏃 in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that
Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a Ⓜ other whales were
brought to his 🚢, all that would not 1⃣ jot advance his Ⓜ,
monomaniac object. Very 🔜 you would have thought from the 🔉 on
the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to 🐱 ⚓ in
the deep; for 🔉 chains are being dragged 🔛 the deck, and thrust
rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast
corpse itself, not the 🚢, is to be moored. Tied by the ❓ to the
💩, and by the 💩 to the bows, the 🐳 now lies with its black
hull 🔚 to the vessel's and seen through the darkness of the night,
which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the 2⃣--🚢 and 🐳,
seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof 1⃣ reclines while
the other remains standing.*


*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
reliable 📖 which the 🚢 has upon the 🐳 when moored alongside,
is by the flukes or 💩; and as from its greater density that 🏢
is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
flexibility 😳 in 🔚, causes it to sink low beneath the 🌹; so
that with the 🚹 you cannot get at it from the ⛵, in ♣ to
put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a
small, strong 🎶 is prepared with a wooden float at its outer 🔚, and
a weight in its ♥, while the other 🔚 is secured to the 🚢. By
adroit management the wooden float is made to 🌹 on the other side
of the mass, so that now having girdled the 🐳, the chain is readily
made to ⌚ suit; and being slipped 🔛 the body, is at 🔚 locked
fast round the smallest 🏢 of the 💩, at the point of junction with
its broad flukes or lobes.


If moody Ahab was now all 😴, at least so far as could be known
on deck, Stubb, his 🔙 👫, 😳 with conquest, betrayed an
unusual but 😯 🔉-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was
he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned
to him for the time the sole management of affairs. 1⃣ small, helping
cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was 🔜 made strangely manifest.
Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the 🐳
as a flavorish thing to his palate.

"A steak, a steak, ere I 😴! You, Daggoo! overboard you ❌, and cut
me 1⃣ from his small!"

Here be it known, that though these 😠 fishermen do not, as a general
thing, and according to the great military maxim, 💩 the enemy defray
the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds
of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
who have a genuine relish for that particular 🏢 of the Sperm 🐳
designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.

About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by 2⃣
lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper
at the capstan-❓, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb
the only banqueter on 🐳's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings
with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming
round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few
sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping
of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers'
hearts. Peering over the side you could just 📅 them (as before you
heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on
their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the 🐳 of the
bigness of a 👨 ❓. This particular feat of the shark seems all
but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable 🌹, they
contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a 🏢 of the
universal problem of all things. The 🎶 they thus 🍃 on the 🐳,
may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking
for a screw.

Though amid all the 🚬 horror and diabolism of a 🌊-fight, sharks
will be seen longingly gazing up to the 🚢's decks, like hungry dogs
round a table where 😳 ♥ is being carved, ready to 💨 down
every killed 👨 that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant
butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's
live ♥ with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,
also, with their 💎-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
under the table at the dead ♥; and though, were you to 🔧 the whole
affair 🔝 down, it would 😯 be pretty much the same thing, that
is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and
though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in
🐚 a 📦 is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
buried; and though 1⃣ or 2⃣ other like instances might be 👗 down,
touching the 👗 terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most
socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless
numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
🐳, moored by night to a whaleship at 🌊. If you have never
seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was
going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his
own epicurean lips.

"Cook, cook!--where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening
his legs 😯 further, as if to form a more secure 🐾 for his supper;
and, at the same time darting his fork into the 🍑, as if stabbing
with his lance; "cook, you cook!--sail this way, cook!"

The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling
🔛 from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something
the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like
his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and
limping 🔛, assisting his 👣 with his tongs, which, after a clumsy
fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered
🔛, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead 🔚 on
the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded
before him, and resting on his 2⃣-legged cane, he bowed his arched 🔙
😯 further over, at the same time sideways inclining his ❓, so as
to bring his best 👂 into 🏃.

"Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his
👄, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been
beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I always say
that to be 🔉, a 🐳-steak must be tough? There are those sharks
now over the side, don't you 📅 they prefer it tough and rare? What a
shindy they are 👢 up! Cook, ❌ and 🍑 to 'em; tell 'em they are
welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must
keep 😯. 🐚 me, if I can hear my own 🔉. Away, cook, and
🐻 my message. Here, 🉑 this 🏮," snatching 1⃣ from his
sideboard; "now then, ❌ and preach to 'em!"

Sullenly taking the offered 🏮, old Fleece limped across the deck
to the bulwarks; and then, with 1⃣ 🚹 dropping his ✨ low over the
🌊, so as to get a 🔉 ⌚ of his congregation, with the other 🚹
he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a
mumbling 🔉 began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling
💺, overheard all that was said.

"Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must 🔚 dat dam
noise dare. You hear? 🔚 dat dam smackin' 👻 de lips! Massa Stubb say
dat you can 😆 your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you
must 🔚 dat dam racket!"

"Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap
on the shoulder,--"Cook! why, 💩 your eyes, you mustn't 🏦 that way
when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, cook!"

"Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to ❌.

"No, cook; ❌ on, ❌ on."

"Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"--

"Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and
Fleece continued.

"Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'🔝 dat dam slappin' 👻 de
💩! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and
bitin' dare?"

"Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. 🍑 to
'em gentlemanly."

Once more the sermon proceeded.

"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat
is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de
pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den
you be 👼; for all 👼 is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.
Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping
yourselbs from dat 🐳. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your
neighbour's mout, I say. Is not 1⃣ shark dood right as toder to dat
🐳? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat 🐳; dat 🐳
belong to some 1⃣ else. I know some ⭕' you has berry brig mout, brigger
dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat
de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber
for de small 🍟 👻 sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help
demselves."

"Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; ❌ on."

"No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scougin' and slappin' each
oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear 1⃣ word; no use a-preaching to
such dam g'uttons as you ☎ 'em, till dare bellies is full, and dare
bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get 'em full, dey wont hear you
den; for den dey sink in the 🌊, ❌ fast to 😴 on de coral, and
can't hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber."

"Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so 🍃 the benediction,
Fleece, and I'll away to my supper."

Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy 💍, raised his
shrill 🔉, and cried--

"Cussed fellow-critters! 👢 up de damndest row as ever you can; 😆
your dam bellies 'till dey bust--and den die."

"Now, cook," said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; "🐻
just where you stood before, there, over against me, and 🐻 particular
attention."

"All 'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
desired 🏢.

"Well," said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; "I shall now ❌
🔙 to the subject of this steak. In the first 🚉, how old are you,
cook?"

"What dat do wid de 'teak," said the old black, testily.

"😯! How old are you, cook?"

"'Bout ninety, dey say," he gloomily muttered.

"And you have lived in this 👨 hard upon 1⃣ 💯 years, cook,
and don't know yet how to cook a 🐳-steak?" rapidly bolting another
mouthful at the 🔚 word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the
❓. "Where were you born, cook?"

"'🔙 de hatchway, in ferry-⛵, goin' ober de Roanoke."

"Born in a ferry-⛵! That's queer, too. But I want to know what
country you were born in, cook!"

"Didn't I say de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply.

"No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'Ⓜ coming to, cook.
You must ❌ 🏠 and be born over again; you don't know how to cook a
🐳-steak yet."

"Bress my soul, if I cook noder 1⃣," he growled, angrily, turning round
to 🍃.

"Come 🔙 here, cook;--here, 🚹 me those tongs;--now 🉑 that bit of
steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be?
🉑 it, I say"--holding the tongs towards him--"🉑 it, and taste it."

Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
muttered, "Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy."

"Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the
⛪?"

"Passed 1⃣ once in Cape-Down," said the old 👨 sullenly.

"And you have once in your life passed a holy ⛪ in Cape-Town, where
you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and
tell me such a 😨 lie as you did just now, eh?" said Stubb. "Where
do you 🐻 to ❌ to, cook?"

"❌ to bed berry 🔜," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.

"Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an 😨 ❓. Now
what's your answer?"

"When dis old brack 👨 dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole
air and demeanor, "he hisself won't ❌ nowhere; but some bressed 👼
will come and fetch him."

"Fetch him? How? In a 🚋 and 4⃣, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch
him where?"

"Up dere," said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his ❓, and
keeping it there very solemnly.

"So, then, you 🐻 to ❌ up into our main-🔝, do you, cook, when you
are dead? But don't you know the higher you 🌹, the colder it gets?
Main-🔝, eh?"

"Didn't say dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks.

"You said up there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and 📅 where
your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you 🐻 to get into heaven by
crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don't
get there, except you ❌ the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a
ticklish business, but must be done, or else it's no ❌. But none of
us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye
hear? 📖 your hat in 1⃣ 🚹, and 👏 t'other a'🔝 of your ♥,
when I'Ⓜ 🎁 my orders, cook. What! that your ♥, there?--that's
your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!--that's it--now you have it. 📖 it there
now, and 🐻 attention."

"All 'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,
vainly wriggling his grizzled ❓, as if to get both ears in front at
1⃣ and the same time.

"Well then, cook, you 📅 this 🐳-steak of yours was so very bad,
that I have put it out of sight as 🔜 as possible; you 📅 that, don't
you? Well, for the future, when you cook another 🐳-steak for my
㊙ table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to
👶 it by overdoing. 📖 the steak in 1⃣ 🚹, and ® a live coal
to it with the other; that done, 🍑 it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow,
cook, when we are cutting in the 🐟, be sure you 🐻 by to get
the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the
flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may ❌."

But Fleece had hardly got 3⃣ paces off, when he was recalled.

"Cook, 🍃 me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-⌚.
D'ye hear? away you sail, then.--Halloa! 🔚! 💩 a 🙇 before you
❌.--Avast heaving again! 🐳-balls for breakfast--don't 🍃."

"Wish, by gor! 🐳 eat him, 'stead of him eat 🐳. I'Ⓜ bressed if
he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old 👨,
limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.



CHAPTER 65. The 🐳 as a 🍑.


That mortal 👨 should 🏃 upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
like Stubb, eat him by his own ✨, as you may say; this seems so
outlandish a thing that 1⃣ must needs ❌ a little into the history and
philosophy of it.

It is upon 📖, that 3⃣ centuries ago the 👅 of the Right
🐳 was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain cook of the
court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
🐳. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered 🆗 eating. The
♥ is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well
seasoned and spiced might be taken for 🐢-balls or veal balls.
The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
porpoise grant from the 🔝.

The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the 🐳 would by all
hands be considered a noble 🍑, were there not so much of him; but
when you come to 💺 down before a ♥-pie nearly 1⃣ 💯 feet
long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of 🚹
like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not
so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare
old vintages of 🌼 old 🏫 oil. Zogranda, 1⃣ of their most famous
doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly
juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--that
these 🚹 actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among
the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed,
they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something
like old Amsterdam housewives' 🍞-nuts or oly-cooks, when 🆕. They
have such an eatable look that the most self-denying 👽 can hardly
keep his hands off.

But what further depreciates the 🐳 as a civilized 🍑, is his
exceeding richness. He is the great 🏆 🐂 of the 🌊, too fat to be
delicately 🔉. Look at his hump, which would be as 🆗 eating as
the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare 🍑), were it not such a solid
pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that
is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white ♥ of a cocoanut in the
third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for
butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
some other ♥, and then partaking of it. In the long try
watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
🚢-🍪 into the huge oil-pots and let them 🍟 there awhile. Many
a 🔉 supper have I thus made.

In the 🐚 of a small Sperm 🐳 the brains are accounted a 🆗 🍑.
The casket of the 💀 is 😕 into with an axe, and the 2⃣ plump,
whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling 2⃣ large puddings),
they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess,
in flavor somewhat resembling calves' ❓, which is quite a 🍑 among
some epicures; and every 1⃣ knows that some 🆕 bucks among the
epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to
have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a
calf's ❓ from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon
discrimination. And that is the reason why a 🆕 🐴 with an
🔉 looking calf's ❓ before him, is somehow 1⃣ of the
saddest sights you can 📅. The ❓ looks a sort of reproachfully at
him, with an "Et tu 🐺!" 🚧.

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the 🐳 is so excessively
unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence;
that appears to 🍃, in some way, from the consideration before
mentioned: i.🇪🇸. that a 👨 should eat a 🆕 murdered thing of the 🌊,
and eat it too by its own ✨. But no ❓ the first 👨 that ever
murdered an 🐂 was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if
he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and
he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. ❌ to the ♥-market
of a Saturday night and 📅 the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the
long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight 🉑 a tooth out of
the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will
be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a 🏃 missionary in
his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that
provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized
and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ⚓ and feastest
on their bloated livers in thy 👑-de-foie-gras.

But Stubb, he eats the 🐳 by its own ✨, does he? and that is
adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your 👅-handle, there, my
civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is
that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very 🐂
you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
that fat goose? With a feather of the same 🐦. And with what quill did
the Secretary of the ♣ for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
formally indite his circulars? It is only within the 🔚 month or 2⃣
that that ♣ passed a resolution to patronise 0⃣ but steel
pens.



CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.


When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm 🐳, after long and
😩 toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general
thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting
him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious 1⃣; is not very
🔜 completed; and requires all hands to 👗 about it. Therefore, the
common 🛃 is to 🉑 in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then 🚢
every 1⃣ below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that,
until that time, ⚓-watches shall be kept; that is, 2⃣ and 2⃣ for
an hour, each 👫, the crew in rotation shall 🌹 the deck to 📅
that all goes well.

But sometimes, especially upon the 🎶 in the Pacific, this plan will
not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather
round the moored carcase, that were he left so for 6⃣ hours, say, on a
stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by 🌅.
In most other parts of the 🌊, however, where these 🐟 do not so
largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,
a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to
tickle them into 😯 greater activity. But it was not thus in the
🎁 🐚 with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any 👨
unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,
would have almost thought the whole round 🌊 was 1⃣ huge cheese, and
those sharks the maggots in it.

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the ⚓-⌚ after his supper was
concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman
came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for
immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering
3⃣ lanterns, so that they 🐱 long gleams of ✨ over the turbid
🌊, these 2⃣ mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
into their skulls, seemingly their only vital 🏢. But in the foamy
confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
always 💥 their 🎶; and this brought about 🆕 revelations of the
incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each
other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit
their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by
the same 👄, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was
this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in
their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual
life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the 🍶 of his skin,
1⃣ of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's 🚹 off, when he tried
to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.


*The whaling-♠ used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;
is about the bigness of a 👨's spread 🚹; and in general shape,
corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
sides are perfectly flat, and its upper 🔚 considerably narrower than
the 😦. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when
being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a
stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.


"Queequeg no 😟 what god made him shark," said the 🐺, agonizingly
lifting his 🚹 up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de
god wat made shark must be 1⃣ dam Ingin."



CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.


It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! ❌ officio
professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
have thought we were offering up ❌ Ⓜ 😳 oxen to the 🌊 gods.

In the first 🚉, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which
no 1⃣ 👨 can possibly 🌹--this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up
to the main-🔝 and firmly lashed to the 😦 mast-❓, the strongest
point anywhere above a 🚢's deck. The 🔚 of the hawser-like rope
winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass,
and the huge 😦 block of the tackles was swung over the 🐳; to
this block the great blubber 👮, weighing some 1⃣ 💯 pounds, was
attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb,
the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the
body for the insertion of the 👮 just above the nearest of the 2⃣
side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular 🎶 is cut round the hole,
the 👮 is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a 😠
chorus, now commence heaving in 1⃣ dense crowd at the windlass. When
instantly, the entire 🚢 careens over on her side; every 💨 in
her starts like the 💥-heads of an old 🏠 in frosty weather; she
trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More
and more she leans over to the 🐳, while every gasping heave of the
windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at 🔚,
a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the 🚢 rolls
🆙 and 🔙 from the 🐳, and the triumphant tackle rises
into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular 🔚 of the
first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the 🐳 precisely
as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body
precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the
strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the 🐳
rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in 1⃣ strip
uniformly peels off 🔛 the 🎶 called the "scarf," simultaneously
cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as
it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the
time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper 🔚 grazes the
main-🔝; the 🚹 at the windlass then 🔚 heaving, and for a moment
or 2⃣ the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let
down from the sky, and every 1⃣ 🎁 must 🉑 🔉 heed to dodge
it when it swings, else it may 📦 his ears and pitch him headlong
overboard.

1⃣ of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices
out a considerable hole in the 😦 🏢 of the swaying mass. Into this
hole, the 🔚 of the 🔙 alternating great tackle is then hooked
so as to retain a 📖 upon the blubber, in ♣ to 🚋 for what
follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, ⚠ all hands to
🐻 off, once more makes a scientific 💨 at the mass, and with a few
sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in 👫;
so that while the short 😦 🏢 is 😯 fast, the long upper strip,
called a blanket-👨, swings 🔝, and is all ready for lowering.
The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the 1⃣ tackle is
peeling and hoisting a 🔙 strip from the 🐳, the other is slowly
slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway
right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into
this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
blanket-👨 as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.
And thus the 🏃 proceeds; the 2⃣ tackles hoisting and lowering
simultaneously; both 🐳 and windlass heaving, the heavers singing,
the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the 🚢
straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the
general friction.



CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.


I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of
the 🐳. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen
afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains
unchanged; but it is only an opinion.

The ❓ is, what and where is the skin of the 🐳? Already you
know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence
of 🏠, 🔚-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and
ranges from 8⃣ or ❌ to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to 🍑 of any creature's
skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point
of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you
cannot 🔥 any other dense enveloping layer from the 🐳's body but
that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if
reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred
dead body of the 🐳, you may scrape off with your 🚹 an infinitely
thin, transparent ♥, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds
of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,
previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but
becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which
I use for marks in my 🐳-books. It is transparent, as I said before;
and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself
with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is
pleasant to ® about whales through their own spectacles, as you may
say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin,
isinglass ♥, which, I 🉑, invests the entire body of the
🐳, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as
the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say,
that the proper skin of the tremendous 🐳 is thinner and more tender
than the skin of a 🆕-born 👶. But no more of this.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the 🐳; then, when this skin,
as in the 🐚 of a very large Sperm 🐳, will 🐻 the bulk of 1⃣
💯 barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or
rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only 3⃣ fourths,
and not the entire ♥ of the 🍰; some idea may hence be had
of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere 🏢 of whose mere
integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ❌ barrels
to the ton, you have ❌ tons for the net weight of only 3⃣ quarters
of the stuff of the 🐳's skin.

In life, the visible 🌹 of the Sperm 🐳 is not the least among
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely
crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,
something like those in the finest Italian 🎶 engravings. But these
marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass ♥ above
mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved
upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,
observant ♥, those 🏃 marks, as in a veritable engraving, but
afford the ⚓ for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical;
that is, if you ☎ those ㊙ cyphers on the walls of pyramids
hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the 🎁
🔗. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon 1⃣ Sperm
🐳 in particular, I was much struck with a 🐚 representing the old
Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on
the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those ㊙ rocks, too, the
㊙-marked 🐳 remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
the exterior of the Sperm 🐳 presents, he not seldom displays the
🔙, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great 🏢 of the
regular 🏃 appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those 🆕
England rocks on the 🌊-coast, which Agassiz imagines to 🉑 the marks
of violent scraping 🔗 with vast floating icebergs--I should say,
that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm 🐳 in this
particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the 🐳 are
probably made by hostile 🔗 with other whales; for I have most
remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.

A word or 2⃣ more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of
the 🐳. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most 🌊-terms, this 1⃣ is very
happy and significant. For the 🐳 is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, 😯 better, an Indian poncho
slipt over his ❓, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this
cosy blanketing of his body, that the 🐳 is enabled to keep himself
comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would
become of a Greenland 🐳, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other 🐟 are
found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it
observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless 🐟, whose very bellies
are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of
an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn 🔥;
whereas, like 👨, the 🐳 has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood,
and he dies. How wonderful is it then--except after explanation--that
this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it
is to 👨; how wonderful that he should be found at 🏠, immersed
to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall
overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly
frozen into the hearts of fields of 🎇, as a fly is found glued
in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
experiment, that the blood of a Polar 🐳 is warmer than that of a
Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we 📅 the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, 👨! admire and model thyself after
the 🐳! Do Ⓜ, too, remain warm among 🎇. Do Ⓜ, too, live in
this 👨 without being of it. Be 🆒 at the equator; keep thy blood
fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the
great 🐳, retain, ⭕ 👨! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these 🆗 things! Of erections,
how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the
🐳!



CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.


Haul in the chains! Let the carcase ❌ astern!

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
beheaded 🐳 flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
it has not perceptibly 😖 anything in bulk. It is 😯 colossal.
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious
flights of 😱 fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
poniards in the 🐳. The vast white headless phantom floats further
and further from the 🚢, and every rod that it so floats, what seem
square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous
💥. For hours and hours from the almost stationary 🚢 that hideous
sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair
face of the pleasant 🌊, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass
of 🔚 floats on and on, till 😖 in infinite perspectives.

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The 🌊-vultures all in
pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled.
In life but few of them would have helped the 🐳, I ween, if
peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they
most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not
the mightiest 🐳 is 😇.

Nor is this the 🔚. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful 👻
survives and hovers over it to 💨. Espied by some timid 👨-of-war or
blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the
swarming fowls, nevertheless 😯 shows the white mass floating in
the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
🐳's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is 👗 down in the
log--SHOALS, ROCKS, AND BREAKERS HEREABOUTS: BEWARE! And for years
afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the 🚉; leaping over it as 💫
🐑 leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your
utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not 😳 hovering in
the air! There's orthodoxy!

Thus, while in life the great 🐳's body may have been a real terror
to his foes, in his 🔚 his 👻 becomes a powerless panic to a
👨.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
the 🐓-Lane 1⃣, and far deeper 🚹 than Doctor Johnson who believe in
them.



CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.


It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
Sperm 🐳 is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
🐳 surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.

Consider that the 🐳 has 0⃣ that can properly be called a neck;
on the contrary, where his ❓ and body seem to 🔗, there, in that
very 🚉, is the thickest 🏢 of him. Remember, also, that the
surgeon must 🏃 from above, some 8⃣ or ❌ feet intervening
between him and his subject, and that subject almost ㊙ in a
discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting 🌊. 🉑
in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so
much as getting 1⃣ 1⃣ peep into the ever-contracting gash thus
made, he must skilfully steer 🔝 of all adjacent, interdicted parts,
and exactly divide the 🔙 at a critical point hard by its insertion
into the 💀. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he
demanded but ❌ minutes to behead a sperm 🐳?

When first severed, the ❓ is dropped astern and held there by a cable
till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small 🐳
it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full
grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm 🐳's ❓ embraces
nearly 1⃣ third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a
burden as that, 😳 by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as
vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch 🅱 in jewellers' scales.

The Pequod's 🐳 being decapitated and the body stripped, the ❓ was
hoisted against the 🚢's side--about half way out of the 🌊, so that
it might yet in great 🏢 be buoyed up by its native element. And there
with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the
enormous downward drag from the 😦 mast-❓, and every Ⓜ-arm
on that side 😌 like a crane over the waves; there, that
blood-dripping ❓ hung to the Pequod's waist like the 🐳
Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.

When this 🔚 task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
below to their dinner. 😯 reigned over the before tumultuous but
now deserted deck. An intense 🐷 calm, like a universal 🐔
lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon
the 🌊.

A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone
from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the 💩-deck, he paused to
gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he
took Stubb's long ♠--😯 remaining there after the 🐳's
Decapitation--and striking it into the 😦 🏢 of the half-suspended
mass, placed its other 🔚 crutch-wise under 1⃣ arm, and so stood
leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this ❓.

It was a black and hooded ❓; and hanging there in the midst of so
intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, Ⓜ vast
and venerable ❓," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a
beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty ❓,
and tell us the ㊙ thing that is in thee. Of all divers, Ⓜ hast
dived the deepest. That ❓ upon which the upper sun now gleams, has
moved amid this 👨's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies
rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous 📖 this
frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,
in that 😨 water-land, there was thy most familiar 🏠. Ⓜ hast
been where 🔔 or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side,
where sleepless mothers would 🍃 their lives to lay them down. Ⓜ
saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their 🔥 🚢; ♥
to ♥ they sank beneath the exulting 👋; true to each other, when
heaven seemed false to them. Ⓜ saw'st the murdered 👫 when tossed
by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper
midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers 😯 sailed on
unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring 🚢 that
would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. ⭕
❓! Ⓜ hast seen enough to split the planets and 💩 an infidel of
Abraham, and not 1⃣ syllable is thine!"

"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant 🔉 from the main-mast-❓.

"Aye? Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting
himself, while whole 💥-clouds swept aside from his brow.
"That lively 😢 upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better
👨.--Where away?"

"3⃣ points on the starboard 🙇, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
us!

"Better and better, 👨. Would now St. Paul would come 🔛 that way,
and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! ⭕ Nature, and ⭕ soul of 👨!
how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest
atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning 🔁 in mind."



CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story.


🚹 in 🚹, 🚢 and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than
the 🚢, and 🔜 the Pequod began to rock.

By and by, through the 👓 the 👽's boats and manned mast-heads
proved her a 🐳-🚢. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting
by, apparently making a passage to some other ⚓, the Pequod could
not hope to ✋ her. So the signal was 👗 to 📅 what response would
be made.

Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of
the American 🐳 🎯 have each a ㊙ signal; all which signals
being collected in a 📖 with the names of the respective vessels
attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the 🐳
commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the 🌊, 😳 at
considerable distances and with no small facility.

The Pequod's signal was at 🔚 responded to by the 👽's setting
her own; which proved the 🚢 to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring
her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and
lowered a ⛵; it 🔜 drew nigh; but, as the side-🏃 was being
rigged by Starbuck's ♣ to accommodate the visiting captain, the
👽 in ❓ waved his 🚹 from his ⛵'s 💩 in token
of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that
the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her
captain, was 😨 of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though
himself and ⛵'s crew remained untainted, and though his 🚢 was half
a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible 🌊 and air rolling and flowing
between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the
land, he peremptorily refused to come into 🚋 🔗 with the
Pequod.

But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
interval of some few yards between itself and the 🚢, the Jeroboam's
⛵ by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the
Pequod, as she heavily forged through the 🌊 (for by this time it blew
very 🆕), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by
the sudden onset of a large rolling 👋, the ⛵ would be pushed some
way ahead; but would be 🔜 skilfully brought to her proper bearings
again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
conversation was sustained between the 2⃣ parties; but at intervals not
without 😯 another interruption of a very different sort.

Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's ⛵, was a 👨 of a singular
appearance, 😳 in that 😠 whaling life where individual notabilities
💩 up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish 👨, sprinkled
all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant 🐔 hair. A
long-skirted, cabalistically-cut 🍰 of a faded walnut tinge enveloped
him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A
deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.

So 🔜 as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had
exclaimed--"That's he! that's he!--the long-togged scaramouch the
Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a strange story
told of the Jeroboam, and a certain 👨 among her crew, some time
previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account
and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
❓ had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
Jeroboam. His story was this:

He had been originally nurtured among the crazy ♣ of Neskyeuna
Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, ㊙
meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
trap-🚪, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
carried in his vest-👝; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim
having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with
that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense
exterior, and offered himself as a green-🚹 candidate for the
Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon
the 🚢's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a
freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded
the captain to 🌹 overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby
he 👗 himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the 🌊 and
vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he
declared these things;--the dark, daring 🏃 of his sleepless, excited
imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united
to 💺 this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant
crew, with an 🏧 of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of
him. As such a 👨, however, was not of much practical use in the 🚢,
especially as he refused to 🏃 except when he pleased, the incredulous
captain would fain have been 🆓 of him; but apprised that that
individual's intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the
archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials--devoting the 🚢
and all hands to unconditional perdition, in 🐚 this intention was
carried out. So strongly did he 🏃 upon his disciples among the crew,
that at 🔚 in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel
was sent from the 🚢, not a 👨 of them would remain. He was therefore
forced to 🆓 his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any
way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that
Gabriel had the complete freedom of the 🚢. The consequence of all
this was, that the archangel cared little or 0⃣ for the captain and
mates; and since the epidemic had 😕 out, he carried a higher 🚹
than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
command; nor should it be stayed but according to his 🔉 😂.
The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before
him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal
homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however
wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking
in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as
his measureless 🏢 of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But
it is time to return to the Pequod.

"I fear not thy epidemic, 👨," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
Mayhew, who stood in the ⛵'s 💩; "come on board."

But now Gabriel started to his feet.

"Think, think of the fevers, 🐔 and bilious! Beware of the horrible
plague!"

"Gabriel! Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "Ⓜ must either--" But
that 💓 a headlong 👋 shot the ⛵ far ahead, and its seethings
drowned all speech.

"Hast Ⓜ seen the White 🐳?" demanded Ahab, when the ⛵ drifted
🔙.

"Think, think of thy 🐳-⛵, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible
💩!"

"I tell thee again, Gabriel, that--" But again the ⛵ tore ahead as if
dragged by fiends. 0⃣ was said for some moments, while a succession
of riotous waves rolled by, which by 1⃣ of those occasional caprices
of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm
🐳's ❓ jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing
it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to
warrant.

When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story
concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from
Gabriel, whenever his 🔑 was mentioned, and the crazy 🌊 that seemed
leagued with him.

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left 🏠, when upon speaking
a 🐳-🚢, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby
Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,
Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White
🐳, in 🐚 the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity,
pronouncing the White 🐳 to be no less a being than the Shaker God
incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or 2⃣
afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the
chief 👫, burned with 🔥 to encounter him; and the captain himself
being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all
the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in
persuading 5⃣ 🚹 to 👨 his ⛵. With them he pushed off; and, after
much 😩 pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at 🔚
succeeded in getting 1⃣ iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to
the main-royal mast-❓, was tossing 1⃣ arm in frantic gestures, and
hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants
of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the 👫, was standing up in his
⛵'s 🙇, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting
his 😠 exclamations upon the 🐳, and essaying to get a fair chance
for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow 🌹 from the 🌊; by its
quick, fanning ❓, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies
of the oarsmen. Next 💓, the luckless 👫, so full of 😠
life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long 🙇 in his
descent, fell into the 🌊 at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a
🍟 of the ⛵ was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's ❓; but the
👫 for ever sank.

It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
Sperm-🐳 Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
Sometimes, 0⃣ is injured but the 👨 who is thus annihilated;
oftener the ⛵'s 🙇 is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the
headsman stands, is torn from its 🚉 and accompanies the body. But
strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than 1⃣,
when the body has been recovered, not a 1⃣ 🎶 of violence is
discernible; the 👨 being stark dead.

The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried
from the 🚢. Raising a piercing 😱--"The vial! the vial!" Gabriel
called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the
🐳. This 😨 event clothed the archangel with added influence;
because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically
🙇-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any
1⃣ might have done, and so have chanced to 💥 1⃣ of many marks in the
wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the 🚢.

Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to
him, that the 👽 captain could not forbear inquiring whether he
intended to 🏃 the White 🐳, if opportunity should offer. To which
Ahab answered--"Aye." Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started
to his feet, glaring upon the old 👨, and vehemently exclaimed, with
downward pointed finger--"Think, think of the blasphemer--dead, and down
there!--beware of the blasphemer's 🔚!"

Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have
just bethought me of my letter-👜; there is a letter for 1⃣ of thy
officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the 👜."

Every 🐳-🚢 takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,
whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends
upon the mere chance of encountering them in the 4⃣ oceans. Thus,
most letters never ✋ their 🎶; and many are only received after
attaining an age of 2⃣ or 3⃣ years or more.

🔜 Starbuck returned with a letter in his 🚹. It was sorely tumbled,
🔇, and covered with a 🔇, spotted, green mould, in consequence
of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, 🔚
himself might well have been the 🚉-👦.

"Can'st not ® it?" cried Ahab. "🍃 it me, 👨. Aye, aye, it's but
a dim scrawl;--what's this?" As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a
long cutting-♠ pole, and with his 👅 slightly split the 🔚, to
insert the letter there, and in that way, 🚹 it to the ⛵, without
its coming any closer to the 🚢.

Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har--yes, Mr.
Harry--(a 👩's pinny 🚹,--the 👨's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr.
Harry Macey, 🚢 Jeroboam;--why it's Macey, and he's dead!"

"Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let
me have it."

"Nay, keep it thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "Ⓜ 🎨 🔜 going that
way."

"Curses 🔫 thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, 🐻 by now to
receive it"; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck's hands, he
caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the ⛵.
But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the ⛵
drifted a little towards the 🚢's 💩; so that, as if by magic, the
letter suddenly ranged 🔛 with Gabriel's eager 🚹. He clutched it
in an 💓, seized the ⛵-👅, and impaling the letter on it,
sent it thus loaded 🔙 into the 🚢. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then
Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to 🍃 way with their oars, and in
that manner the mutinous ⛵ rapidly shot away from the Pequod.

As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their 🏃 upon the 👑
of the 🐳, many strange things were hinted in reference to this 😠
affair.



CHAPTER 72. The 👿-Rope.


In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a 🐳, there
is much 🏃 🔙 and forwards among the crew. Now hands are
wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying
in any 1⃣ 🚉; for at 1⃣ and the same time everything has to be done
everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description
of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned
that upon first breaking ⚓ in the 🐳's 🔙, the blubber-👮
was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the
mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same 👮
get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend
Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the
monster's 🔙 for the special purpose referred to. But in very many
cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the
🐳 till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The
🐳, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the
immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ❌ feet below the
😳 of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the
🐳 and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-🏭
beneath him. On the occasion in ❓, Queequeg figured in the
Highland costume--a 👕 and socks--in which to my eyes, at least,
he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no 1⃣ had a better chance to
🎶 him, as will 🔜 be seen.

Being the 🐺's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the 🙇-oar
in his ⛵ (the 🔙 1⃣ from forward), it was my cheerful duty to
attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead
🐳's 🔙. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by
a long cord. Just so, from the 🚢's steep side, did I 📖 Queequeg
down there in the 🌊, by what is technically called in the fishery
a 👿-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his
waist.

It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
proceed further, it must be said that the 👿-rope was fast at
both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow
leather 1⃣. So that for better or for worse, we 2⃣, for the time, were
wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to 🌹 no more, then both 🛃
and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag
me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.
Queequeg was my own inseparable 👫 brother; nor could I any way get
🆓 of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my 🏢 then, that
while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive
that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of
2⃣; that my 😇 will had received a mortal wound; and that another's
mistake or misfortune might plunge 😇 me into unmerited disaster
and 🔚. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in
Providence; for its 😳-handed equity never could have so gross an
injustice. And yet 😯 further 😔--while I jerked him now
and then from between the 🐳 and 🚢, which would threaten to 🐏
him--😯 further 😔, I say, I saw that this 🏢 of mine
was the precise 🏢 of every mortal that breathes; only, in most
cases, he, 1⃣ way or other, has this Siamese 🔗 with a plurality
of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by
mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say
that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly 🏃 these and the
multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's
👿-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came
very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly 🍃 that, do what I
would, I only had the management of 1⃣ 🔚 of it.*


*The 👿-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
that the 👿 and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
upon the original 🛃 was introduced by no less a 👨 than Stubb,
in ♣ to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible
guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his 👿-rope holder.


I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the
🐳 and the 🚢--where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy
he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
night, the sharks now 🆕 and more keenly allured by the before pent
blood which began to 🏃 from the carcass--the rabid creatures swarmed
round it like bees in a beehive.

And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them
aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were
it not that attracted by such prey as a dead 🐳, the otherwise
miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom 👻 a 👨.

Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a
ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.
Accordingly, besides the 👿-rope, with which I now and then jerked
the poor fellow from too 🔚 a vicinity to the maw of what seemed
a peculiarly ferocious shark--he was provided with 😯 another
protection. Suspended over the side in 1⃣ of the stages, Tashtego
and Daggoo continually flourished over his ❓ a 👫 of keen
🐳-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
✋. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and
benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg's best happiness, I 🉑; but
in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both
he and the sharks were at times half ㊙ by the blood-muddled water,
those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg
than a 💩. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there
with that great iron 👮--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his
Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.

Well, well, my dear comrade and 👫-brother, thought I, as I drew in
and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the 🌊--what matters
it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us 🚹
in this whaling 👨? That unsounded 🌊 you gasp in, is Life; those
sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks
and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

But courage! there is 🔉 cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted 🐺 at 🔚 climbs
up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over
the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory
glance hands him--what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands
him a cup of tepid ginger and water!

"Ginger? Do I smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near.
"Yes, this must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then
standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the
😲 steward slowly saying, "Ginger? ginger? and will you have
the goodness to tell me, Mr. 🍞-👦, where lies the virtue of ginger?
Ginger! is ginger the sort of 🔥 you use, 🍞-👦, to 🔥 a 🔥
in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!--what the devil is ginger?
🌊-coal? firewood?--lucifer matches?--tinder?--gunpowder?--what the
devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg
here."

"There is some sneaking Temperance ♣ movement about this
business," he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just
come from forward. "Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it,
if you please." Then watching the 👫's countenance, he added, "The
steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap
to Queequeg, there, this 💓 off the 🐳. Is the steward an
apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
which he blows 🔙 the life into a half-drowned 👨?"

"I 🏦 not," said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."

"Aye, aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug a
harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine here; you want to poison
us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder
us all, and 👝 the proceeds, do ye?"

"It was not me," cried 🍞-👦, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the
ginger on board; and bade me never 🍃 the harpooneers any spirits, but
only this ginger-jub--so she called it."

"Ginger-jub! you gingerly 👿! 🉑 that! and 🏃 🔛 with ye
to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.
Starbuck. It is the captain's orders--grog for the harpooneer on a
🐳."

"Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't 💥 him again, but--"

"Oh, I never 😧 when I 💥, except when I 💥 a 🐳 or something of
that sort; and this fellow's a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?"

"Only this: ❌ down with him, and get what Ⓜ wantest thyself."

When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in 1⃣ 🚹, and a sort
of 🍵-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was
handed to Queequeg; the 🔙 was Aunt Charity's 🎁, and that was
freely given to the waves.



CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right 🐳; and Then Have a 🍑
Over Him.


It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm 🐳's
prodigious ❓ hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it
continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it.
For the 🎁 other matters press, and the best we can do now for the
❓, is to 🙏 heaven the tackles may 📖.

Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
drifted into a 🌊, which, by its occasional patches of 🐔 brit,
gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of
those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near
the Crozetts without lowering a ⛵; yet now that a Sperm 🐳
had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
announcement was made that a Right 🐳 should be captured that day, if
opportunity offered.

Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and 2⃣
boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were 🆓 in pursuit. Pulling further
and further away, they at 🔚 became almost invisible to the 🚹 at
the mast-❓. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great 🚌 of
tumultuous white water, and 🔜 after news came from aloft that 1⃣ or
both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the 🚢 by the
towing 🐳. So 🔚 did the monster come to the hull, that at
first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
maelstrom, within 3⃣ rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from
⌚, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the 😢 from the
🚢 to the boats, which, for 1⃣ 💓, seemed on the point of being
brought with a deadly 💨 against the vessel's side. But having plenty
of 🎶 yet in the tubs, and the 🐳 not sounding very rapidly, they
paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their
might so as to get ahead of the 🚢. For a few minutes the struggle was
intensely critical; for while they 😯 slacked out the tightened 🎶
in 1⃣ direction, and 😯 plied their oars in another, the contending
strain threatened to 🉑 them under. But it was only a few feet advance
they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when
instantly, a swift tremor was felt 🏃 like lightning 🔛 the
keel, as the strained 🎶, scraping beneath the 🚢, suddenly 🌹
to ⌚ under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its
drippings, that the drops fell like bits of 😕 👓 on the water,
while the 🐳 beyond also 🌹 to sight, and once more the boats were
😇 to fly. But the fagged 🐳 abated his speed, and blindly altering
his 🏃, went round the 💩 of the 🚢 towing the 2⃣ boats after
him, so that they performed a complete circuit.

Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till 🔚
flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for
lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm 🐳's body,
rushed to the 🆕 blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every
🆕 gash, as the eager Israelites did at the 🆕 bursting fountains that
poured from the smitten rock.

At 🔚 his spout grew thick, and with a 😨 👋 and 🐱, he
turned upon his 🔙 a corpse.

While the 2⃣ headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
conversation ensued between them.

"I ❓ what the old 👨 wants with this lump of foul lard," said
Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
ignoble a leviathan.

"Wants with it?" said Flask, coiling some 🆓 🎶 in the ⛵'s 🙇,
"did you never hear that the 🚢 which but once has a Sperm 🐳's
❓ hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right 🐳's
on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that 🚢 can never
afterwards 🐢?"

"Why not?

"I don't know, but I heard that 🍋 👻 of a Fedallah saying so,
and he seems to know all about ships' charms. But I sometimes think
he'll charm the 🚢 to no 🔉 at 🔚. I don't half like that chap,
Stubb. Did you ever 🎶 how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into
a 🐍's ❓, Stubb?"

"Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no 1⃣ by; look
down there, Flask"--pointing into the 🌊 with a peculiar ❓ of
both hands--"Aye, will I! Flask, I 🉑 that Fedallah to be the devil in
😷. Do you believe that 🐓 and 🐷 story about his having been
stowed away on board 🚢? He's the devil, I say. The reason why you
don't 📅 his 💩, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries
it coiled away in his 👝, I guess. 🐚 him! now that I think of
it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots."

"He sleeps in his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've
seen him lay of nights in a 📜 of rigging."

"No ❓, and it's because of his cursed 💩; he coils it down, do ye
📅, in the ♥ of the rigging."

"What's the old 👨 have so much to do with him for?"

"Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose."

"Bargain?--about what?"

"Why, do ye 📅, the old 👨 is hard bent after that White 🐳, and
the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away
his silver ⌚, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he'll
surrender Moby Dick."

"Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"

"I don't know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked
1⃣, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the
old 🎏-🚢 once, switching his 💩 about devilish easy and
gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at 🏠. Well, he
was at 🏠, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching
his hoofs, up and says, 'I want 🚽.' 'What for?' says the old
governor. 'What business is that of yours,' says the devil, getting
mad,--'I want to use him.' '🉑 him,' says the governor--and by the
Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't 🍃 🚽 the Asiatic cholera before
he got through with him, I'll eat this 🐳 in 1⃣ mouthful. But look
sharp--ain't you all ready there? Well, then, 🔧 ahead, and let's get
the 🐳 alongside."

"I think I remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask,
when at 🔚 the 2⃣ boats were slowly advancing with their burden
towards the 🚢, "but I can't remember where."

"3⃣ Spaniards? Adventures of those 3⃣ bloody-minded soladoes? Did
ye ® it there, Flask? I guess ye did?"

"No: never saw such a 📖; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,
Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"

"Am I the same 👨 that helped kill this 🐳? Doesn't the devil live
for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever 📅
any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a
latch-🔑 to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can
crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?"

"How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"

"Do you 📅 that mainmast there?" pointing to the 🚢; "well, that's
the figure 1⃣; now 🉑 all the hoops in the Pequod's 📖, and 🚋
🔛 in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you 📅; well, that
wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation
couldn't ® hoops enough to 💩 oughts enough."

"But 📅 here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
meant to 🍃 Fedallah a 🌊-toss, if you got a 🔉 chance. Now, if
he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going
to live for ever, what 🔉 will it do to pitch him overboard--tell me
that?

"🍃 him a 🔉 ducking, anyhow."

"But he'd crawl 🔙."

"Duck him again; and keep ducking him."

"Suppose he should 🉑 it into his ❓ to duck you, though--yes, and
drown you--what then?"

"I should like to 📅 him try it; I'd 🍃 him such a 👫 of black eyes
that he wouldn't dare to ® his face in the admiral's cabin again for
a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and
hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. 💩 the devil,
Flask; so you suppose I'Ⓜ afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of
him, except the old governor who daresn't ⌚ him and put him in
🔁-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him ❌ about kidnapping
people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil
kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor!"

"Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"

"Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now
to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I 📅 anything very suspicious
going on, I'll just 🉑 him by the nape of his neck, and say--Look
here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord
I'll 💩 a grab into his 👝 for his 💩, 🉑 it to the capstan,
and 🍃 him such a wrenching and heaving, that his 💩 will come short
off at the stump--do you 📅; and then, I rather guess when he finds
himself docked in that queer fashion, he'll 🐭 off without the poor
satisfaction of feeling his 💩 between his legs."

"And what will you do with the 💩, Stubb?"

"Do with it? Sell it for an 🐂 whip when we get 🏠;--what else?"

"Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all 🔛, Stubb?"

"Mean or not mean, here we are at the 🚢."

The boats were here hailed, to tow the 🐳 on the larboard side, where
fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing
him.

"Didn't I tell you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll 🔜 📅 this right
🐳's ❓ hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's."

In 🔉 time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
leaned over towards the sperm 🐳's ❓, now, by the counterpoise of
both heads, she regained her 😳 keel; though sorely strained, you may
well believe. So, when on 1⃣ side you hoist in Locke's ❓, you ❌
over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come
🔙 again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep
trimming ⛵. Oh, ye foolish! 😖 all these 💥-heads overboard,
and then you will float ✨ and right.

In disposing of the body of a right 🐳, when brought alongside the
🚢, the same preliminary proceedings commonly 🉑 🚉 as in the
🐚 of a sperm 🐳; only, in the latter instance, the ❓ is cut off
whole, but in the former the lips and 👅 are separately removed and
hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is
called the 🔝-👨. But 0⃣ like this, in the 🎁 🐚,
had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and
the ❓-laden 🚢 not a little resembled a mule carrying a 👫 of
overburdening panniers.

Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right 🐳's ❓, and ever
and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
🚹. And Ahab chanced so to 🐻, that the Parsee occupied his shadow;
while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to
blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing
things.



CHAPTER 74. The Sperm 🐳's ❓--Contrasted ⌚.


Here, now, are 2⃣ great whales, laying their heads together; let us
🔗 them, and lay together our own.

Of the Ⓜ ♣ of 🍃 leviathans, the Sperm 🐳 and the Right
🐳 are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly
hunted by 👨. To the Nantucketer, they 🎁 the 2⃣ extremes of all
the known varieties of the 🐳. As the external difference between
them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a ❓ of each is this
moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely ❌ from 1⃣
to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like
to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology
than here?

In the first 🚉, you are struck by the general contrast between these
heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain
mathematical symmetry in the Sperm 🐳's which the Right 🐳's sadly
lacks. There is more character in the Sperm 🐳's ❓. As you behold
it, you involuntarily 🐻 the immense superiority to him, in point
of pervading dignity. In the 🎁 instance, too, this dignity is
heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his ❓ at the 🔝,
🎁 token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what
the fishermen technically ☎ a "grey-headed 🐳."

Let us now 🎶 what is least dissimilar in these heads--namely, the 2⃣
most important organs, the ♥ and the 👂. Far 🔙 on the side of
the ❓, and low down, near the 🐟 of either 🐳's jaw, if you
narrowly search, you will at 🔚 📅 a lashless ♥, which you would
fancy to be a 🆕 colt's ♥; so out of all proportion is it to the
magnitude of the ❓.

Now, from this peculiar sideway 🏢 of the 🐳's eyes, it is
plain that he can never 📅 an object which is exactly ahead, no more
than he can 1⃣ exactly astern. In a word, the 🏢 of the 🐳's
eyes corresponds to that of a 👨's ears; and you may fancy, for
yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects
through your ears. You would find that you could only command some
thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-🎶 of sight;
and about thirty more 💺 it. If your bitterest foe were 🚶
straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not
be able to 📅 him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from
💺. In a word, you would have 2⃣ backs, so to speak; but, at the
same time, also, 2⃣ fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the
front of a 👨--what, indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual 🏢, so as to
produce 1⃣ picture and not 2⃣ to the brain; the peculiar 🏢 of
the 🐳's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of
solid ❓, which towers between them like a great mountain separating
2⃣ lakes in valleys; this, of 🏃, must wholly separate the
impressions which each independent organ imparts. The 🐳, therefore,
must 📅 1⃣ distinct picture on this side, and another distinct
picture on that side; while all between must be 🔉 darkness and
nothingness to him. 👨 may, in effect, be said to look out on the 👨
from a ⌚-📦 with 2⃣ joined sashes for his window. But with the
🐳, these 2⃣ sashes are separately inserted, making 2⃣ distinct
windows, but sadly impairing the ⌚. This peculiarity of the 🐳's
eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be
remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.

A curious and most puzzling ❓ might be started concerning this
visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
hint. So long as a 👨's eyes are open in the ✨, the act of seeing
is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any 1⃣'s experience
will teach him, that though he can 🉑 in an undiscriminating sweep of
things at 1⃣ glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively,
and completely, to examine any 2⃣ things--however large or however
small--at 1⃣ and the same 💓 of time; never mind if they lie side
by side and 👻 each other. But if you now come to separate these 2⃣
objects, and 💍 each by a circle of 🔉 darkness; then, in
♣ to 📅 1⃣ of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to
🉑 on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
consciousness. How is it, then, with the 🐳? True, both his eyes,
in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
comprehensive, combining, and subtle than 👨's, that he can at the same
moment of time attentively examine 2⃣ distinct prospects, 1⃣ on 1⃣
side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a 👨 were able
simultaneously to ❌ through the demonstrations of 2⃣ distinct problems
in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this
comparison.

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
beset by 3⃣ or 4⃣ boats; the timidity and liability to queer
frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

But the 👂 of the 🐳 is full as curious as the ♥. If you are an
entire 👽 to their 🏃, you might 🏃 over these 2⃣ heads
for hours, and never 🔑 that organ. The 👂 has no external 🍃
whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little 💺 the ♥. With
respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed
between the sperm 🐳 and the right. While the 👂 of the former has
an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered
over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the 🐳 should 📅 the
👨 through so small an ♥, and hear the 💥 through an 👂 which
is smaller than a 🐰's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
Herschel's great 🔭; and his ears capacious as the porches of
cathedrals; would that 💩 him any longer of sight, or sharper of
hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind?
Subtilize it.

Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at 🚹, 🏦
over the sperm 🐳's ❓, that it may lie 💺 up; then, ascending
by a 🏃 to the 🔝, have a peep down the 👄; and were it not
that the body is now completely separated from it, with a 🏮 we
might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his 🐻. But
let us 📖 on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
a really beautiful and chaste-looking 👄! from floor to ceiling,
lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as
bridal satins.

But come out now, and look at this portentous 😦 jaw, which seems
like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-📦, with the hinge at 1⃣
🔚, instead of 1⃣ side. If you 👃 it up, so as to get it overhead,
and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,
alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these
spikes fall with impaling 🐏. But far more 😨 is it to behold,
when fathoms down in the 🌊, you 📅 some sulky 🐳, floating there
suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging
straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the 👨 like a
🚢's jib-💥. This 🐳 is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of
sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his
jaw have ☺, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a
reproach to all his tribe, who must, no ❓, imprecate 🔒-jaws upon
him.

In most cases this 😦 jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised
artist--is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting
the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone
with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
including canes, ☔-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.

With a long, 😩 hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
⚓; and when the proper time comes--some few days after the other
🏃--Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,
are 👗 to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-♠, Queequeg lances
the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
stumps of old oaks out of 😠 wood lands. There are generally forty-2⃣
teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and
piled away like joists for 🚧 houses.



CHAPTER 75. The Right 🐳's ❓--Contrasted ⌚.


Crossing the deck, let us now have a 🔉 long look at the Right 🐳's
❓.

As in general shape the noble Sperm 🐳's ❓ may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
so, at a broad ⌚, the Right 🐳's ❓ bears a rather inelegant
resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed 👞. 2⃣ 💯 years ago an
old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's 🔚. And
in this same 🔚 or 👞, that old 👩 of the nursery tale, with
the swarming 🍲, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her
progeny.

But as you come nearer to this great ❓ it begins to 🉑 different
aspects, according to your point of ⌚. If you 🐻 on its 🔝 and
look at these 2⃣ F-shaped spoutholes, you would 🉑 the whole ❓
for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your ♥ upon this strange,
crested, comb-like incrustation on the 🔝 of the mass--this green,
barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders ☎ the "🔝," and the
Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right 🐳; fixing your eyes
solely on this, you would 🉑 the ❓ for the trunk of some huge oak,
with a 🐦's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you ⌚ those live
crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost
sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the
technical term "🔝" also bestowed upon it; in which 🐚 you will
🉑 great 😟 in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a
diademed king of the 🌊, whose green 🔝 has been put together for
him in this marvellous manner. But if this 🐳 be a king, he is a very
sulky looking fellow to grace a 👑. Look at that hanging 😦 👄!
what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's
measurement, about twenty feet long and 5⃣ feet deep; a sulk and pout
that will 🐻 you some 500 gallons of oil and more.

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate 🐳 should be 🐰-lipped.
The fissure is about a 🐾 across. Probably the mother during an
important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes
caused the beach to gape. Over this 👄, as over a slippery 🚪,
we now slide into the 👄. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should
🉑 this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. 🔉 Lord! is this the
road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a
pretty sharp 🐟, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while
these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, 🎁 us with those wondrous, half
vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say 3⃣ 💯 on a
side, which depending from the upper 🏢 of the ❓ or 🔝
bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres,
through which the Right 🐳 strains the water, and in whose
intricacies he retains the small 🐟, when openmouthed he goes through
the seas of brit in feeding time. In the 🔑 blinds of bone, as they
🐻 in their natural ♣, there are certain curious marks, curves,
hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age,
as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this
criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
probability. At any rate, if we 🐻 to it, we must grant a far greater
age to the Right 🐳 than at first glance will seem reasonable.

In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
concerning these blinds. 1⃣ voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
"whiskers" inside of the 🐳's 👄;* another, "hogs' bristles"; a
third old 👨 in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
"There are about 2⃣ 💯 and fifty fins growing on each side of his
upper CHOP, which arch over his 👅 on each side of his 👄."


*This reminds us that the Right 🐳 really has a sort of whisker, or
rather a moustache, consisting of a few 😕 white hairs on the
upper 🏢 of the outer 🔚 of the 😦 jaw. Sometimes these
tufts 🍃 a rather brigandish 🚧 to his otherwise solemn
countenance.


As every 1⃣ knows, these same "hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers,"
"blinds," or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has
long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time that the bone was
in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those
ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the 🐳, as
you may say; 😳 so, in a 🚿, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the ☔ being a
⛺ spread over the same bone.

But now 🍃 all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
in the Right 🐳's 👄, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think
you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
Ⓜ pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
💣--the 👅, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
👄. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck. This particular 👅 now before us; at a passing glance I
should say it was a 6⃣-barreler; that is, it will 🐻 you about that
amount of oil.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
with--that the Sperm 🐳 and the Right 🐳 have almost entirely
different heads. To ♥ up, then: in the Right 🐳's there is no great
well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a
😦 jaw, like the Sperm 🐳's. Nor in the Sperm 🐳 are there any
of those blinds of bone; no huge 😦 👄; and scarcely anything of a
👅. Again, the Right 🐳 has 2⃣ external spout-holes, the Sperm
🐳 only 1⃣.

Look your 🔚, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together; for 1⃣ will 🔜 sink, unrecorded, in the 🌊; the other will
not be very long in following.

Can you ⌚ the 🚧 of the Sperm 🐳's there? It is the same
he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem
now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to 🔚. But 🎶 the
other ❓'s 🚧. 📅 that amazing 😦 👄, pressed by accident
against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not
this whole ❓ seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
facing 🔚? This Right 🐳 I 🉑 to have been a Stoic; the Sperm
🐳, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.



CHAPTER 76. The Battering-🐏.


Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm 🐳's ❓, I would have
you, as a sensible physiologist, simply--particularly 🎶 its front
aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate
it now with the sole ⌚ of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
🔉 estimate of whatever battering-🐏 🏢 may be lodged
there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle
this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to 1⃣ of
the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be
found in all recorded history.

You 🎶 that in the ordinary swimming 🏢 of the Sperm 🐳,
the front of his ❓ presents an almost wholly vertical ✈ to the
water; you 🎶 that the 😦 🏢 of that front slopes considerably
🔙, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
receives the 💥-like 😦 jaw; you 🎶 that the 👄 is entirely
under the ❓, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own 👄
were entirely under your chin. Moreover you 🎶 that the 🐳 has
no external 👃; and that what 👃 he has--his spout hole--is on the
🔝 of his ❓; you 🎶 that his eyes and ears are at the sides
of his ❓, nearly 1⃣ third of his entire length from the front.
Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm
🐳's ❓ is a dead, blind wall, without a 1⃣ organ or tender
prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider
that only in the extreme, 😦, 🔙 sloping 🏢 of the front of
the ❓, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you
get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial
development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as 1⃣ 🐏.
Finally, though, as will 🔜 be revealed, its contents partly comprise
the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of
the ♥ which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.
In some previous 🚉 I have described to you how the blubber wraps the
body of the 🐳, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the ❓;
but with this difference: about the ❓ this ✉, though not so
thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any 👨 who has not
handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by
the strongest 👨 arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though
the forehead of the Sperm 🐳 were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not
think that any 🌠 lurks in it.

Bethink yourself also of another thing. When 2⃣ large, loaded Indiamen
chance to crowd and 🐚 towards each other in the docks, what do the
sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
🔗, any merely hard ♥, like iron or wood. No, they 📖
there a large, round 🐏 of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest
and toughest of 🐂-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the 🐏 which
would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron 😤-bars. By
itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I 🐏 at. But
supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
as ordinary 🐟 possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,
capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm 🐳,
as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too,
the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his ❓
altogether beneath the 🌹, and anon swims with it high elevated out
of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its ✉;
considering the unique interior of his ❓; it has hypothetically
occurred to me, I say, that those ㊙ lung-celled honeycombs there
may possibly have some hitherto 👽 and unsuspected 🔗 with
the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and
contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to
which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.

Now, 🎶. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable
wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims 💺 it all a
mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood
is--by the cord; and all obedient to 1⃣ volition, as the smallest
insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
expansive monster; when I shall ® you some of his more inconsiderable
braining feats; I 🏦 you will have renounced all ignorant
incredulity, and be ready to 🐻 by this; that though the Sperm 🐳
stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic
with the Pacific, you would not elevate 1⃣ hair of your ♥-brow. For
unless you own the 🐳, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist
in Truth. But 🔝 Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to
encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell
the weakling youth lifting the 😨 goddess's veil at Lais?



CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.


Now comes the Baling of the 🐚. But to comprehend it aright, you must
know something of the curious internal 🚧 of the thing operated
upon.

Regarding the Sperm 🐳's ❓ as a solid oblong, you may, on an
inclined ✈, sideways divide it into 2⃣ quoins,* whereof the 😦
is the bony 🚧, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
unctuous mass wholly 😇 from bones; its broad forward 🔚 forming the
expanded vertical apparent forehead of the 🐳. At the ♥ of the
forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have 2⃣
almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
wall of a thick tendinous ♥.


*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp 🔚 formed by the
steep inclination of 1⃣ side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
sides.


The 😦 subdivided 🏢, called the junk, is 1⃣ immense honeycomb
of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ❌ Ⓜ
infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
extent. The upper 🏢, known as the 🐚, may be regarded as the great
Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm 🐳. And as that famous great 3⃣ is
mystically carved in front, so the 🐳's vast plaited forehead forms
innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his
wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished
with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun
of the 🐳 contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages;
namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid,
and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious ♥ found unalloyed
in any other 🏢 of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly
fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after 🔚, it 🔜 begins to
concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the
first thin delicate 🎇 is just forming in water. A large 🐳's
🐚 generally yields about 5⃣ 💯 gallons of sperm, though from
unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and
dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably 😖 in the ticklish business
of securing what you can.

I know not with what 🆗 and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun
was coated within, but in 🔝 richness that coating could not
possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the
lining of a 🆗 pelisse, forming the inner 🌹 of the Sperm 🐳's
🐚.

It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm 🐳
embraces the entire length of the entire 🔝 of the ❓; and since--as
has been elsewhere 👗 forth--the ❓ embraces 1⃣ third of the whole
length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for
a 🔉 sized 🐳, you have more than twenty-6⃣ feet for the depth
of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a 🚢's
side.

As in decapitating the 🐳, the operator's instrument is brought 🔚
to the 🏢 where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
🔍; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
invaluable contents. It is this decapitated 🔚 of the ❓, also, which
is at 🔚 elevated out of the water, and retained in that 🏢 by
the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on 1⃣ side,
💩 quite a wilderness of ropes in that 💩.

Thus much being said, attend now, I 🙏 you, to that marvellous and--in
this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
🐳's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.



CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.


Nimble as a 🐱, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the
🏢 where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried
with him a ✨ tackle called a whip, consisting of only 2⃣ parts,
travelling through a 1⃣-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that
it hangs down from the Ⓜ-arm, he swings 1⃣ 🔚 of the rope, till it
is caught and firmly held by a 🚹 on deck. Then, 🚹-over-🚹, down
the other 🏢, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he
lands on the 🔝 of the ❓. There--😯 high elevated above the
rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--he seems some Turkish
Muezzin 📲 the 🔉 people to prayers from the 🔝 of a tower. A
short-handled sharp ♠ being sent up to him, he diligently searches
for the proper 🚉 to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business
he proceeds very heedfully, like a 💎-hunter in some old 🏠,
sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time
this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like
a well-bucket, has been attached to 1⃣ 🔚 of the whip; while the other
🔚, being stretched across the deck, is there held by 2⃣ or 3⃣
alert hands. These 🔚 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 downward guides the bucket into the Tun,
till it entirely disappears; then 🎁 the word to the seamen at the
whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail
of 🆕 milk. Carefully lowered from its 🔝, the full-freighted
vessel is caught by an appointed 🚹, and quickly emptied into a large
🛀. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until
the deep cistern will 🐻 no more. Towards the 🔚, Tashtego has to
🐏 his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun,
until some twenty feet of the pole have 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 at once a
queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that 😠 Indian,
was so heedless and reckless as to let ❌ for a moment his 1⃣-handed
📖 on the great cabled tackles suspending the ❓; or whether the
🚉 where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil
1⃣ 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 eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor
Tashtego--like the 👫 reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
dropped ❓-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with
a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

"👨 overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and putting 1⃣ 🐾
into it, so as the better to secure his slippery 🚹-📖 on the whip
itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the 🔝 of the ❓, almost
before Tashtego could have reached its interior 💺. Meantime,
there was a 😨 tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless ❓ throbbing and heaving just below the 🌹 of the 🌊,
as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only
the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
depth to which he had sunk.

At this 💓, while Daggoo, on the 🔝 of the ❓, was clearing
the whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--a
sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all,
1⃣ of the 2⃣ enormous hooks suspending the ❓ tore out, and with
a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk 🚢
reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The 1⃣ remaining 👮,
upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every 💓 to be
on the point of 🎁 way; an event 😯 more likely from the violent
motions of the ❓.

"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with 1⃣ 🚹
holding on to the 🔉 tackles, so that if the ❓ should drop, he
would 😯 remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul 🎶,
rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.

"In heaven's 🔑, 👨," cried Stubb, "are you ramming 🏠 a cartridge
there?--Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on
🔝 of his ❓? Avast, will ye!"

"🐻 🔝 of the tackle!" cried a 🔉 like the bursting of a
🚀.

Almost in the same 💓, with a 💥-💥, the enormous mass
dropped into the 🌊, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the
suddenly 😌 hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering
🐷; and all caught their breath, as half swinging--now over the
sailors' heads, and now over the water--Daggoo, through a thick ☁ of
spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the 💺 of the 🌊!
But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure
with a boarding-sword in his 🚹, was for 1⃣ swift moment seen
hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my
brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. 1⃣ packed 👢 was made to the
side, and every ♥ counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and
no 🏠 of either the 🍩 or the diver could be seen. Some hands now
jumped into a ⛵ alongside, and pushed a little off from the 🚢.

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

"Both! both!--it is both!"--cried Daggoo again with a joyful 😢; and
🔜 after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with 1⃣ 🚹, and
with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the
waiting ⛵, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was
long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.

Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after
the slowly descending ❓, Queequeg with his keen sword had made
side lunges near its 💺, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then
dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and 🆙,
and so hauled out poor Tash by the ❓. 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 might occasion great trouble;--he had
thrust 🔙 the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a
somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in
the 🔉 old way--❓ foremost. As for the great ❓ itself, that was
doing as 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 successfully
accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently
hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
Midwifery should be taught in the same 🏃 with fencing and boxing,
riding and rowing.

I know that this queer adventure of the ☀-Header's will be sure to
seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either
seen or heard of some 1⃣'s falling into a cistern ashore; an accident
which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the
Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the
Sperm 🐳's well.

But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
the tissued, infiltrated ❓ of the Sperm 🐳, was the lightest and
most corky 🏢 about him; and yet Ⓜ makest it 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 poor Tash fell in, the 🐚 had been
nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense
tendinous wall of the well--a 🔁 welded, hammered ♥, as I
have before said, much heavier than the 🌊 water, and a lump of which
sinks in it like 🍃 almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this
♥ was in the 🎁 instance materially counteracted by the
other parts of the ❓ remaining undetached from it, so that it sank
very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance
for performing his agile obstetrics on the 🏃, as you may say. Yes, it
was a 🏃 delivery, so it was.

Now, had Tashtego perished in that ❓, it had been a very precious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the ㊙ inner chamber
and sanctum sanctorum of the 🐳. Only 1⃣ sweeter 🔚 can readily be
recalled--the delicious 🔚 of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey
in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that
leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.
How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey ❓, and
sweetly perished there?



CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.


To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the ❓ of this
Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for
Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,
or for Gall to have mounted a 🏃 and manipulated the Dome of the
Pantheon. 😯, in that famous 🏃 of his, Lavater not only treats
of the various faces of 🚹, but also attentively studies the faces
of horses, birds, serpents, and 🐟; and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of 🚧 discernible therein. Nor have Gall and
his disciple Spurzheim failed to 😖 out some hints touching the
phrenological characteristics of other beings than 👨. Therefore,
though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these
2⃣ semi-sciences to the 🐳, I will do my endeavor. I try all things;
I achieve what I can.

Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm 🐳 is an anomalous creature.
He has no proper 👃. And since the 👃 is the 🔑 and most
conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and
finally controls their combined 🚧; hence it would seem that its
entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect
the countenance of the 🐳. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable
to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
keeping without the elevated open-🏃 belfry of the 👃. 💨 the 👃
from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry 🔚! Nevertheless,
Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so
stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were
hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A
👃 to the 🐳 would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical
voyage you sail round his vast ❓ in your jolly-⛵, your noble
conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a
👃 to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon
obtruding 😳 when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his 🚽.

In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical ⌚ to
be had of the Sperm 🐳, is that of the full front of his ❓. This
aspect is sublime.

In thought, a 🆗 👨 brow is like the 🇪🇸 when troubled with the
🌅. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the 🐷 has a
👻 of the Ⓜ in it. Pushing 🔉 cannon up mountain defiles, the
🐘's brow is majestic. 👨 or animal, the ㊙ brow is as
that great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees.
It signifies--"God: done this day by my 🚹." But in most creatures,
nay in 👨 himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine
land lying 🔛 the snow 🎶. Few are the foreheads which like
Shakespeare's or Melancthon's 🌹 so high, and descend so low, that the
eyes themselves seem 🔝, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all
above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to 🏃 the antlered
thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters 🏃 the
snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm 🐳, this high and
mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,
that gazing on it, in that full front ⌚, you feel the Deity and the
😨 powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living
nature. For you 📅 no 1⃣ point precisely; not 1⃣ distinct feature is
revealed; no 👃, eyes, ears, or 👄; no face; he has none, proper;
0⃣ but that 1⃣ broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with
riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and 🚹.
Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way
viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you
plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the
forehead's ♥, which, in 👨, is Lavater's 🎶 of 🌠.

But how? 🌠 in the Sperm 🐳? Has the Sperm 🐳 ever written
a 📖, spoken a speech? No, his great 🌠 is declared in his
doing 0⃣ particular to 🌹 it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical 😯. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm 🐳
been known to the 🆕 Orient 👨, he would have been deified by
their 👶-magian thoughts. They deified the 🐊 of the Nile,
because the 🐊 is 🔇; and the Sperm 🐳 has no
👅, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of
protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure
🔙 to their 🐻-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly
enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted
hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high 💺, the great Sperm 🐳
shall lord it.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every 👨's and every being's
face. Physiognomy, like every other 👨 science, is but a passing
fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who ® in thirty languages, could
not ® the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle
meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to ® the 😨 Chaldee of
the Sperm 🐳's brow? I but put that brow before you. ® it if you
can.



CHAPTER 80. The 🍳.


If the Sperm 🐳 be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.

In the full-grown creature the 💀 will measure at least twenty feet
in length. Unhinge the 😦 jaw, and the side ⌚ of this 💀 is as
the side of a moderately inclined ✈ resting throughout on a 😳
🐾. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined ✈ is
angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
mass of the junk and sperm. At the high 🔚 the 💀 forms a crater to
bed that 🏢 of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater--in
another cavity seldom exceeding ❌ inches in length and as many in
depth--reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at
least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is ㊙
away 💺 its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the
amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it
secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny
that the Sperm 🐳 has any other brain than that palpable semblance
of 1⃣ formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm 🔍. Lying in strange
folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more
in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that ㊙ 🏢
of him as the 💺 of his intelligence.

It is plain, then, that phrenologically the ❓ of this Leviathan, in
the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his
true brain, you can then 📅 no indications of it, nor feel any. The
🐳, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
👨.

If you unload his 💀 of its spermy heaps and then 🉑 a 🌹 ⌚
of its 🌹 🔚, which is the high 🔚, you will be struck by its
resemblance to the 👨 💀, beheld in the same 🏢, and from
the same point of ⌚. Indeed, 🚉 this reversed 💀 (scaled down
to the 👨 magnitude) among a 🐚 of 🚹's skulls, and you would
involuntarily 😖 it with them; and remarking the depressions on
1⃣ 🏢 of its 🔝, in phrenological phrase you would say--This
👨 had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,
considered 🔛 with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
🏢, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.

But if from the comparative dimensions of the 🐳's proper brain, you
deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's 🔙,
you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung
necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
💀 proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I 🉑 it
the Germans were not the first 🚹 to perceive. A 👽 friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with
the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
beaked 🙇 of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the
cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a 👨's
character will be found betokened in his ⚓. I would rather feel
your 🔙 than your 💀, whoever you are. A thin joist of a 🔙
never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I 😂 in my 🔙, as in the
🏠 audacious staff of that 🎏 which I fling half out to the 👨.

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm 🐳. His cranial
cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
the 💺 of the spinal canal will measure ❌ inches across, being
8⃣ in 🔝, and of a triangular figure with the 🐾 downwards. As
it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but
for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of 🏃,
this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous ♥--the
spinal cord--as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.
And what is 😯 more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's
cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost
equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be
unreasonable to survey and map out the 🐳's 🔙 phrenologically?
For, viewed in this ✨, the wonderful comparative smallness of his
brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative
magnitude of his spinal cord.

But leaving this hint to 🏃 as it may with the phrenologists, I
would merely 🉑 the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the
Sperm 🐳's hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over 1⃣
of the larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer
convex mould of it. From its relative 🏢 then, I should ☎ this
high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm 🐳.
And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to
know.



CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.


The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the 🚢 Jungfrau, Derick
De Deer, master, of Bremen.

At 1⃣ time the greatest whaling people in the 👨, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
intervals of latitude and longitude, you 😯 occasionally 😆 with
their 🎏 in the Pacific.

For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to 🐻 her respects.
While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
⛵, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
bows instead of the 💩.

"What has he in his 🚹 there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German. "Impossible!--a lamp-feeder!"

"Not that," said Stubb, "no, no, it's a ☕-🚽, Mr. Starbuck; he's
coming off to 💩 us our ☕, is the Yarman; don't you 📅 that big
tin can there alongside of him?--that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all
right, is the Yarman."

"❌ 🔛 with you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.
He's out of oil, and has come a-begging."

However curious it may seem for an oil-🚢 to be borrowing oil on the
🐳-⚓, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
really happens; and in the 🎁 🐚 Captain Derick De Deer did
indubitably 🐻 a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.

As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
heeding what he had in his 🚹; but in his 😕 lingo, the German
🔜 evinced his complete ignorance of the White 🐳; immediately
turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
remarks touching his having to 🔧 into his hammock at night in
🔉 darkness--his 🔚 drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
1⃣ flying-🐟 yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding
by hinting that his 🚢 was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
called a CLEAN 1⃣ (that is, an empty 1⃣), well deserving the 🔑 of
Jungfrau or the Virgin.

His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
🚢's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the 🐶 was Derick, that
without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
round his ⛵ and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.

Now, the 🔙 having risen to leeward, he and the other 3⃣ German
boats that 🔜 followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's
keels. There were 8⃣ whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger,
they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the 👃,
rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness.
They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great
wide parchment upon the 🌊.

Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the 🌹, swam a huge,
humped old 🐷, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this 🐳 belonged
to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for
such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck
to their wake, though indeed their 🔙 water must have retarded him,
because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed 1⃣,
like the swell formed when 2⃣ hostile currents 😆. His spout was
short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush,
and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean
commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried
extremity, causing the waters 💺 him to upbubble.

"Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the 🐻-💴, I'Ⓜ
afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of 🐻-💴! Adverse
winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul 👃
I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever 🐳 yaw so before?
it must be, he's 😖 his tiller."

As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
way; so did this old 🐳 heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly
turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard 5⃣. Whether he had 😖
that 5⃣ in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.

"Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll 🍃 ye a sling for that wounded
arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the 🐳-🎶 near him.

"Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "🍃 way, or the
German will have him."

With 1⃣ intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
1⃣ 🐟, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable 🐳, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit
for the time. At this juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the 3⃣
German boats 🔚 lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's
⛵ 😯 led the 🐶, though every moment neared by his 👽
rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so
nigh to his 🎶, he would be enabled to 💨 his iron before they
could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite
confident that this would be the 🐚, and occasionally with a deriding
gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.

"The ungracious and ungrateful 🐶!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares
me with the very poor-📦 I filled for him not 5⃣ minutes ago!"--then
in his old intense whisper--"🍃 way, greyhounds! 🐶 to it!"

"I tell ye what it is, 🚹"--cried Stubb to his crew--"it's against
my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous
Yarman--🔧--won't ye? Are ye going to let that 👿 💓 ye? Do
ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best 👨. Come,
why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an
⚓ overboard--we don't budge an inch--we're becalmed. Halloo, here's
🐀 growing in the ⛵'s 💺--and by the Lord, the mast there's
budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of
it is, 🚹, will ye 👅 🔥 or not?"

"Oh! 📅 the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down--"What
a hump--Oh, DO pile on the beef--lays like a log! Oh! my lads, DO
⛲--slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads--baked
clams and muffins--oh, DO, DO, ⛲,--he's a 💯 barreller--don't
lose him now--don't oh, DON'T!--📅 that Yarman--Oh, won't ye 🔧 for
your duff, my lads--such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm?
There goes 3⃣ Ⓜ dollars, 🚹!--a 🏦!--a whole 🏦! The 🏦
of England!--Oh, DO, DO, DO!--What's that Yarman about now?"

At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the 🔁 ⌚
of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically
accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the 🔙 toss.

"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "🔧 now, 🚹, like fifty
Ⓜ 🎶-of-battle-🚢 loads of 😳-haired devils. What d'ye say,
Tashtego; are you the 👨 to snap your 🔙 in 2⃣-and-twenty pieces
for the honour of old Gayhead? What d'ye say?"

"I say, 🔧 like god-dam,"--cried the Indian.

Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's
3⃣ boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
momentarily neared him. In that 🆗, 🆓, chivalrous attitude of
the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the 3⃣ mates stood up
proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating 😢
of, "There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with
the Yarman! Sail over him!"

But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all
their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this 🏃, had not
a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade
of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to 😇
his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's ⛵ was nigh to
capsizing, and he thundering away at his 🚹 in a mighty 😡;--that was
a 🔉 time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a 😢, they took a
mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's 💩.
An 💓 more, and all 4⃣ boats were diagonically in the 🐳's
immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the
foaming swell that he made.

It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The 🐳 was
now going ❓ out, and sending his spout before him in a continual
😧 ⛲; while his 1⃣ poor 5⃣ 💓 his side in an agony of
fright. Now to this 🚹, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight,
and 😯 at every 🎈 that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the
🌊, or sideways rolled towards the sky his 1⃣ beating 5⃣. So have I
seen a 🐦 with clipped wing making affrighted 😕 circles in the
air, vainly striving to 🏃 the piratical hawks. But the 🐦 has a
🔉, and with plaintive cries will 💩 known her fear; but the fear
of this vast 🔇 🐺 of the 🌊, was chained up and enchanted in him;
he had no 🔉, 😌 that choking respiration through his spiracle,
and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while 😯, in his
amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent 💩, there was enough to
appal the stoutest 👨 who so pitied.

Seeing now that but a very few moments more would 🍃 the Pequod's
boats the advantage, and rather than be thus 😞 of his 🔙, Derick
chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long 💨,
ere the 🔚 chance would for ever 🏃.

But no sooner did his harpooneer 🐻 up for the stroke, than all 3⃣
tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to their feet,
and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and
darted over the ❓ of the German harpooneer, their 3⃣ Nantucket
irons entered the 🐳. Blinding vapours of ✨ and white-🔥! The
3⃣ boats, in the first 😡 of the 🐳's headlong 👢, bumped
the German's aside with such 🐏, that both Derick and his 😖
harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the 3⃣ flying keels.

"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing
glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up 🔜--all
right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--🆓
😟 travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a
sunbeam! Hurrah!--Here we ❌ like 3⃣ tin kettles at the 💩 of a mad
cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an 🐘 in a tilbury on
a plain--makes the 🚲-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that
way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a
hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy
Jones--all a 👢 down an endless inclined ✈! Hurrah! this 🐳
carries the everlasting mail!"

But the monster's 🏃 was a brief 1⃣. 🎁 a sudden gasp, he
tumultuously sounded. With a grating 👢, the 3⃣ lines flew round
the loggerheads with such a 🐏 as to gouge deep grooves in them;
while so 😨 were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would
🔜 exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they
caught repeated 🚬 turns with the rope to 📖 on; till at
🔚--owing to the perpendicular strain from the 🍃-lined chocks of
the boats, whence the 3⃣ ropes went straight down into the blue--the
gunwales of the bows were almost 😳 with the water, while the 3⃣
sterns tilted high in the air. And the 🐳 🔜 ceasing to 🔉,
for some time they remained in that attitude, 😨 of expending more
🎶, though the 🏢 was a little ticklish. But though boats have
been taken down and 😖 in this way, yet it is this "holding on," as it
is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from
the 🔙; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into 🔜 rising
again to 😆 the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril
of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this 🏃 is always the
best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken
🐳 stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the
enormous 🌹 of him--in a full grown sperm 🐳 something less than
2000 square feet--the pressure of the water is immense. We all know
what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves 🐻 up under; 😳
here, above-⚓, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a 🐳,
bearing on his 🔙 a column of 2⃣ 💯 fathoms of 🌊! It must at
least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. 1⃣ whaleman has estimated
it at the weight of twenty 🎶-of-battle ships, with all their guns,
and stores, and 🚹 on board.

As the 3⃣ boats lay there on that gently rolling 🌊, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a 1⃣ groan or 😢 of any
sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that 😯 and
placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
agony! Not 8⃣ inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
Seems it credible that by 3⃣ such thin threads the great Leviathan
was suspended like the big weight to an 8⃣ day clock. Suspended? and
to what? To 3⃣ bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
once so triumphantly said--"Canst Ⓜ 😆 his skin with barbed irons?
or his ❓ with 🐟-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot
📖, the spear, the 💨, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as
straw; the arrow cannot 💩 him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh!
that unfulfilments should ⌚ the prophets. For with the strength
of a Ⓜ thighs in his 💩, Leviathan had 🏃 his ❓ under the
mountains of the 🌊, to hide him from the Pequod's 🐟-spears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the 3⃣ boats
sent down beneath the 🌹, must have been long enough and broad
enough to 😎 half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the
wounded 🐳 must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his ❓!

"🐻 by, 🚹; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the 3⃣ lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting 🆙 to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and 🔚 throbs of the 🐳, so that every
oarsman felt them in his 💺. The next moment, 😌 in great 🏢
from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
🆙, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
scared from it into the 🌊.

"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."

The lines, of which, hardly an 💓 before, not 1⃣ 🚹's breadth
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung 🔙 all
dripping into the boats, and 🔜 the 🐳 broke water within 2⃣
🚢's lengths of the hunters.

His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
certain directions. Not so with the 🐳; 1⃣ of whose peculiarities
it is to have an entire non-valvular 🚧 of the blood-vessels, so
that when pierced 😳 by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly
drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is
heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance
below the 🌹, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant
streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant
and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and
bleeding for a considerable period; 😳 as in a drought a river will
🏃, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible
hills. 😳 now, when the boats pulled upon this 🐳, and perilously
drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,
they were followed by steady jets from the 🆕 made wound, which kept
continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his ❓ was only
at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the
air. From this 🔚 🌋 no blood yet came, because no vital 🏢 of him
had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly ☎ it, was
untouched.

As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper 🏢 of
his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly
revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were
beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the
noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the 🐳's eyes
had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to 📅.
But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his 1⃣ arm, and his
blind eyes, he must die the 🔚 and be murdered, in ♣ to ✨ the
☀ bridals and other merry-makings of 🚹, and also to illuminate the
solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
😯 rolling in his blood, at 🔚 he partially disclosed a strangely
discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the
flank.

"A nice 🏢," cried Flask; "just let me 😭 him there once."

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late. At the 💓 of the 💨 an
ulcerous ⛲ shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than
sufferable 😧, the 🐳 now spouting thick blood, with swift 😡
blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews
all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's ⛵ and marring the
bows. It was his 🔚 stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by
loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped 5⃣,
then over and over slowly revolved like a waning 👨; turned up
the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most
piteous, that 🔚 expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water
is gradually drawn off from some mighty ⛲, and with half-stifled
melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
⚓--so the 🔚 long dying spout of the 🐳.

🔜, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the 🚢, the body
showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,
by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so
that ere long every ⛵ was a buoy; the sunken 🐳 being suspended a
few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when
the 🚢 drew nigh, the 🐳 was transferred to her side, and was
strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain
that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the
💺.

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the ♠,
the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh,
on the 😦 🏢 of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of
harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales,
with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any
kind to denote their 🚉; therefore, there must needs have been
some other 👽 reason in the 🎁 🐚 fully to account for
the ulceration alluded to. But 😯 more curious was the fact of a
lance-❓ of 💎 being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
the flesh perfectly 🏠 about it. Who had darted that 💎 lance? And
when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before
America was discovered.

What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden 🔚 was put to further
discoveries, by the 🚢's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
to the 🌊, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink.
However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the
🔚; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the 🚢
would have been capsized, if 😯 persisting in locking arms with the
body; then, when the command was given to break 🔝 from it, such was
the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and
cables were fastened, that it was impossible to 🐱 them off. Meantime
everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the
deck was like 🚶 up the steep gabled roof of a 🏠. The 🚢
groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and
cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.
In vain handspikes and crows were brought to 🉑 upon the immovable
fluke-chains, to 👃 them adrift from the timberheads; and so low
had the 🐳 now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all
approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to
the sinking bulk, and the 🚢 seemed on the point of going over.

"📖 on, 📖 on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such
a devil of a hurry to sink! By 💥, 🚹, we must do something or ❌
for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and 🏃
1⃣ of ye for a prayer 📖 and a pen-👅, and cut the big chains."

"👅? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's 🔉
hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing
at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were
given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific
snap, every fastening went adrift; the 🚢 righted, the carcase sank.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
🐳 is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm 🐳 floats with great
buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the
🌹. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and
😕-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their
bones 🔉 and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the 🐟 so
sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it
is not so. For 🆕 whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm 🌼 and May of
life, with all their panting lard about them; 😳 these brawny, buoyant
heroes do sometimes sink.

Be it said, however, that the Sperm 🐳 is far less liable to this
accident than any other species. Where 1⃣ of that sort ❌ down, twenty
Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no ❓ imputable in
no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right 🐳;
his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
incumbrance the Sperm 🐳 is wholly 😇. But there are instances
where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken 🐳
again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this
is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious
magnitude; becomes a sort of animal 🎈. A 🎶-of-battle 🚢 could
hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among
the Bays of 🆕 Zealand, when a Right 🐳 gives token of sinking, they
fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone
down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.

It was not long after the sinking of the body that a 😢 was heard from
the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering
her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a 5⃣-🔙,
belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its
incredible 🏢 of swimming. Nevertheless, the 5⃣-🔙's spout is so
similar to the Sperm 🐳's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often
mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant 🐶 of this unnearable 🐺. The Virgin crowding all sail,
made after her 4⃣ 🆕 keels, and thus they all disappeared far to
leeward, 😯 in bold, hopeful 🐶.

Oh! many are the 5⃣-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.



CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.


There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
method.

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
to the very ⛲-❓ of it so much the more am I impressed with its
great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who 1⃣ way or other
have shed 🎶 upon it, I am transported with the reflection
that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a
fraternity.

The gallant Perseus, a 👦 of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and
to the eternal honour of our 📲 be it said, that the first 🐳
attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those
were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to
succor the 😟, and not to 😆 🚹's lamp-feeders. Every 1⃣
knows the 🆗 story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda,
the 👧 of a king, was tied to a rock on the 🌊-coast, and as
Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince
of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
achieved by the best harpooneers of the 🎁 day; inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first 💨. And let no 👨 ❓ this
Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
in 1⃣ of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton
of a 🐳, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to
be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans
took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in 😤. What
seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this:
it was from Joppa that Jonah 👗 sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed
to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and
the 🐉; which 🐉 I maintain to have been a 🐳; for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
often 🐻 for each other. "Ⓜ 🎨 as a lion of the waters, and as a
🐉 of the 🌊," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a 🐳;
in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it
would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but
encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle
with the great monster of the deep. Any 👨 may kill a 🐍, but only a
Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the ♥ in them to march boldly
up to a 🐳.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though
the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
on land and the 👼 on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
of those times, when the true form of the 🐳 was 👽 to artists;
and considering that as in Perseus' 🐚, St. George's 🐳 might have
crawled up out of the 🌊 on the beach; and considering that the animal
ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or 🌊-🐴;
bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible
with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
📖 this so-called 🐉 no other than the great Leviathan himself. In
fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
fare like that 🐟, flesh, and 🐦 idol of the Philistines, Dagon by
🔑; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his 🐴's ❓ and
both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or
fishy 🏢 of him remained. Thus, then, 1⃣ of our own noble stamp, 😳
a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by 🔉 rights, we
harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble ♣
of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honourable
company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a
🐳 like their great patron), let them never ♥ a Nantucketer with
disdain, since 😳 in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are
much better entitled to St. George's 🎀 than they.

Whether to 🉑 Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing 🔉
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a 🐳; 😯, whether
that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
appears that he ever actually harpooned his 🐟, unless, indeed,
from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
whaleman; at any rate the 🐳 caught him, if he did not the 🐳. I
claim him for 1⃣ of our clan.

But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
Hercules and the 🐳 is considered to be derived from the 😯 more
ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the 🐳; and vice versa; certainly
they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
👋 of our ♣. Our Ⓜ master is 😯 to be named; for like royal
kings of old times, we find the ❓ waters of our fraternity in 0⃣
short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now
to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the 😨 Vishnoo, 1⃣
of the 3⃣ persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine
Vishnoo himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ❌
earthly incarnations, has for ever 👗 apart and sanctified the 🐳.
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate
the 👨 after 1⃣ of its periodical dissolutions, he gave 🐻 to
Vishnoo, to preside over the 🏃; but the Vedas, or ㊙ books,
whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before
beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
something in the shape of practical hints to 🆕 architects, these
Vedas were lying at the 💺 of the waters; so Vishnoo became
incarnate in a 🐳, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,
rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? 😳
as a 👨 who rides a 🐴 is called a horseman?

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-👋
for you! What ♣ but the whaleman's can ❓ off like that?



CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.


Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the 🐳 in the
preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical
story of Jonah and the 🐳. But then there were some sceptical Greeks
and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,
equally doubted the story of Hercules and the 🐳, and Arion and the
🐬; and yet their doubting those traditions did not 💩 those
traditions 1⃣ whit the less facts, for all that.

1⃣ old 🎏-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
story was this:--He had 1⃣ of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
embellished with curious, unscientific plates; 1⃣ of which represented
Jonah's 🐳 with 2⃣ spouts in his ❓--a peculiarity only true
with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right 🐳, and the
varieties of that ♣), concerning which the fishermen have this
saying, "A penny 👋 would choke him"; his 🉑 is so very small.
But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not
necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the
🐳's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some 🏢 of his 👄. And
this seems reasonable enough in the 🔉 Bishop. For truly, the
Right 🐳's 👄 would accommodate a 👫 of whist-tables, and
comfortably 💺 all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have
ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on 🔙 thoughts, the Right
🐳 is toothless.

Another reason which 🎏-Harbor (he went by that 🔑) urged for his
want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
reference to his incarcerated body and the 🐳's gastric juices. But
this objection likewise falls to the ⚓, because a German exegetist
supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a
DEAD 🐳--😳 as the French soldiers in the Russian 🏃 turned
their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has
been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
thrown overboard from the Joppa 🚢, he straightway effected his 🏃
to another vessel near by, some vessel with a 🐳 for a figure-❓;
and, I would add, possibly called "The 🐳," as some craft are
nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there
been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the 🐳 mentioned
in the 📖 of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver--an inflated 👜
of 👃--which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a
watery doom. Poor 🎏-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But
he had 😯 another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I
remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the 🐳 in the Mediterranean
🌊, and after 3⃣ days he was vomited up somewhere within 3⃣ days'
journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than 3⃣
days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast.
How is that?

But was there no other way for the 🐳 to land the prophet within that
short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the
way of the Cape of 🔉 Hope. But not to speak of the passage through
the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the
Persian Gulf and 😳 🌊, such a supposition would involve the complete
circumnavigation of all Africa in 3⃣ days, not to speak of the Tigris
waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any 🐳 to
swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of 🔉 Hope
at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great
headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so 💩
modern history a liar.

But all these foolish arguments of old 🎏-Harbor only evinced his
foolish pride of reason--a thing 😯 more reprehensible in him, seeing
that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the
sun and the 🌊. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh
via the Cape of 🔉 Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of
the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly
enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And
some 3⃣ centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages,
speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was
a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.



CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.


To 💩 them 🏃 easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are
anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an
analogous operation upon their ⛵; they grease the 💺. Nor is it
to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly
be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are
hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in ⌚ is to
💩 the ⛵ slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
his ⛵, and 1⃣ 🌅 not long after the German 🚢 Jungfrau
disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling
under its 💺, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the
unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a 👗 of hair from
the craft's bald keel. He seemed to be 🏃 in obedience to some
particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.

Towards noon whales were raised; but so 🔜 as the 🚢 sailed down to
them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a 😕 flight,
as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.

Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great
😓, Tashtego at 🔚 succeeded in planting 1⃣ iron; but the
stricken 🐳, without at all sounding, 😯 continued his horizontal
flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
imperative to lance the flying 🐳, or be content to lose him. But
to haul the ⛵ up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and
😠. What then remained?

Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of 🚹 and
countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
none 🔝 that 🆗 manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts 0⃣ like it. It
is only indispensable with an inveterate 🏃 🐳; its Ⓜ
fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking ⛵, under extreme
headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ❌ or twelve
feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon,
and also of a lighter material--💴. It is furnished with a small rope
called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled 🔙 to
the 🚹 after darting.

But before going further, it is important to 🎶 here, that though
the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it
is seldom done; and when done, is 😯 less frequently successful,
on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as
compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a
general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a 🐳, before any
pitchpoling comes into 🏃.

Look now at Stubb; a 👨 who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel
in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed 🙇 of the
flying ⛵; wrapt in fleecy ✨, the towing 🐳 is forty feet ahead.
Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice 🔛 its
length to 📅 if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up
the 📜 of the warp in 1⃣ 🚹, so as to secure its 😇 🔚 in his
grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before
his waistband's ♥, he levels it at the 🐳; when, covering
him with it, he steadily depresses the 🐐-🔚 in his 🚹, thereby
elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his
🎀, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,
balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless
impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming
distance, and quivers in the life 🏢 of the 🐳. Instead of
sparkling water, he now spouts 😳 blood.

"That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'Tis July's immortal
Fourth; all fountains must 🏃 wine today! Would now, it were old
Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,
Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye 📖 a canakin to the ⛲, and we'd drink
round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice 👊 in the
spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live 👊-🎳 quaff the
living stuff."

Again and again to such gamesome 🍑, the dexterous 💨 is repeated,
the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful
3⃣. The agonized 🐳 goes into his 😕; the tow-🎶 is
slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and
mutely watches the monster die.



CHAPTER 85. The ⛲.


That for 6⃣ Ⓜ years--and no 1⃣ knows how many millions of ages
before--the great whales should have been spouting all over the 🌊,
and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so
many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries 🔙,
thousands of hunters should have been 🔚 by the ⛲ of the
🐳, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--that all this should
be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a 💩
minutes past 1⃣ ⭕'clock P.Ⓜ. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.
1851), it should 😯 remain a problem, whether these spoutings
are, after all, really water, or 0⃣ but vapour--this is surely a
noteworthy thing.

Let us, then, look at this matter, 🔛 with some interesting items
contingent. Every 1⃣ knows that by the peculiar cunning of their
gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is
combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod
might live a 💯, and never once 🔥 its ❓ above the 🌹.
But owing to his marked internal 🚧 which gives him regular
lungs, like a 👨 being's, the 🐳 can only live by inhaling the
disengaged air in the open 🏧. Wherefore the necessity for
his periodical visits to the upper 👨. But he cannot in any degree
breathe through his 👄, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm
🐳's 👄 is buried at least 8⃣ feet beneath the 🌹; and
what is 😯 more, his windpipe has no 🔗 with his 👄. No, he
breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the 🔝 of his ❓.

If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a 🏃
indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a
certain element, which being subsequently brought into 🔗 with the
blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I
shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
🉑 it, and it follows that if all the blood in a 👨 could be
aerated with 1⃣ breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not
fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then
live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the
🐚 with the 🐳, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full
hour and more (when at the 💺) without drawing a 1⃣ breath, or
so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has
no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his 🔙
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of
vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the 🌹, are
completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more,
a Ⓜ fathoms in the 🌊, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in
him, just as the 🐫 crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus
supply of drink for future use in its 4⃣ supplementary stomachs.
The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the
supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more
cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of
that leviathan in HAVING HIS SPOUTINGS OUT, as the fishermen phrase
it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the 🌹, the
Sperm 🐳 will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform
with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and
jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he
rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to
a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that
he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to 💩 🔉 his regular
allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he
finally ❌ down to stay out his full term below. 🎶, however, that
in different individuals these rates are different; but in any 1⃣
they are alike. Now, why should the 🐳 thus insist upon having his
spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
descending for 🔉? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
🐳's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the 🐶. For
not by 👮 or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing
a Ⓜ fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, ⭕
hunter, as the great necessities that strike the 😤 to thee!

In 👨, breathing is incessantly going on--1⃣ breath only serving
for 2⃣ or 3⃣ pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
attend to, waking or 😴, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
Sperm 🐳 only breathes about 1⃣ seventh or Sunday of his time.

It has been said that the 🐳 only breathes through his spout-hole; if
it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then
I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell
seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all
answers to his 👃 is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged
with 2⃣ elements, it could not be expected to have the 🏢 of
smelling. But owing to the ㊙ of the spout--whether it be water or
whether it be vapour--no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on
this ❓. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm 🐳 has no proper
olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no
Cologne-water in the 🌊.

Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the 🚇 of his spouting
canal, and as that long canal--like the Ⓜ Erie Canal--is furnished
with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of
air or the 🆙 exclusion of water, therefore the 🐳 has no 🔉;
unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles,
he talks through his 👃. But then again, what has the 🐳 to say?
Seldom have I known any 🔉 being that had anything to say to
this 👨, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
living. Oh! happy that the 👨 is such an excellent listener!

Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm 🐳, chiefly intended as it
is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid 🔛,
horizontally, just beneath the upper 🌹 of his ❓, and a little
to 1⃣ side; this curious canal is very much like a 🔫-pipe laid down
in a city on 1⃣ side of a street. But the ❓ returns whether this
🔫-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the
Sperm 🐳 is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that
exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the 👄, and
discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the 👄 indirectly
communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this
is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because
the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm 🐳's food is far beneath
the 🌹, and there he cannot spout 😳 if he would. Besides, if
you regard him very closely, and time him with your ⌚, you will find
that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods
of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.

But why 🐛 1⃣ with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
tell water from air? My dear sir, in this 👨 it is not so easy to
settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
knottiest of all. And as for this 🐳 spout, you might almost 🐻 in
it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.

The 🔑 body of it is ㊙ in the snowy sparkling ☁ enveloping
it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,
when, always, when you are 🔚 enough to a 🐳 to get a 🔚 ⌚
of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading
all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really
perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are
not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they
are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole
fissure, which is countersunk into the 🔝 of the 🐳's ❓? For
😳 when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day 🌊 in a calm, with
his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; 😳 then,
the 🐳 always carries a small basin of water on his ❓, as under
a blazing sun you will sometimes 📅 a cavity in a rock filled up with
rain.

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
precise nature of the 🐳 spout. It will not do for him to be peering
into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot ❌ with your pitcher to
this ⛲ and 😆 it, and bring it away. For 😳 when coming into
slight 🔗 with the outer, vapoury shreds of the ⛲, which will
often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of
the thing so touching it. And I know 1⃣, who coming into 😯 closer
🔗 with the spout, whether with some scientific object in ⌚,
or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.
Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much ❓
it, that if the ⛲ is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let
this deadly spout alone.

😯, we can hypothesize, 😳 if we cannot 🌹 and establish. My
hypothesis is this: that the spout is 0⃣ but ☁. And besides
other reasons, to this 🔚 I am impelled, by considerations
touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm 🐳;
I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and 🔉. And I am
convinced that from the heads of all ponderous 🔉 beings, such as
Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes
up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the
curiosity to 🚉 a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,
a curious involved worming and 👋 in the 🏧 over my
❓. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after 6⃣ cups of hot 🍵 in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon;
this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, 🌁 monster, to
behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical 🌊; his vast, mild
❓ overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable
contemplations, and that vapour--as you will sometimes 📅 it--glorified
by a 🌈, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
For, d'ye 📅, rainbows do not 📲 the 🔝 air; they only irradiate
vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then 💨, enkindling my ☁ with a
heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few 🔛 with them, have intuitions. Doubts
of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this
combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a 👨 who
regards them both with equal ♥.



CHAPTER 86. The 💩.


Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft ♥ of the antelope,
and the lovely plumage of the 🐦 that never alights; less celestial, I
celebrate a 💩.

Reckoning the largest sized Sperm 🐳's 💩 to begin at that point of
the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a 👨, it comprises
upon its upper 🌹 alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The
compact round body of its root expands into 2⃣ broad, 🏠, flat palms
or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.
At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways
recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In
no living thing are the lines of 🍑 more exquisitely defined than in
the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the
full grown 🐳, the 💩 will considerably 🔝 twenty feet across.

The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
into it, and you find that 3⃣ distinct strata compose it:--upper,
♥, and 😦. The fibres in the upper and 😦 layers, are
long and horizontal; those of the ♥ 1⃣, very short, and 🏃
crosswise between the outside layers. This triune 🚧, as much as
anything else, imparts 🏢 to the 💩. To the student of old Roman
walls, the ♥ layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
🏃 of tiles always alternating with the 💎 in those wonderful
relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
great strength of the masonry.

But as if this vast local 🏢 in the tendinous 💩 were not enough,
the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
and 🏃 down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
largely contribute to their might; so that in the 💩 the confluent
measureless 🐏 of the whole 🐳 seems concentrated to a point.
Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.

Nor does this--its amazing strength, at all 🏃 to cripple the graceful
flexion of its motions; where infantileness of 😌 undulates through
a Titanism of 🏢. On the contrary, those motions derive their most
appalling 🍑 from it. Real strength never impairs 🍑 or harmony,
but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,
strength has much to do with the magic. 🉑 away the tied tendons that
all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its
charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the
naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the
👨, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints 😳 God
the 🔰 in 👨 form, 🎶 what robustness is there. And whatever
they may reveal of the divine love in the 👦, the soft, curled,
hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
successfully embodied; these pictures, so 😇 as they are of all
💪, hint 0⃣ of any 🏢, but the mere negative, feminine
1⃣ of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form
the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.

Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in 💢, whatever be the mood it
be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
fairy's arm can 🔝 it.

5⃣ great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a 5⃣ for
progression; 🔙, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.

First: Being horizontal in its 🏢, the Leviathan's 💩 acts in
a different manner from the tails of all other 🌊 creatures. It never
wriggles. In 👨 or 🐟, wriggling is a 🏠 of inferiority. To the
🐳, his 💩 is the sole means of propulsion. 📜-wise coiled
forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung 🔙, it is this
which gives that singular darting, leaping ❓ to the monster when
furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.

🔙: It is a little significant, that while 1⃣ sperm 🐳 only
fights another sperm 🐳 with his ❓ and jaw, nevertheless, in his
conflicts with 👨, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his 💩. In
striking at a ⛵, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the
blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed
air, especially if it descend to its 🎶, the stroke is then simply
irresistible. No ribs of 👨 or ⛵ can withstand it. Your only
salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the
opposing water, then partly owing to the ✨ buoyancy of the 🐳
⛵, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed
plank or 2⃣, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most
serious 🍃. These submerged side blows are so often received in the
fishery, that they are accounted mere 👶's 🏃. Some 1⃣ strips off
a 👗, and the hole is stopped.

Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the 🐳
the sense of 👻 is concentrated in the 💩; for in this respect
there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the
🐘's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of
sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the 🐳 with a certain soft
slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the 🌹
of the 🌊; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor,
whiskers and all. What ♥ there is in that preliminary 👻!
Had this 💩 any prehensile 🏢, I should straightway bethink me of
Darmonodes' 🐘 that so frequented the 🌼-market, and with
low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their
zones. On more accounts than 1⃣, a pity it is that the 🐳 does not
possess this prehensile virtue in his 💩; for I have heard of yet
another 🐘, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk
and extracted the 💨.

Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the 🐳 in the fancied security of the
♥ of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence
of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the 🌊 as if it were a
hearth. But 😯 you 📅 his 🏢 in his 🏃. The broad palms of
his 💩 are flirted high into the air; then smiting the 🌹, the
thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great
🔫 had been discharged; and if you noticed the ✨ wreath of vapour
from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was
the 🚬 from the 👻-hole.

Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
lie considerably below the 😳 of his 🔙, they are then completely
out of sight beneath the 🌹; but when he is about to plunge into
the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
downwards 💨 out of ⌚. Excepting the sublime BREACH--somewhere
else to be described--this peaking of the 🐳's flukes is perhaps the
grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
profundities the gigantic 💩 seems spasmodically snatching at the
highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth
his 😧 colossal claw from the 🔥 Baltic of Hell. But in
gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in
the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the
archangels. Standing at the mast-❓ of my 🚢 during a 🌅 that
crimsoned sky and 🌊, I once saw a large herd of whales in the 🇪🇸,
all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with
peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a Ⓜ embodiment
of adoration of the gods was never beheld, 😳 in Persia, the 🏠 of
the 🔥 worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
🐘, I then testified of the 🐳, pronouncing him the most devout
of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of
antiquity often hailed the 🌅 with their trunks uplifted in the
profoundest 😯.

The chance comparison in this chapter, between the 🐳 and the
🐘, so far as some aspects of the 💩 of the 1⃣ and the trunk
of the other are concerned, should not 🏃 to 🚉 those 2⃣
opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
respectively belong. For as the mightiest 🐘 is but a terrier
to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan's 💩, his trunk is but the
stalk of a lily. The most 😨 blow from the 🐘's trunk were as
the playful 🐛 of a fan, compared with the measureless 🐚 and 💨
of the sperm 🐳's ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have
1⃣ after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews
into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*


*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the 🐳
and the 🐘 is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the
🐘 stands in much the same respect to the 🐳 that a 🐶 does to
the 🐘; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the 🐘
will often 🏃 up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it,
⛲ it forth in a stream.


The more I consider this mighty 💩, the more do I deplore my inability
to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
would well grace the 🚹 of 👨, remain wholly inexplicable. In an
extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these ㊙ gestures,
that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to 😇-Mason
signs and symbols; that the 🐳, indeed, by these methods
intelligently conversed with the 👨. Nor are there wanting other
motions of the 🐳 in his general body, full of strangeness, and
unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may,
then, I but ❌ skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know
not 😳 the 💩 of this 🐳, how understand his ❓? much more,
how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Ⓜ shalt 📅 my 🔙
parts, my 💩, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I
cannot completely 💩 out his 🔙 parts; and hint what he will about
his face, I say again he has no face.



CHAPTER 87. The Ⓜ Armada.


The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-🇪🇸 from
the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.
In a continuous 🎶 from that peninsula stretch the long islands of
Sumatra, ☕, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a
vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia,
and dividing the long unbroken Indian 🌊 from the thickly studded
oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
for the 🚻 of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the
straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels
bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.

Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from ☕; and standing
midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
promontory, known to seamen as ☕ ❓; they not a little correspond
to the 🔑 gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,
and gold, and ivory, with which the Ⓜ islands of that oriental
🌊 are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least 🉑 the
appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
western 👨. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied
with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these
Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered 🔝-sails from
the endless procession of ships before the 👃, which for centuries
past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
and ☕, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the 🇪🇸. But while
they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce
their claim to more solid tribute.

Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among
the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the
vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the
point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they
have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these
corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, 😳 at the 🎁
day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in
those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.

With a fair, 🆕 👃, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan 🌊, and
thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and
there by the Sperm 🐳, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and
gain the far coast of 🗾, in time for the great whaling season there.
By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the
known Sperm 🐳 cruising grounds of the 👨, previous to descending
upon the 🎶 in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else 😞
in his pursuit, firmly counted upon 🎁 battle to Moby Dick, in the
🌊 he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most
reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.

But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab 👻 no land? does his crew
drink air? Surely, he will 🔚 for water. Nay. For a long time, now,
the circus-🏃 sun has raced within his fiery ☎, and needs
no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. 🎶 this, too, in the
whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with 👽 stuff, to be
transferred to 👽 wharves; the 👨-wandering 🐳-🚢 carries
no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
whole lake's contents bottled in her ample 📖. She is ballasted with
utilities; not altogether with unusable 🐷-🍃 and kentledge. She
carries years' water in her. 🔝 old 🌼 Nantucket water; which,
when 3⃣ years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from
the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may
have gone to China from 🆕 York, and 🔙 again, touching at a score
of ports, the 🐳-🚢, in all that interval, may not have sighted
1⃣ grain of soil; her crew having seen no 👨 but floating seamen like
themselves. So that did you 🏃 them the news that another flood had
come; they would only answer--"Well, boys, here's the ark!"

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
☕, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
the ⚓, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
excellent 🏢 for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more
and more upon ☕ ❓, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
land 🔜 loomed on the starboard 🙇, and with delighted nostrils
the 🆕 cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a 1⃣ ⛲ was
descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any 🔙
hereabouts, the 🚢 had well nigh entered the straits, when the
customary cheering 😢 was heard from aloft, and ere long a 👓 of
singular magnificence saluted us.

But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which
of late they have been hunted over all 4⃣ oceans, the Sperm Whales,
instead of almost invariably sailing in small 🆓 companies, as in
former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes
embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if
numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual
assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm 🐳 into
such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that 😳 in the
best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months
together, without being greeted by a 1⃣ spout; and then be suddenly
saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.

Broad on both bows, at the distance of some 2⃣ or 3⃣ miles, and
forming a great semicircle, embracing 1⃣ half of the 😳 horizon,
a continuous chain of 🐳-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular 👫-jets of the Right
🐳, which, dividing at 🔝, fall over in 2⃣ branches, like the cleft
drooping boughs of a willow, the 1⃣ forward-slanting spout of the
Sperm 🐳 presents a thick curled bush of white ☁, continually
rising and falling away to leeward.

Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would 🌹 on a high hill of
the 🌊, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the
air, and beheld through a blending 🏧 of bluish haze, showed
like the Ⓜ cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
of a balmy autumnal 🌅, by some horseman on a 🔝.

As marching armies approaching an unfriendly ☁ in the mountains,
accelerate their march, all eagerness to 🚉 that perilous passage in
their 🌹, and once more 💥 in comparative security upon the plain;
😳 so did this vast 🎯 of whales now seem hurrying forward through
the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
swimming on, in 1⃣ solid, but 😯 crescentic ♥.

Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers
handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their
yet suspended boats. If the 👃 only held, little ❓ had they, that
chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy
into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their
number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated 🚋, Moby
Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
white-🐘 in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with
stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed 🔛, driving these leviathans
before us; when, of a sudden, the 🔉 of Tashtego was heard, loudly
directing attention to something in our wake.

Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our 🌹.
It seemed formed of 🆓 white vapours, rising and falling something
like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and
❌; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling
his 👓 at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole,
crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the
sails;--Malays, sir, and after us!"

As if too long lurking 💺 the headlands, till the Pequod should
fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot
pursuit, to 💩 up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift
Pequod, with a 🆕 ⭐ 👃, was herself in hot 🐶; how very
kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to
her own chosen pursuit,--mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they
were. As with 👓 under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his
forward 🔧 beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after 1⃣ the
bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed
his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery ☁ in
which the 🚢 was then sailing, and bethought him that through that
gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that
same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly 🔚;
and not only that, but a herd of remorseless 😠 pirates and
inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their
curses;--when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's
brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some
stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the 🏠
thing from its 🚉.

But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
Pequod at 🔚 shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
side, emerging at 🔚 upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining
upon the 🚢, than to 😂 that the 🚢 had so victoriously gained
upon the Malays. But 😯 driving on in the wake of the whales, at
length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the 🚢 neared them;
and the 👃 now dying away, word was passed to ⛲ to the boats. But
no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm
🐳, become notified of the 3⃣ keels that were after them,--though
as yet a mile in their 🌹,--than they rallied again, and forming
in 🔚 ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like
flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.

Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the 🐶,
when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
token that they were now at 🔚 under the influence of that strange
perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive
it in the 🐳, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns
in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
😕 up in 1⃣ measureless rout; and like King Porus' elephants in the
Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation.
In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly
swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they
plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was 😯 more
strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed
as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the
🌊. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple 🐑, pursued over
the pasture by 3⃣ fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced
such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic
of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of
thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a
solitary horseman. Witness, too, all 👨 beings, how when herded
together in the sheepfold of a 🏠's pit, they will, at the
slightest alarm of 🔥, 👢 helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to 🔚. Best,
therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales
before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
infinitely outdone by the 😡 of 🚹.

Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent ❓,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in 1⃣ 🚉. As is customary in
those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some 1⃣
lone 🐳 on the outskirts of the 🏫. In about 3⃣ minutes' time,
Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken 🐟 darted blinding spray
in our faces, and then 🏃 away with us like ✨, steered straight
for the ♥ of the herd. Though such a movement on the 🏢 of the
🐳 struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and
indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it 🎁
1⃣ of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift
monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic 🏫, you 📲
adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.

As, blind and deaf, the 🐳 plunged forward, as if by sheer 🏢 of
speed to 🆓 himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
thus tore a white gash in the 🌊, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset ⛵ was
like a 🚢 mobbed by 🎇-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
moment it may be locked in and crushed.

But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away
from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the
time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in 🚹, pricking out of our
way whatever whales he could ✋ by short darts, for there was no time
to 💩 long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted
duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the
shouting 🏢 of the business. "Out of the way, Commodore!" cried 1⃣,
to a great dromedary that of a sudden 🌹 bodily to the 🌹,
and for an 💓 threatened to swamp us. "Hard down with your 💩,
there!" cried a 🔙 to another, which, 🔚 to our gunwale, seemed
calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.

All whaleboats 🏃 certain curious contrivances, originally invented
by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. 2⃣ thick squares of wood
of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each
other's grain at right angles; a 🎶 of considerable length is then
attached to the ♥ of this block, and the other 🔚 of the 🎶
being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales
are 🔚 round you than you can possibly 🐶 at 1⃣ time. But sperm
whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must
kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing
them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it
is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our ⛵
was furnished with 3⃣ of them. The first and 🔙 were successfully
darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly 🏃 off, fettered by the
enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like
malefactors with the chain and 🍳. But upon flinging the third, in the
act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under 1⃣
of the seats of the ⛵, and in an 💓 tore it out and carried it
away, dropping the oarsman in the ⛵'s 💺 as the 💺 slid from
under him. On both sides the 🌊 came in at the wounded planks, but we
stuffed 2⃣ or 3⃣ drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for
the time.

It had been next to impossible to 💨 these drugged-harpoons, were
it not that as we advanced into the herd, our 🐳's way greatly
diminished; moreover, that as we went 😯 further and further from the
circumference of commotion, the 😨 disorders seemed waning. So that
when at 🔚 the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing 🐳 sideways
vanished; then, with the tapering 🐏 of his 🍃 momentum, we
glided between 2⃣ whales into the innermost ♥ of the 🏫, as if
from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here
the storms in the 💥 glens between the outermost whales, were heard
but not felt. In this 🔑 expanse the 🌊 presented that smooth
satin-like 🌹, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture
thrown off by the 🐳 in his more 😯 moods. Yes, we were now
in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the ♥ of every
commotion. And 😯 in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of
the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, 8⃣
or ❌ in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of
horses in a ☎; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic
circus-rider might easily have over-arched the ♥ ones, and so have
gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing
whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no
possible chance of 🏃 was at 🎁 afforded us. We must ⌚ for
a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only
admitted us in ♣ to shut us up. Keeping at the ♥ of the lake,
we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women
and children of this routed host.

Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in
any 1⃣ of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by
the whole multitude, must have contained at least 2⃣ or 3⃣ square
miles. At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might be
deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low ⛵ that
seemed playing up almost from the 👄 of the horizon. I 🎶 this
circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely
locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the
herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
stopping; or, possibly, being so 🆕, unsophisticated, and every way
😇 and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
whales--now and then visiting our becalmed ⛵ from the margin of the
lake--evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a 😯
becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like 🏠
dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and
touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched
their backs with his lance; but 😨 of the consequences, for the
time refrained from darting it.

But far beneath this wondrous 👨 upon the 🌹, another and 😯
👽 👨 met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended
in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed 🔜 to
become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
exceedingly transparent; and as 👨 infants while suckling will calmly
and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if ⭐ 2⃣ different
lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be 😯
spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--😳 so did the
🆕 of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if
we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their 🆕-born sight. Floating on their
sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. 1⃣ of these little
infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some 6⃣ feet in
girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
recovered from that irksome 🏢 it had so lately occupied in the
maternal reticule; where, 💩 to ❓, and all ready for the final
⛲, the unborn 🐳 lies bent like a 🐉's 🙇. The delicate
side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, 😯 🆕 retained the
plaited crumpled appearance of a 👶's ears 🆕 arrived from 👽
parts.

"🎶! 🎶!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him
fast!--Who 🎶 him! Who struck?--2⃣ 🐳; 1⃣ big, 1⃣ little!"

"What ails ye, 👨?" cried Starbuck.

"Look-🇪🇸 here," said Queequeg, pointing down.

As when the stricken 🐳, that from the 🛀 has reeled out hundreds of
fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows
the slackened curling 🎶 buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the
air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
Leviathan, by which the 🆕 cub seemed 😯 tethered to its dam. Not
seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the 🐶, this natural 🎶, with
the maternal 🔚 🆓, becomes entangled with the hempen 1⃣, so that
the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas
seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw 🆕 Leviathan
amours in the deep.*


*The sperm 🐳, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
most other 🐟, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
which may probably be 👗 down at ♣ months, producing but 1⃣ at a
time; though in some few known instances 🎁 🐻 to an Esau and
Jacob:--a contingency provided for in suckling by 2⃣ teats, curiously
situated, 1⃣ on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves
🏃 🆙 from that. When by chance these precious parts in a
nursing 🐳 are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk
and blood rivallingly discolour the 🌊 for rods. The milk is very sweet
and rich; it has been tasted by 👨; it might do well with strawberries.
When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute MORE HOMINUM.


And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations
and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the ♥ freely and
fearlessly 👶 in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled
in dalliance and 😂. But 😳 so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of
my being, do I myself 😯 for ever centrally disport in 🔇 calm; and
while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and
deep inland there I 😯 🛀 me in eternal mildness of 😂.

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,
😯 engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or
possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of
room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight
of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro
across the circles, was 0⃣ to what at 🔚 met our eyes. It is
sometimes the 🛃 when fast to a 🐳 more than commonly powerful
and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
maiming his gigantic 💩-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled
cutting-♠, to which is attached a rope for hauling it 🔙 again.
A 🐳 wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this 🏢, but not
effectually, as it seemed, had 😕 away from the ⛵, carrying 🔛
with him half of the harpoon 🎶; and in the extraordinary agony of
the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone
mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay
wherever he went.

But agonizing as was the wound of this 🐳, and an appalling 👓
enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to
inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the
intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that
by 1⃣ of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this 🐳 had
become entangled in the harpoon-🎶 that he towed; he had also 🏃
away with the cutting-♠ in him; and while the 😇 🔚 of the rope
attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the
harpoon-🎶 round his 💩, the cutting-♠ itself had worked 🆓
from his flesh. So that 😧 to 😡, he was now churning
through the water, violently flailing with his flexible 💩, and
tossing the keen ♠ about him, wounding and murdering his own
comrades.

This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their
stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake
began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted
by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to
heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;
in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more 🔑
circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was
departing. A low advancing hum was 🔜 heard; and then like to the
tumultuous masses of block-🎇 when the great river Hudson breaks up in
⛲, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner ♥,
as if to pile themselves up in 1⃣ common mountain. Instantly Starbuck
and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the 💩.

"Oars! Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--"gripe your
oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, 🚹, 🐻 by! Shove him off,
you Queequeg--the 🐳 there!--😭 him!--💥 him! 🐻 up--🐻
up, and stay so! ⛲, 🚹--🔧, 🚹; never mind their backs--scrape
them!--scrape away!"

The ⛵ was now all but jammed between 2⃣ vast black bulks, leaving a
narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor
we at 🔚 shot into a temporary opening; then 🎁 way rapidly,
and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many
similar hair-breadth escapes, we at 🔚 swiftly glided into what had
just been 1⃣ of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales,
all violently making for 1⃣ ♥. This lucky salvation was cheaply
purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows
to 😭 the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his ❓ by
the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a 👫 of broad flukes 🔚
by.

Riotous and 😕 as the universal commotion now was, it 🔜
resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
clumped together at 🔚 in 1⃣ dense body, they then renewed their
onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but
the boats 😯 lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales
might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure 1⃣ which Flask had
killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, 2⃣ or 3⃣ of which
are carried by every ⛵; and which, when additional 🔙 is at 🚹,
are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead 🐳, both to
🎶 its 🚉 on the 🌊, and also as token of prior possession, should
the boats of any other 🚢 🏃 near.

The 🍃 of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less 🐟. Of all the
drugged whales only 1⃣ was captured. The rest contrived to 🏃 for
the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other
craft than the Pequod.



CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.


The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
vast aggregations.

Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
have been seen, 😳 at the 🎁 day, small 🆓 bands are
occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.
Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of 2⃣ sorts; those
composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but 🆕
vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.

In cavalier attendance upon the 🏫 of females, you invariably 📅 a
male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
his gallantry by falling in the 🌹 and covering the flight of his
ladies. In truth, this 👨 is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
over the watery 👨, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces
and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and
his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
leviathanic proportions, the ladies, 😳 at full growth, are not
more than 1⃣-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to 🔝 half a dozen
yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to EMBONPOINT.

It is very curious to ⌚ this harem and its lord in their indolent
ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the 🏃 in leisurely
search of variety. You 😆 them on the 🎶 in time for the full 🌼
of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from
spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all
unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and
down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental
waters in anticipation of the 🆒 season there, and so evade the other
excessive temperature of the year.

When serenely advancing on 1⃣ of these journeys, if any strange
suspicious sights are seen, my lord 🐳 keeps a wary ♥ on his
interesting 🏠. Should any unwarrantably pert 🆕 Leviathan coming
that way, presume to 🏃 confidentially 🔚 to 1⃣ of the ladies,
with what prodigious 😡 the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!
High times, indeed, if unprincipled 🆕 rakes like him are to be
permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the
Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed;
for, alas! all 🐟 bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the
most 😨 duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales,
who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with
their long 😦 jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving
for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not
a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,--furrowed
heads, 😕 teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and
dislocated mouths.

But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
the first 👢 of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to ⌚
that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and
revels there awhile, 😯 in tantalizing vicinity to 🆕 Lothario,
like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his Ⓜ concubines.
Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom 🍃
🐶 to 1⃣ of these Ⓜ Turks; for these Ⓜ Turks are too 🚿
of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the
sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
🉑 😟 of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For
like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord
🐳 has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so,
being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the
👨; every 👶 an 👽. In 🔉 time, nevertheless, as the 🔥
of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends
her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated
Turk; then a love of 😌 and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our
Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, ⚠ stage of life,
forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an ⚠, sulky old
soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his
prayers, and ⚠ each 🆕 Leviathan from his amorous errors.

Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a 🏫, so
is the lord and master of that 🏫 technically known as the
schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably
satirical, that after going to 🏫 himself, he should then ❌ abroad
inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title,
schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the 🔑 bestowed
upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the 👨 who first
thus entitled this sort of Ottoman 🐳, must have ® the memoirs of
Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that
famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of
those ㊙ lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.

The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster 🐳
betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
Whales. Almost universally, a lone 🐳--as a solitary Leviathan is
called--proves an ancient 1⃣. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone,
he will have no 1⃣ near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to
wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though
she keeps so many moody secrets.

The schools composing none but 🆕 and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while
those female whales are characteristically timid, the 🆕 males, or
forty-barrel-bulls, as they ☎ them, are by far the most pugnacious
of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.

The Forty-barrel-🐷 schools are larger than the harem schools. Like
a 💍 of 🆕 collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
tumbling round the 👨 at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous
lad at Yale or Harvard. They 🔜 🆓 this turbulence though,
and when about 3⃣-fourths grown, break up, and separately ❌ about in
quest of settlements, that is, harems.

Another point of difference between the male and female schools is
😯 more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
Forty-barrel-🐷--poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike
a member of the harem 🏫, and her companions swim around her with
every token of 😟, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as
themselves to fall a prey.



CHAPTER 89. Fast-🐟 and 🆓-🐟.


The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the 🔚 chapter but 1⃣,
necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the 🐳
fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the Ⓜ 🔣 and badge.

It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,
a 🐳 may be struck by 1⃣ vessel, then 🏃, and be finally killed
and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised
many 🔞 contingencies, all partaking of this 1⃣ Ⓜ feature. For
example,--after a 😩 and perilous 🐶 and capture of a 🐳,
the body may get 🆓 from the 🚢 by reason of a violent 😡; and
drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a 🔙 whaler, who, in a
calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or 🎶. Thus
the most vexatious and violent disputes would often 🌹 between
the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,
undisputed law applicable to all cases.

Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative
enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in
A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling
law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and
lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse
comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of
the Chinese ♣ for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's
Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing,
or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.

I. A Fast-🐟 belongs to the party fast to it.

2⃣. A 🆓-🐟 is fair 🔙 for anybody who can soonest ⌚ it.

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
brevity of it, which necessitates a vast 📖 of commentaries to
expound it.

First: What is a Fast-🐟? Alive or dead a 🐟 is technically fast,
when it is connected with an occupied 🚢 or ⛵, by any medium at all
controllable by the occupant or occupants,--a mast, an oar, a ♣-inch
cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.
Likewise a 🐟 is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other
recognised 🔣 of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly
evince their ability at any time to 🉑 it alongside, as well as their
intention so to do.

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks--the
Coke-upon-Littleton of the ✊. True, among the more upright and
honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,
where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for 1⃣ party to claim
possession of a 🐳 previously chased or killed by another party. But
others are by no means so scrupulous.

Some fifty years ago there was a curious 🐚 of 🐳-trover litigated
in England, wherein the plaintiffs 👗 forth that after a hard 🐶 of
a 🐳 in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
succeeded in harpooning the 🐟; they were at 🔚, through peril of
their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their ⛵
itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another 🚢) came up
with the 🐳, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were
remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs'
teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done,
he would now retain their 🎶, harpoons, and ⛵, which had remained
attached to the 🐳 at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the
plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their 🐳, 🎶,
harpoons, and ⛵.

Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was
the judge. In the 🏃 of the defence, the witty Erskine went on
to illustrate his 🏢, by alluding to a recent crim. con.
🐚, wherein a 👨, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's
viciousness, had at 🔚 abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
the 🏃 of years, repenting of that 👣, he instituted an action to
recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he
then supported it by saying, that though the 👨 had originally
harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the
great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at 🔚 abandoned her; yet
abandon her he did, so that she became a 🆓-🐟; and therefore
when a subsequent 👨 re-harpooned her, the lady then became that
subsequent 👨's property, 🔛 with whatever harpoon might have
been found 😌 in her.

Now in the 🎁 🐚 Erskine contended that the examples of the 🐳
and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.

These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
learned Judge in 👗 terms decided, to wit,--That as for the ⛵, he
awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it
to 😌 their lives; but that with regard to the controverted 🐳,
harpoons, and 🎶, they belonged to the defendants; the 🐳, because
it was a 🆓-🐟 at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons
and 🎶 because when the 🐟 made off with them, it (the 🐟)
acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards
took the 🐟 had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took
the 🐟; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.

A common 👨 looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the
matter, the 2⃣ great principles laid down in the 👫 whaling laws
previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in
the above cited 🐚; these 2⃣ laws touching Fast-🐟 and 🆓-🐟,
I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all 👨
jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture,
the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but 2⃣
props to 🐻 on.

Is it not a saying in every 1⃣'s 👄, Possession is half of the law:
that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often
possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of
Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-🐟, whereof possession is
the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's 🔚
mite but a Fast-🐟? What is yonder undetected villain's marble 🏠
with a 🚪-🐚 for a waif; what is that but a Fast-🐟? What is the
ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone,
the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's 🏠 from starvation;
what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-🐟? What is the Archbishop of
Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant 🍞 and cheese
of hundreds of thousands of 😕-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular L100,000 but a
Fast-🐟? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets
but Fast-🐟? What to that redoubted harpooneer, 🚽 🐷, is poor
Ireland, but a Fast-🐟? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother
Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-🐟? And concerning all these, is not
Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-🐟 be pretty generally applicable,
the kindred doctrine of 🆓-🐟 is 😯 more widely so. That is
internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a 🆓-🐟, in which Columbus struck the
Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India
to England? What at 🔚 will Mexico be to the United States? All
🆓-🐟.

What are the Rights of 👨 and the Liberties of the 👨 but
🆓-🐟? What all 🚹's minds and opinions but 🆓-🐟? What is
the principle of religious belief in them but a 🆓-🐟? What to
the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
🆓-🐟? What is the great globe itself but a 🆓-🐟? And what
are you, reader, but a 🆓-🐟 and a Fast-🐟, too?



CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.


"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."
BRACTON, L. 3⃣, 💯. 3⃣.


Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken 🔛 with the
context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
that land, the King, as Honourary Ⓜ Harpooneer, must have the ❓,
and the Queen be respectfully presented with the 💩. A division which,
in the 🐳, is much like halving an 🍎; there is no intermediate
🔚. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in
🐏 in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
touching the general law of Fast and 🆓-🐟, it is here treated of
in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts
the English railways to be at the expense of a separate 🚗, specially
reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first 🚉, in
curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is 😯 in
🐏, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within
the 🔚 2⃣ years.

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some 1⃣
of the 5⃣ Ports, had after a hard 🐶 succeeded in killing and
beaching a 🆗 🐳 which they had originally descried afar off from
the shore. Now the 5⃣ Ports are partially or somehow under the
jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.
Holding the 🏢 directly from the 🔝, I believe, all the royal
emoluments incident to the 5⃣ Port territories become by assignment
his. By some writers this 🏢 is called a sinecure. But not so.
Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his
perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of
them.

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
🐟 high and dry, promising themselves a 🔉 L150 from the precious
oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare 🍵 with their wives, and 🔉
ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up
steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable 👨, with
a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the 🐳's ❓,
he says--"Hands off! this 🐟, my masters, is a Fast-🐟. I seize it
as the Lord Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful
consternation--so truly English--knowing not what to say, fall to
vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing
from the 🐳 to the 👽. But that did in nowise mend the matter,
or at all soften the hard ♥ of the learned 👨 with the copy
of Blackstone. At length 1⃣ of them, after long scratching about for
his ideas, made bold to speak,

"Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"

"The Duke."

"But the duke had 0⃣ to do with taking this 🐟?"

"It is his."

"We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is
all that to ❌ to the Duke's benefit; we getting 0⃣ at all for our
pains but our blisters?"

"It is his."

"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
getting a livelihood?"

"It is his."

"I thought to 🆓 my old bed-ridden mother by 🏢 of my share of
this 🐳."

"It is his."

"Won't the Duke be content with a 💩 or a half?"

"It is his."

In a word, the 🐳 was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the 🐚 might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard 1⃣, an honest clergyman
of the town respectfully addressed a 🎶 to his Grace, begging him to
🉑 the 🐚 of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To
which my Lord Duke in ♥ replied (both letters were published)
that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
obliged to the reverend 👨 if for the future he (the reverend
👨) would decline meddling with other people's business. Is
this the 😯 militant old 👨, standing at the corners of the 3⃣
kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?

It will readily be seen that in this 🐚 the alleged right of the
Duke to the 🐳 was a delegated 1⃣ from the Sovereign. We must needs
inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with
that right. The law itself has already been 👗 forth. But Plowdon gives
us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the 🐳 so caught belongs to
the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence." And by the
soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such
matters.

But why should the King have the ❓, and the Queen the 💩? A reason
for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench
author, 1⃣ William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye 💩 is ye Queen's,
that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone." Now this
was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or
Right 🐳 was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone
is not in the 💩; it is in the ❓, which is a sad mistake for
a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
presented with a 💩? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are 2⃣ royal 🐟 so styled by the English law writers--the 🐳
and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
nominally supplying the tenth branch of the 🔝's ordinary revenue.
I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by
inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same
way as the 🐳, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic ❓
peculiar to that 🐟, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be
humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there
seems a reason in all things, 😳 in law.



CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The 🌹-Bud.


"In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,
insufferable fetor denying not ❓." SIR T. BROWNE, 5⃣.🇪🇸.


It was a week or 2⃣ after the 🔚 whaling scene recounted, and when we
were slowly sailing over a 😪, vapoury, mid-day 🌊, that the many
noses on the Pequod's deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the
3⃣ pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was
smelt in the 🌊.

"I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are
some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
would keel up before long."

🔜, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
lay a 🚢, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of 🐳 must be
alongside. As we glided nearer, the 👽 showed French colours from
his 🔝; and by the eddying ☁ of vulture 🌊-🐦 that circled, and
hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the 🐳 alongside
must be what the fishermen ☎ a blasted 🐳, that is, a 🐳 that
has died unmolested on the 🌊, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.
It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must
exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are
incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded
by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
Yet are there those who will 😯 do it; notwithstanding the fact that
the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and
by no means of the nature of attar-of-🌹.

Coming 😯 nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
had a 🔙 🐳 alongside; and this 🔙 🐳 seemed 😳 more
of a 💐 than the first. In truth, it turned out to be 1⃣ of
those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort
of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies
almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the
proper 🚉 we shall 📅 that no knowing fisherman will ever 🔧
up his 👃 at such a 🐳 as this, however much he may shun blasted
whales in general.

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the 👽, that Stubb vowed
he recognised his cutting ♠-pole entangled in the lines that were
knotted round the 💩 of 1⃣ of these whales.

"There's a pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the
🚢's bows, "there's a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes
of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering
their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm 🐳 spouts; yes,
and sometimes sailing from their port with their 📖 full of boxes of
tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they
will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all
know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our
leavings, the drugged 🐳 there, I mean; aye, and is content too with
scraping the dry bones of that other precious 🐟 he has there. Poor
devil! I say, pass round a hat, some 1⃣, and let's 💩 him a 🎁
of a little oil for dear charity's 🍶. For what oil he'll get from
that drugged 🐳 there, wouldn't be fit to 🔥 in a jail; no, not
in a condemned cell. And as for the other 🐳, why, I'll agree to get
more oil by chopping up and trying out these 3⃣ masts of ours, than
he'll get from that 📦 of bones; though, now that I think of it, it
may 🐻 something worth a 🔉 ✋ more than oil; yes, ambergris.
I ❓ now if our old 👨 has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes,
I'Ⓜ for it;" and so saying he started for the 💩-deck.

By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether
or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of
escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb
now called his ⛵'s crew, and pulled off for the 👽. Drawing
across her 🙇, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French
taste, the upper 🏢 of her 🙇-👨 was carved in the likeness of a
huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had 🐷
spikes 😌 from it here and there; the whole terminating in a
symmetrical folded 💡 of a bright 😳 colour. Upon her ❓ boards, in
large gilt letters, he ® "Bouton de 🌹,"--🌹-button, or 🌹-bud;
and this was the romantic 🔑 of this aromatic 🚢.

Though Stubb did not understand the BOUTON 🏢 of the inscription, yet
the word 🌹, and the bulbous figure-❓ put together, sufficiently
explained the whole to him.

"A wooden 🌹-bud, eh?" he cried with his 🚹 to his 👃, "that will
do very well; but how like all creation it smells!"

Now in ♣ to 📖 🚋 communication with the people on deck, he
had to 🔧 round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come 🔚 to
the blasted 🐳; and so 🍑 over it.

Arrived then at this 🏢, with 1⃣ 🚹 😯 to his 👃, he
bawled--"Bouton-de-🌹, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that
speak English?"

"Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-👨 from the bulwarks, who turned out to be
the chief-👫.

"Well, then, my Bouton-de-🌹-bud, have you seen the White 🐳?"

"WHAT 🐳?"

"The WHITE 🐳--a Sperm 🐳--Moby Dick, have ye seen him?

"Never heard of such a 🐳. Cachalot Blanche! White 🐳--no."

"Very 🔉, then; 🔉 bye now, and I'll ☎ again in a minute."

Then rapidly pulling 🔙 towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning
over the 💩-deck 🚋 awaiting his report, he moulded his 2⃣ hands
into a 🎺 and shouted--"No, Sir! No!" Upon which Ahab retired, and
Stubb returned to the Frenchman.

He now perceived that the Guernsey-👨, who had just got into the
chains, and was using a cutting-♠, had slung his 👃 in a sort of
👜.

"What's the matter with your 👃, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"

"I wish it was 😕, or that I didn't have any 👃 at all!" answered
the Guernsey-👨, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very
much. "But what are you holding YOURS for?"

"Oh, 0⃣! It's a 🌹 👃; I have to 📖 it on. 🆗 day, ain't it?
Air rather gardenny, I should say; 😖 us a bunch of posies, will ye,
Bouton-de-🌹?"

"What in the devil's 🔑 do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman,
flying into a sudden 😡.

"Oh! keep 🆒--🆒? yes, that's the word! why don't you 💍 those
whales in 🎇 while you're 🏃 at 'em? But joking aside, though; do
you know, 🌹-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of
such whales? As for that dried up 1⃣, there, he hasn't a gill in his
whole carcase."

"I know that well enough; but, d'ye 📅, the Captain here won't believe
it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But
come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll
get out of this dirty scrape."

"Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb,
and with that he 🔜 mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented
itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of 😳 worsted, were getting the
🔉 tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow
and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a 🔉 humor. All their
noses 🆙 😌 from their faces like so many jib-booms.
Now and then pairs of them would drop their 🏃, and 🏃 up to the
mast-❓ to get some 🆕 air. Some thinking they would ⌚ the
plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their
nostrils. Others having 😕 the stems of their pipes almost short
off at the 🎳, were vigorously puffing tobacco-🚬, so that it
constantly filled their olfactories.

Stubb was struck by a 🚿 of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
the Captain's round-🏠 abaft; and looking in that direction saw a
fiery face thrust from 💺 the 🚪, which was held ajar from within.
This was the 😧 surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating
against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's
round-🏠 (CABINET he called it) to avoid the pest; but 😯, could
not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.

Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
Guernsey-👨 had a little chat with him, during which the 👽 👫
expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus,
who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-👨
had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
held his peace on that ❓, but otherwise was quite 🐶 and
㊙ with him, so that the 2⃣ quickly concocted a little plan
for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all
dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan
of theirs, the Guernsey-👨, under 🔝 of an interpreter's 🏢, was
to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as
for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in
him during the ❓.

By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
small and dark, but rather delicate looking 👨 for a 🌊-captain, with
large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a 😳 cotton velvet vest
with ⌚-seals at his side. To this 👨, Stubb was now politely
introduced by the Guernsey-👨, who at once ostentatiously put on the
aspect of interpreting between them.

"What shall I say to him first?" said he.

"Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the ⌚ and seals, "you
may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
though I don't pretend to be a judge."

"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-👨, in French, turning to his
captain, "that only yesterday his 🚢 spoke a vessel, whose captain
and chief-👫, with 6⃣ sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
blasted 🐳 they had brought alongside."

Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.

"What now?" said the Guernsey-👨 to Stubb.

"Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
carefully, I'Ⓜ quite certain that he's no more fit to command a
🐳-🚢 than a St. Jago 👿. In fact, tell him from me he's a
baboon."

"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other 🐳, the dried 1⃣, is
far more deadly than the blasted 1⃣; in 🆗, Monsieur, he conjures us,
as we value our lives, to cut 🆓 from these 🐟."

Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud 🔉 commanded his
crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once 🐱 🆓
the cables and chains confining the whales to the 🚢.

"What now?" said the Guernsey-👨, when the Captain had returned to
them.

"Why, let me 📅; yes, you may as well tell him now that--that--in
fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
else."

"He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service to
us."

Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
(meaning himself and 👫) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his
cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.

"He wants you to 🉑 a 👓 of wine with him," said the interpreter.

"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink
with the 👨 I've diddled. In fact, tell him I must ❌."

"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't 🉑 of his drinking; but
that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had
best drop all 4⃣ boats, and 🔧 the 🚢 away from these whales, for
it's so calm they won't drift."

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his ⛵, hailed
the Guernsey-👨 to this effect,--that having a long tow-🎶 in his
⛵, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter
🐳 of the 2⃣ from the 🚢's side. While the Frenchman's boats,
then, were engaged in towing the 🚢 1⃣ way, Stubb benevolently towed
away at his 🐳 the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most
unusually long tow-🎶.

🔜 a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to 🐱 off from the 🐳;
hoisting his boats, the Frenchman 🔜 increased his distance, while the
Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's 🐳. Whereupon Stubb quickly
pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to 🍃 🎶 of
his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous
cunning. Seizing his sharp ⛵-♠, he commenced an excavation in the
body, a little 💺 the side 5⃣. You would almost have thought he was
digging a cellar there in the 🌊; and when at length his ♠ struck
against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and
pottery buried in fat English loam. His ⛵'s crew were all in high
excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as
gold-hunters.

And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
😱, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning
to look 😞, especially as the horrible 💐 increased, when
suddenly from out the very ♥ of this plague, there stole a faint
stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without
being absorbed by it, as 1⃣ river will 🏃 into and then 🔛 with
another, without at all blending with it for a time.

"I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with 😂, striking something in
the subterranean regions, "a 👜! a 👜!"

Dropping his ♠, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls
of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old
cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with
your thumb; it is of a hue between 🐔 and ash colour. And this, 🔉
friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.
Some 6⃣ handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably 😖 in the
🌊, and 😯 more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for
impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board,
else the 🚢 would 📲 them 🔉 bye.



CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.


Now this ambergris is a very curious ♥, and so important as
an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain
Coffin was examined at the 🍰 of the English 🏠 of Commons on that
subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,
the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem
to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for
grey amber, yet the 2⃣ substances are quite distinct. For amber, though
at times found on the 🌊-coast, is also dug up in some far inland
soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the 🌊. Besides,
amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless ♥, used for
👄-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft,
waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in
perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.
The Turks use it in cooking, and also 🏃 it to Mecca, for the same
purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine
merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.

Who would think, then, that such 🆗 ladies and gentlemen should regale
themselves with an ♥ found in the inglorious bowels of a 🐱
🐳! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and
by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the 🐳. How to cure such
a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering 3⃣ or 4⃣
⛵ loads of Brandreth's pills, and then 🏃 out of harm's way, as
laborers do in blasting rocks.

I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain
hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors'
trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were 0⃣
more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.

Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be
found in the ♥ of such decay; is this 0⃣? Bethink thee of that
saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption;
how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise
☎ to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh
the best musk. Also 🍃 not the strange fact that of all things of
ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the
worst.

I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
owing to my anxiety to repel a 👢 often made against whalemen,
and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be
considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of
the Frenchman's 2⃣ whales. Elsewhere in this 📖 the slanderous
aspersion has been disproved, that the 📲 of whaling is throughout
a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They
hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma
🌹?

I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
Greenland whaling ships in London, more than 2⃣ centuries ago. Because
those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at 🌊 as
the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the 🆕 blubber in
small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and 🏃
it 🏠 in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas,
and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding
any other 🏃. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the 📖,
and unloading 1⃣ of these 🐳 cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a
savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an
old city grave-Ⓜ, for the foundations of a Lying-in-🏥.

I partly surmise also, that this wicked 👢 against whalers may be
likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
latter 🔑 is the 1⃣ used by the learned Fogo Von ☺, in his great
🏃 on Smells, a text-📖 on that subject. As its 🔑 imports (smeer,
fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in ♣ to afford a
🚉 for the blubber of the Dutch 🐳 🎯 to be tried out, without
being taken 🏠 to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of
furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full
operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is
quite different with a South 🌊 Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of 4⃣
years perhaps, after completely filling her 📖 with oil, does not,
perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the
state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that
living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by
no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the
people of the ♥ ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by
the 👃. Nor indeed can the 🐳 possibly be otherwise than fragrant,
when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance
of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the
open air. I say, that the ❓ of a Sperm 🐳's flukes above water
dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her 🍛 in a
warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm 🐳 to for 💐,
considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous 🐘, with
jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian
town to do honour to Alexander the Great?



CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.


It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an
event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might 🌹 her own.

Now, in the 🐳 🚢, it is not every 1⃣ that goes in the boats. Some
few hands are reserved called 🚢-keepers, whose province it is to 🏃
the vessel while the boats are pursuing the 🐳. As a general thing,
these 🚢-keepers are as hardy fellows as the 🚹 comprising the boats'
crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or 😨
wight in the 🚢, that wight is certain to be made a 🚢-keeper. It
was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-🔑, Pip by
abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember
his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.

In outer aspect, Pip and 🍞-👦 made a 👫, like a black pony and a
white 1⃣, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
1⃣ eccentric 👫. But while hapless 🍞-👦 was by nature 🔇 and
torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at 💺
very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to
his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with
finer, freer relish than any other 🏃. For blacks, the year's 📆
should ® 0⃣ but 3⃣ 💯 and sixty-5⃣ Fourth of Julys and
🆕 Year's Days. Nor 😁 so, while I write that this little black was
brilliant, for 😳 blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's
peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he
had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly 🌁 his
brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily
😯 in him, in the 🔚 was destined to be luridly illumined by
strange 😠 fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ❌ times the
natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut,
he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at
melodious 😳-tide, with his ☀ ha-ha! had turned the round horizon
into 1⃣ 🌠-belled tambourine. So, though in the 🔝 air of day,
suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered ♦ drop
will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would ® you
the ♦ in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy
⚓, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural
gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then
the evil-blazing ♦, once the divinest 🔣 of the crystal skies,
looks like some 🔝-💎 stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to
the story.

It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman
chanced so to 🔧 his 🚹, as for a time to become quite maimed;
and, temporarily, Pip was put into his 🚉.

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
but happily, for that time, escaped 🔚 🔗 with the 🐳; and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
him, took 😟, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness
to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.

Now upon the 🔙 lowering, the ⛵ paddled upon the 🐳; and as
the 🐟 received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's 💺. The
involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in
🚹, out of the ⛵; and in such a way, that 🏢 of the ☺ 🐳
🎶 coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as
to become entangled in it, when at 🔚 plumping into the water. That
💓 the stricken 🐳 started on a fierce 🏃, the 🎶 swiftly
straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks
of the ⛵, remorselessly dragged there by the 🎶, which had taken
several turns around his chest and neck.

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the 🔥 of the 🏃. He
hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the ⛵-👅 from its sheath,
he suspended its sharp edge over the 🎶, and turning towards Stubb,
exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's blue, choked face
plainly looked, Do, for God's 🍶! All passed in a 💓. In less than
half a minute, this entire thing happened.

"💩 him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the 🐳 was 😖 and Pip was
saved.

So 🔜 as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed
by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these
irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like,
but 😯 half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done,
unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The ♥ was, Never
🌹 from a ⛵, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the
soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, STICK TO THE ⛵, is your
true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM
THE ⛵, is 😯 better. Moreover, as if perceiving at 🔚 that if he
should 🍃 undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving
him too wide a margin to 🌹 in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped
all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the ⛵,
Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you 🌹; mind that. We
can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a 🐳 would sell for
thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. 🉑 that in mind, and
don't 🌹 any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
though 👨 loved his fellow, yet 👨 is a money-making animal, which
propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
he did not breast out the 🎶; and hence, when the 🐳 started to
🏃, Pip was left 💺 on the 🌊, like a hurried traveller's trunk.
Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous,
blue day; the spangled 🌊 calm and 🆒, and flatly stretching away,
all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the
extremest. Bobbing up and down in that 🌊, Pip's ebon ❓ showed
like a ❓ of cloves. No ⛵-👅 was lifted when he fell so rapidly
astern. Stubb's inexorable 🔙 was turned upon him; and the 🐳 was
winged. In 3⃣ minutes, a whole mile of shoreless 🌊 was between
Pip and Stubb. Out from the ♥ of the 🌊, poor Pip turned his
crisp, curling, black ❓ to the sun, another lonely castaway, though
the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open 🌊 is as easy to the
practised 🏊 as to ride in a ⛲-carriage ashore. But the 😨
lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
♥ of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? 🎶, how
when sailors in a dead calm 🛀 in the open 🌊--🎶 how closely they
hug their 🚢 and only coast 🔛 her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
did not mean to, at least. Because there were 2⃣ boats in his wake,
and he supposed, no ❓, that they would of 🏃 come up to Pip very
quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so
called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to
military navies and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
spying whales 🔚 to them on 1⃣ side, turned, and gave 🐶; and
Stubb's ⛵ was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
upon his 🐟, that Pip's ringed horizon began to 💥 around him
miserably. By the merest chance the 🚢 itself at 🔚 rescued him; but
from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at
least, they said he was. The 🌊 had jeeringly kept his finite body
up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.
Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
the unwarped 🔑 👨 glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,
God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters
heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's 🐾 upon the treadle of the
loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So 👨's
insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, 👨
comes at 🔚 to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and
frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his
God.

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
like abandonment befell myself.



CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the 🚹.


That 🐳 of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to
the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations
previously detailed, were regularly gone through, 😳 to the baling of
the Heidelburgh Tun, or 🐚.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed
in dragging away the larger tubs, so 🔜 as filled with the sperm; and
when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
others, I sat down before a large Constantine's 🛀 of it, I found
it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the
liquid 🏢. It was our business to squeeze these lumps 🔙 into fluid.
A sweet and unctuous duty! No ❓ that in old times this sperm was
such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a
softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for
only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to
serpentine and spiralise.

As I sat there at my 😌, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
😓 at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the 🚢 under
indolent sail, and gliding so serenely 🔛; as I bathed my hands among
those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within
the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of ⛲
violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky
meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible
sperm, I washed my hands and my ♥ of it; I almost began to credit
the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying
the heat of 💢; while bathing in that 🛀, I felt divinely 😇 from
all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the 🌅 long; I squeezed that sperm
till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
feeling did this avocation beget; that at 🔚 I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as
much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come;
let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
👨 must eventually 😦, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable
felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in
the wife, the ♥, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the
country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze 🐚
eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things
akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm 🐳 for the
try-works.

First comes white-🐴, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
🏢 of the 🐟, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It
is tough with congealed tendons--a 🐏 of 💪--but 😯 contains
some oil. After being severed from the 🐳, the white-🐴 is first
cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like
blocks of Berkshire marble.

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
🐳's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is
a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its 🔑
imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
snowy and golden ⚓, dotted with spots of the deepest 😊 and
purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason,
it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole
💺 the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive
a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted,
supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an
unusually 🆗 vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another ♥, and a very singular 1⃣, which turns up in
the 🏃 of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
adequately to 🔑. It is called slobgollion; an appellation
original with the whalemen, and 😳 so is the nature of the ♥.
It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the
tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.
I 📖 it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the 🐚,
coalescing.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
dark, glutinous ♥ which is scraped off the 🔙 of the Greenland
or right 🐳, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior
souls who 🏃 that ignoble Leviathan.

Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the 🐳's vocabulary.
But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's 🍟 is
a short 🏠 strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering 🏢 of
Leviathan's 💩: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is
about the size of the iron 🏢 of a hoe. Edgewise moved 🔛 the
oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless
blandishments, as of magic, allures 🔛 with it all impurities.

But to ⌚ all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long 🍑 with its inmates.
This 🚉 has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the 🐳. When the proper
time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of
terror to all tyros, especially by night. On 1⃣ side, lit by a 🔇
🏮, a space has been left 🔝 for the workmen. They generally
❌ in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a ♠-👨. The whaling-pike is
similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same 🔑. The gaff is
something like a ⛵-👮. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
sheet of blubber, and strives to 📖 it from slipping, as the 🚢
pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the ♠-👨 stands on the sheet
itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable 🐴-pieces. This
♠ is sharp as hone can 💩 it; the spademan's feet are shoeless;
the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from
him, like a sledge. If he cuts off 1⃣ of his own toes, or 1⃣ of his
assistants', would you be very much 😲? Toes are scarce among
veteran blubber-room 🚹.



CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.


Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
🚉-mortemizing of the 🐳; and had you strolled forward nigh the
windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
there, lying 🔛 lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
cistern in the 🐳's huge ❓; not the prodigy of his unhinged 😦
jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical 💩; none of these would so
surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,--longer than
a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a 🐾 in diameter at the 🐾, and ⛲-black
as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or,
rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in
the ㊙ groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
King Asa, her 👦, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it
for an abomination at the 🐻 Kedron, as darkly 👗 forth in the 15th
chapter of the First 📖 of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes 🔛, and assisted
by 2⃣ allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners ☎ it,
and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier
carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle
deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an
African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside
out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a 🔉 stretching, so as almost to
🔁 its diameter; and at 🔚 hangs it, well spread, in the rigging,
to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some 3⃣ feet of it,
towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting 2⃣ slits for arm-holes
at the other 🔚, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer
now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his 📲.
Immemorial to all his ♣, this investiture alone will adequately
protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his 🏢.

That 🏢 consists in mincing the 🐴-pieces of blubber for the
pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden 🐴, planted
endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious 🛀 beneath it, into
which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's
desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent
on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a
Pope were this mincer!*


*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable 😢 from the mates
to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his 🏃 into as
thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of
boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably
increased, besides perhaps 🆙 it in quality.



CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.


Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed 🚢.
It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her
planks.

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
roomy 🏢 of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and
mortar, some ❌ feet by 8⃣ square, and 5⃣ in 🔝. The
🐾 does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly
secured to the 🌹 by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all
sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
with wood, and at 🔝 completely covered by a large, sloping, battened
hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, 2⃣ in
number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are
kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone
and sand, till they shine within like silver 👊-bowls. During the
night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and 📜
themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them--1⃣
👨 in each 🚽, side by side--many ㊙ communications
are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a 🚉 also for 🔉
mathematical meditation. It was in the left 🚹 try-🚽 of the Pequod,
with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first
indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies
gliding 🔛 the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from
any point in precisely the same time.

Removing the 🔥-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the 2⃣ iron mouths of
the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted
with 🔉 doors of iron. The intense heat of the 🔥 is prevented
from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
extending under the entire inclosed 🌹 of the works. By a tunnel
inserted at the 🌹, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open 🚋
from the 🌹 wall. And here let us ❌ 🔙 for a moment.

It was about ♣ ⭕'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were
first started on this 🎁 voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee
the business.

"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, 🔥 the
works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his
shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that
in a whaling voyage the first 🔥 in the try-works has to be fed for a
time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick
ignition to the staple 🔥. In a word, after being tried out, the
crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, 😯 contains
considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters 🏃 the flames.
Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
ignited, the 🐳 supplies his own 🔥 and burns by his own body.
Would that he consumed his own 🚬! for his 🚬 is horrible to
inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in
it for the time. It has an unspeakable, 😠, Hindoo odor about it, such
as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left
wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were 🔝 from the
carcase; sail had been made; the 👃 was freshening; the 😠 🌊
darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
🔥. The burning 🚢 drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the
bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad
sheets of 🔥 for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
folded them in conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the 🔝 of the works, now afforded a wide hearth
in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the
pagan harpooneers, always the 🐳-🚢's stokers. With huge pronged
poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or
stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out
of the doors to ⌚ them by the feet. The 🚬 rolled away in sullen
heaps. To every pitch of the 🚢 there was a pitch of the boiling oil,
which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the 👄
of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the
windlass. This served for a 🌊-sofa. Here lounged the ⌚, when not
otherwise employed, looking into the 😳 heat of the 🔥, till their
eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all
begrimed with 🚬 and 😓, their matted beards, and the contrasting
barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in
the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other
their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;
as their uncivilized laughter forked 🆙 out of them, like the
flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers
wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the
👃 howled on, and the 🌊 leaped, and the 🚢 groaned and dived, and
yet steadfastly shot her 😳 hell further and further into the blackness
of the 🌊 and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in
her 👄, and viciously 👏 round her on all sides; then the rushing
Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with 🔥, and burning
a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
guided the way of this 🔥-🚢 on the 🌊. Wrapped, for that interval,
in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the 😡, the
ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before
me, capering half in 🚬 and half in 🔥, these at 🔚 begat kindred
visions in my soul, so 🔜 as I began to 🐻 to that unaccountable
drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing 😴, I was
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote
my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails,
just beginning to shake in the 👃; I thought my eyes were open; I
was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically
stretching them 😯 further apart. But, spite of all this, I could 📅
no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I
had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.
0⃣ seemed before me but a ⛲ gloom, now and then made ghastly by
flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
rushing from all havens astern. A stark, 😖 feeling, as of
🔚, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with
the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way,
inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief
😴 I had turned myself about, and was fronting the 🚢's 💩, with
my 🔙 to her 🙇 and the compass. In an 💓 I faced 🔙, just
in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the 👃, and very
probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this
unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being
brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the 🔥, ⭕ 👨! Never dream with thy
🚹 on the helm! 🔧 not thy 🔙 to the compass; 🉑 the first
hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial 🔥, when its
redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
flames, the morn will ® in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp--all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's
accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
deserts and of griefs beneath the 🌔. The sun hides not the 🌊,
which is the dark side of this earth, and which is 2⃣ thirds of this
earth. So, therefore, that mortal 👨 who hath more of 😂 than sorrow
in him, that mortal 👨 cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With
books the same. The truest of all 🚹 was the 👨 of Sorrows, and the
truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the 🆗 hammered
steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful 👨 hath not got 📖
of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and
jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather 🍑 of
operas than hell; calls Cowper, 🆕, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all
of 🐱 🚹; and throughout a 😟-😇 lifetime swears by Rabelais as
passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that 👨 is fitted to 💺
down on tomb-stones, and break the green 🔇 mould with unfathomably
wondrous Solomon.

But 😳 Solomon, he says, "the 👨 that wandereth out of the way
of understanding shall remain" (I.🇪🇸., 😳 while living) "in the
congregation of the dead." 🍃 not thyself up, then, to 🔥, lest it
invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is 😡. And there is a Catskill
eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges,
and soar out of them again and become invisible in the ☀ spaces.
And 😳 if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the
mountains; so that 😳 in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is 😯
higher than other birds upon the plain, 😳 though they soar.



CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.


Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's
forecastle, where the off duty ⌚ were 😴, for 1⃣ 1⃣
moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some
illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay
in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.

In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
queens. To 🍛 in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
seeks the food of ✨, so he lives in ✨. He makes his 🏢 an
Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night
the 🚢's black hull 😯 houses an illumination.

📅 with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
lamps--often but old bottles and vials, though--to the 🐷 cooler at
the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He
burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
unvitiated state; a fluid 👽 to solar, lunar, or astral
contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early 🐀 butter in April. He
goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
genuineness, 😳 as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
supper of 🔙.



CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.


Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
descried from the mast-❓; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside
and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of
old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded
surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he
is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his
spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the 🔥;--but now it
remains to conclude the 🔚 chapter of this 🏢 of the description by
rehearsing--singing, if I may--the romantic proceeding of decanting off
his oil into the casks and striking them down into the 📖, where
once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding 🔛
beneath the 🌹 as before; but, alas! never more to 🌹 and blow.

While 😯 warm, the oil, like hot 👊, is received into the
6⃣-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the 🚢 is pitching and rolling
this way and that in the midnight 🌊, the enormous casks are slewed
round and headed over, 🔚 for 🔚, and sometimes perilously 💨
across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at 🔚
👨-handled and stayed in their 🏃; and all round the hoops, rap,
rap, ❌ as many hammers as can 🏃 upon them, for now, ❌ OFFICIO,
every sailor is a cooper.

At length, when the 🔚 pint is casked, and all is 🆒, then the great
hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the 🚢 are thrown open, and down
❌ the casks to their final rest in the 🌊. This done, the hatches are
replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.

In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps 1⃣ of the most remarkable
incidents in all the business of whaling. 1⃣ day the planks stream with
freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred 💩-deck enormous masses of
the 🐳's ❓ are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as
in a brewery Ⓜ; the 🚬 from the try-works has besooted all the
bulwarks; the mariners ❌ about suffused with unctuousness; the entire
🚢 seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the 💥 is
deafening.

But a day or 2⃣ after, you look about you, and 😭 your ears in this
self-same 🚢; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,
you would all but 🏦 you trod some 🔇 merchant vessel, with a
most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses
a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never
look so white as just after what they ☎ an affair of oil. Besides,
from the ashes of the burned scraps of the 🐳, a potent lye is
readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the 🔙 of the 🐳
remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands
❌ diligently 🔛 the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags
restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the 😦
rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise
faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed
upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of
sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined
and simultaneous industry of almost the entire 🚢's company, the
whole of this conscientious duty is at 🔚 concluded, then the crew
themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from 🔝 to
toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, 🆕 and all aglow, as
bridegrooms 🆕-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.

Now, with elated 👣, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and 🆗 cambrics;
propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the 🔝; object not
to taking 🍵 by 🌔 on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to
such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short
of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
bring us napkins!

But 🎶: aloft there, at the 3⃣ mast heads, 🐻 3⃣ 🚹 intent
on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least 1⃣ small grease-🏢
somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest
uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through
for ninety-6⃣ hours; when from the ⛵, where they have swelled their
wrists with all day rowing on the 🎶,--they only 👣 to the deck to
🏃 vast chains, and heave the 🔉 windlass, and cut and slash, yea,
and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined
fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the
🐶 of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the
🚢, and 💩 a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor
fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by
the 😢 of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another 🐳,
and ❌ through the whole 😩 thing again. Oh! my friends, but this
is 👨-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long
toilings extracted from this 👨's vast bulk its small but valuable
sperm; and then, with 😩 patience, cleansed ourselves from its
defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul;
hardly is this done, when--THERE SHE BLOWS!--the 👻 is spouted up,
and away we sail to fight some other 👨, and ❌ through 🆕 life's
old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, 2⃣
Ⓜ years ago, did die, so 🔉, so wise, so mild; I sailed with
thee 🔛 the Peruvian coast 🔚 voyage--and, foolish as I am, taught
thee, a green simple 👦, how to 💒 a rope!



CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.


Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his 💩-deck,
taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but
in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been
added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,
he was wont to pause in 🔧 at each 🏢, and 🐻 there strangely
eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass,
that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his
purpose; and when resuming his 🚶 he again paused before the mainmast,
then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin
there, he 😯 wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed
with a certain 😠 longing, if not hopefulness.

But 1⃣ 🌅, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be 🆕
attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as
though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some
certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little
worth, and the round 👨 itself but an empty 0⃣, except to sell by
the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to 😆 up some morass in
the Milky Way.

Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the
♥ of gorgeous hills, whence, 🇪🇸 and west, over golden sands, the
❓-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all
the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of 🐷 spikes, yet,
untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it 😯 preserved its Quito
glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed
by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick
darkness which might 🔝 any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
🌅 found the doubloon where the sunset left it 🔚. For it was
👗 apart and sanctified to 1⃣ awe-striking 🔚; and however wanton
in their sailor ways, 1⃣ and all, the mariners revered it as the white
🐳's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the 😩 ⌚ by
night, wondering whose it was to be at 🔚, and whether he would ever
live to spend it.

Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks
and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners 👋, are in
luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through
those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.

It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
of these things. On its round 💍 it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
♥ of the 👨, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
and it had been 🐱 midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that
knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of 3⃣
Andes' summits; from 1⃣ a 🔥; a tower on another; on the third a
crowing 🐓; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the
⚓ sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.

Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
pausing.

"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
all other Ⓜ and lofty things; look here,--3⃣ peaks as proud as
Lucifer. The 🏠 tower, that is Ahab; the 🌋, that is Ahab; the
courageous, the undaunted, and victorious 🐦, that, too, is Ahab; all
are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
which, like a magician's 👓, to each and every 👨 in 🔧 but
mirrors 🔙 his own ㊙ self. Great pains, small gains for those
who ask the 👨 to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now
this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but 📅! aye, he enters the 🏠
of storms, the equinox! and but 6⃣ months before he wheeled out of a
former equinox at Aries! From 😡 to 😡! So be it, then. Born in
throes, 't is fit that 👨 should live in pains and die in pangs! So be
it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to 🏃 on. So be it, then."

"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must
have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck
to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old 👨 seems to ®
Belshazzar's 😨 writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.
He goes below; let me ®. A dark valley between 3⃣ mighty,
heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the 3⃣, in some faint
earthly 🔣. So in this vale of 🔚, God girds us round; and over
all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness 😯 shines a beacon and a
hope. If we 🙇 down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;
but if we 🌹 them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.
Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain
snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin
speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but 😯 sadly to me. I will quit it,
lest Truth shake me falsely."

"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's
been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
faces which I should say might be somewhere within ♣ fathoms long.
And all from looking at a 👨 of gold, which did I have it now on
Negro Hill or in Corlaer's 👮, I'd not look at it very long ere
spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as
queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your
doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold
moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and 💩 joes. What
then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing
wonderful? By Golconda! let me ® it once. Halloa! here's signs and
wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the
zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and
as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try
my 🚹 at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with
the Massachusetts 📆. Here's the 📖. Let's 📅 now. Signs and
wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem; here they
are--here they ❌--all alive:--Aries, or the 🐏; Taurus, or the 🐷
and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he
wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the 🚪
between 2⃣ of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ☎. 📖! you lie there;
the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to 🍃 us the
bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That's my
small experience, so far as the Massachusetts 📆, and Bowditch's
navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic ❌. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
there is 0⃣ wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There's
a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you,
Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of 👨 in 1⃣ round chapter;
and now I'll ® it off, straight out of the 📖. Come, Almanack! To
begin: there's Aries, or the 🐏--lecherous 🐶, he begets us; then,
Taurus, or the 🐷--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the
Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to ✋ Virtue, when lo! comes
♋ the Crab, and drags us 🔙; and here, going from Virtue, Leo,
a 💥 Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly
dabs with his ✋; we 🏃, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our
first love; we 💒 and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes
Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we
are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly 🌹, as Scorpio, or the
Scorpion, stings us in the 🌹; we are curing the wound, when whang
come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing
himself. As we pluck out the shafts, 🐻 aside! here's the
battering-🐏, Capricornus, or the 🐐; full tilt, he comes rushing,
and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours
out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to 👃 up with Pisces, or the
Fishes, we 😴. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the
sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and
hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and
so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye! Adieu,
Doubloon! But 🔚; here comes little King-🚉; dodge round the
try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have to say. There; he's
before it; he'll out with something 🔜. So, so; he's beginning."

"I 📅 0⃣ here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises
a certain 🐳, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this
staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at
2⃣ cents the cigar, that's ♣ 💯 and sixty cigars. I won't 🚬
dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's ♣ 💯 and
sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."

"Shall I ☎ that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort
of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old
hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the 🌊. He
luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side
of the mast; why, there's a 🐴-👞 nailed on that side; and now he's
🔙 again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering--🔉 like an old
worn-out ☕-🏭. 😭 ears, and listen!"

"If the White 🐳 be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when
the sun stands in some 1⃣ of these signs. I've studied signs, and know
their marks; they were taught me 2⃣ score years ago, by the old witch
in Copenhagen. Now, in what 🏠 will the sun then be? The 🐴-👞
🏠; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what's the
🐴-👞 🏠? The lion is the 🐴-👞 🏠--the 💥 and
devouring lion. 🚢, old 🚢! my old ❓ shakes to think of thee."

"There's another rendering now; but 😯 1⃣ text. All sorts of 🚹
in 1⃣ kind of 👨, you 📅. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--all
tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
suppose, as the old women 🍑 Surgeon's Astronomy in the 🔙 country.
And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--I
guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't know what to 💩
of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.
But, aside again! here comes that 👻-devil, Fedallah; 💩 coiled out
of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he
say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a 🏠 to the 🏠 and bows
himself; there is a sun on the coin--🔥 worshipper, depend upon it.
Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip--poor 👦! would he had died,
or I; he's half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these
interpreters--myself included--and look now, he comes to ®, with that
unearthly idiot face. 🐻 away again and hear him. Hark!"

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! 🆙 his mind,
poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!"

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Why, he's getting it by ♥--hist! again."

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Well, that's funny."

"And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'Ⓜ a 😤,
especially when I 🐻 a'🔝 of this 💴 tree here. Caw! caw! caw!
caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a 😤? And where's the 💨-😤? There he
stands; 2⃣ bones stuck into a 👫 of old trowsers, and 2⃣ more poked
into the sleeves of an old 👑."

"❓ if he means me?--🆓!--poor lad!--I could ❌ hang
myself. Any way, for the 🎁, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can 🐻
the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty for my
sanity. So, so, I 🍃 him muttering."

"Here's the 🚢's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on 🔥
to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence? Then
again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when 0⃣'s nailed to
the mast it's a 🏠 that things 🌹 desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab!
the White 🐳; he'll 💥 ye! This is a 💴 tree. My 🔰, in old
Tolland county, cut down a 💴 tree once, and found a silver ☎ grown
over in it; some old darkey's 💒 ☎. How did it get there? And
so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to 🐟 up this old
mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the
shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green
miser'll hoard ye 🔜! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds
blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-🍰 done!"



CHAPTER 💯. Leg and Arm.

The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.


"🚢, ahoy! Hast seen the White 🐳?"

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a 🚢 showing English colours, bearing
down under the 💩. 🎺 to 👄, the old 👨 was standing in his
hoisted 💩-⛵, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the 👽
captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own ⛵'s 🙇. He was
a darkly-tanned, burly, 🔉-natured, 🆗-looking 👨, of sixty or
thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and 1⃣ empty arm of this 👑 streamed
💺 him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat.

"Hast seen the White 🐳!"

"📅 you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had ㊙ it,
he held up a white arm of sperm 🐳 bone, terminating in a wooden ❓
like a 🐞.

"👨 my ⛵!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him--"🐻 by to 😦!"

In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
crew were dropped to the water, and were 🔜 alongside of the 👽.
But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
once stepped on board of any vessel at 🌊 but his own, and then it was
always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other
vessel at a moment's ⚠. Now, it is no very easy matter
for anybody--except those who are almost hourly used to it, like
whalemen--to clamber up a 🚢's side from a ⛵ on the open 🌊; for
the great swells now 🌹 the ⛵ high up towards the bulwarks, and
then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived
of 1⃣ leg, and the strange 🚢 of 🏃 being altogether unsupplied
with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a
clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful 🔝
he could hardly hope to attain.

It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
in the 🎁 instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
2⃣ officers of the strange 🚢, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular 🏃 of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
👫 of tastefully-ornamented 👨-ropes; for at first they did not seem
to bethink them that a 1⃣-legged 👨 must be too much of a cripple to
use their 🌊 bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
cried out, "I 📅, I 📅!--avast heaving there! 🌹, boys, and swing
over the cutting-tackle."

As 🔉 luck would have it, they had had a 🐳 alongside a day or 2⃣
previous, and the great tackles were 😯 aloft, and the massive curved
blubber-👮, now clean and dry, was 😯 attached to the 🔚. This
was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his
solitary thigh into the curve of the 👮 (it was like sitting in the
fluke of an ⚓, or the crotch of an 🍎 tree), and then 🎁 the
word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his
own weight, by pulling 🚹-over-🚹 upon 1⃣ of the 🏃 parts of
the tackle. 🔜 he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and
gently landed upon the capstan ❓. With his ivory arm frankly thrust
forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his
ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like 2⃣ sword-🐟 blades)
cried out in his walrus way, "Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones
together!--an arm and a leg!--an arm that never can shrink, d'ye
📅; and a leg that never can 🏃. Where did'st Ⓜ 📅 the White
🐳?--how long ago?"

"The White 🐳," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the 🇪🇸, and taking a rueful sight 🔛 it, as if it had been a
🔭; "there I saw him, on the 🎶, 🔚 season."

"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from
the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.

"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"

"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"

"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the 🎶,"
began the Englishman. "I was ignorant of the White 🐳 at that time.
Well, 1⃣ day we lowered for a pod of 4⃣ or 5⃣ whales, and my ⛵
fastened to 1⃣ of them; a regular circus 🐴 he was, too, that went
milling and milling round so, that my ⛵'s crew could only 👗 🍑,
by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. 🔜 up breaches
from the 💺 of the 🌊 a bouncing great 🐳, with a milky-white
❓ and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."

"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
breath.

"And harpoons 😌 in near his starboard 5⃣."

"Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"

"🍃 me a chance, then," said the Englishman, 🔉-humoredly. "Well,
this old great-grandfather, with the white ❓ and hump, runs all afoam
into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-🎶!

"Aye, I 📅!--wanted to 🏢 it; 😇 the fast-🐟--an old trick--I
know him."

"How it was exactly," continued the 1⃣-armed commander, "I do not know;
but in biting the 🎶, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow;
but we didn't know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the
🎶, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other 🐳's;
that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and
what a noble great 🐳 it was--the noblest and biggest I ever saw,
sir, in my life--I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling 😡
he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard 🎶 would get 🆓, or
the tooth it was tangled to might 🏃 (for I have a devil of a ⛵'s
crew for a 🔧 on a 🐳-🎶); seeing all this, I say, I jumped
into my first 👫's ⛵--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way,
Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--as I was saying, I jumped
into Mounttop's ⛵, which, d'ye 📅, was gunwale and gunwale
with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls
alive, 👨--the next 💓, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both
eyes out--all befogged and bedeadened with black ✨--the 🐳's 💩
looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with
a blinding sun, all 🔝-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the
🔙 iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the 💩 like a Lima
tower, cutting my ⛵ in 2⃣, leaving each half in splinters; and,
flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
all chips. We all struck out. To 🏃 his 😨 flailings, I seized
📖 of my harpoon-pole 😌 in him, and for a moment clung to that
like a sucking 🐟. But a combing 🌊 dashed me off, and at the same
💓, the 🐟, taking 1⃣ 🔉 💨 forwards, went down like a
💓; and the barb of that cursed 🔙 iron towing 🔛 near me
caught me here" (clapping his 🚹 just below his shoulder); "yes,
caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was
thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the 🔉 God, the barb ript
its way 🔛 the flesh--🔝 🔛 the whole length of my arm--came
out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;--and that 👨 there will tell
you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, 🚢's surgeon: Bunger,
my lad,--the captain). Now, Bunger 👦, spin your 🏢 of the yarn."

The professional 👨 thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the
time standing near them, with 0⃣ specific visible, to denote his
gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober
1⃣; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen 👗 or 👕, and patched
trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a
marlingspike he held in 1⃣ 🚹, and a 💊-📦 held in the other,
occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the 2⃣
crippled captains. But, at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab,
he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding.

"It was a shocking bad wound," began the 🐳-surgeon; "and, taking my
advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy--"

"Samuel Enderby is the 🔑 of my 🚢," interrupted the 1⃣-armed
captain, addressing Ahab; "❌ on, 👦."

"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
weather there on the 🎶. But it was no use--I did all I could; sat up
with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet--"

"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering
his 🔉, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he
couldn't 📅 to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas
over, about 3⃣ ⭕'clock in the 🌅. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with
me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very
dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you 🐶, 😆 out! why
don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly 👿.) But, heave ahead,
👦, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other 👨."

"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said the
imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly 🙇 to Ahab--"is apt to
be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But
I may as well say--en passant, as the French 🎶--that I myself--that
is to say, 💩 Bunger, late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total
abstinence 👨; I never drink--"

"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to
him; 🆕 water throws him into the hydrophobia; but ❌ on--❌ on with
the arm story."

"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing,
sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my
best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the
truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more
than 2⃣ feet and several inches long. I measured it with the 🍃 🎶.
In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came.
But I had no 🚹 in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
against all rule"--pointing at it with the marlingspike--"that is the
captain's 🏃, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to 💩 it; he had
that ♣-🔨 there put to the 🔚, to knock some 1⃣'s brains
out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
passions sometimes. Do ye 📅 this dent, sir"--removing his hat, and
brushing aside his hair, and exposing a 🎳-like cavity in his 💀,
but which bore not the slightest scarry 👻, or any token of ever
having been a wound--"Well, the captain there will tell you how that
came here; he knows."

"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with
it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger! was there ever such another
Bunger in the watery 👨? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
pickle, you 🐶; you should be preserved to future ages, you 👿."

"What became of the White 🐳?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
impatiently listening to this by-🏃 between the 2⃣ Englishmen.

"Oh!" cried the 1⃣-armed captain, "oh, yes! Well; after he sounded,
we didn't 📅 him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I
didn't then know what 🐳 it was that had served me such a trick, till
some time afterwards, when coming 🔙 to the 🎶, we heard about Moby
Dick--as some ☎ him--and then I knew it was he."

"Did'st Ⓜ cross his wake again?"

"Twice."

"But could not fasten?"

"Didn't want to try to: ain't 1⃣ limb enough? What should I do without
this other arm? And I'Ⓜ thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he
swallows."

"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "🍃 him your left arm for bait to
get the right. Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and mathematically
🙇 to each Captain in succession--"Do you know, gentlemen, that the
digestive organs of the 🐳 are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely 🐻
😳 a 👨's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you 🉑 for the
White 🐳's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means
to 🉑 a 1⃣ limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But
sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine
in Ceylon, that making believe 🉑 💩-knives, once upon a time let
1⃣ drop into him in 🔉 earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth
or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks,
d'ye 📅. No possible way for him to 🐻 that 💩-👅, and fully
incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if
you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn 1⃣ arm for the
🍶 of the privilege of 🎁 decent burial to the other, why in that
🐚 the arm is yours; only let the 🐳 have another chance at you
🔜, that's all."

"No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the
arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then; but not to
another 1⃣. No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and
that has 😆 me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know
that; and there is a 🚢-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,
he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"--glancing at the
ivory leg.

"He is. But he will 😯 be hunted, for all that. What is best let
alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a
magnet! How long since Ⓜ saw'st him 🔚? Which way heading?"

"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly
🚶 round Ahab, and like a 🐶, strangely snuffing; "this 👨's
blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--his 💓
makes these planks 💓!--sir!"--taking a lancet from his 👝, and
drawing near to Ahab's arm.

"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--"👨 the ⛵!
Which way heading?"

"🔉 God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the ❓ was put.
"What's the matter? He was heading 🇪🇸, I think.--Is your Captain
crazy?" whispering Fedallah.

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his 👄, slid over the bulwarks to
🉑 the ⛵'s steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
towards him, commanded the 🚢's sailors to 🐻 by to 😦.

In a moment he was standing in the ⛵'s 💩, and the Manilla 🚹
were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.
With 🔙 to the 👽 🚢, and face 👗 like a flint to his own,
Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.



CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.


Ere the English 🚢 fades from sight, be it 👗 down here, that
she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling 🏠 of
Enderby & Sons; a 🏠 which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not
far 💺 the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point
of real historical 😟. How long, prior to the year of our
Lord 1775, this great whaling 🏠 was in existence, my numerous
🐟-documents do not 💩 plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted
out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm 🐳;
though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant
Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets
pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not
elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were
the first among 👨 to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
🐳; and that for half a 💯 they were the only people of the
whole globe who so harpooned him.

In 1778, a 🆗 🚢, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole 👢 of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
🎺, and was the first among the nations to 😦 a 🐳-⛵ of any
sort in the great South 🌊. The voyage was a skilful and lucky 1⃣;
and returning to her 🏢 with her 📖 full of the precious sperm, the
Amelia's example was 🔜 followed by other ships, English and American,
and thus the vast Sperm 🐳 grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.
But not content with this 🔉 deed, the indefatigable 🏠 again
bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only
knows--and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their
expense, the British government was induced to 🚢 the sloop-of-war
Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South 🌊. Commanded
by a naval 🚉-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and
did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In
1819, the same 🏠 fitted out a discovery 🐳 🚢 of their own, to
❌ on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of 🗾. That 🚢--well
called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus
that the great Japanese Whaling ⚓ first became generally known.
The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
Nantucketer.

All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose 🏠, I think, exists to
the 🎁 day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
slipped his cable for the great South 🌊 of the other 👨.

The 🚢 named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank 🔉 flip down in the
forecastle. It was a 🆗 gam we had, and they were all trumps--every
soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly 🔚. And that 🆗
gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
ivory 🐶--it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
🚢; and may my parson 🍃 me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
at the rate of ❌ gallons the hour; and when the 😢 came (for it's
squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were
called to reef topsails, we were so 🔝-🔉 that we had to swing each
other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
howling gale, a ⚠ example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
did not ❌ overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we
had to pass the flip again, though the 🐺 salt spray bursting down
the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my
taste.

The beef was 🆗--tough, but with body in it. They said it was
🐷-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you
could feel them, and 👋 them about in you after they were swallowed.
If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out
of you like billiard-balls. The 🍞--but that couldn't be helped;
besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the 🍞 contained the
only 🆕 fare they had. But the forecastle was not very ✨, and it
was very easy to 👣 over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all
in all, taking her from 🚚 to helm, considering the dimensions of the
cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; 🙇 and aft,
I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly 🚢; of 🔉 fare and plenty;
🆗 flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from 👢 heels to
hat-💍.

But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous, hospitable
ships; that passed round the beef, and the 🍞, and the can, and the
joke; and were not 🔜 😩 of eating, and drinking, and 😆?
I will tell you. The abounding 🔉 cheer of these English whalers
is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of
historical 🐳 research, when it has seemed needed.

The English were preceded in the 🐳 fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms 😯 extant
in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English
merchant-🚢 scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in
the English, this thing of whaling 🔉 cheer is not normal and natural,
but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special
origin, which is here pointed out, and will be 😯 further elucidated.

During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch 📖, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I
knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every 🐳 🚢 must 🏃 its cooper. I was
reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of 1⃣
"Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned 👨,
professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and
St. Pott's, to whom I handed the 🏃 for translation, 🎁 him a 📦
of sperm candles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so 🔜 as he
spied the 📖, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"
but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch 📖
treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained
a very interesting account of its 🐳 fishery. And in this chapter it
was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the
outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from
which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:

💿,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 🆑,000 lbs. of stock
🐟. 550,000 lbs. of 🍪. 72,000 lbs. of soft 🍞. 2⃣,800 firkins
of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. ❌,800 barrels of
🍻.

Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
the 🎁 🐚, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
barrels, quarts, and gills of 🔉 gin and 🔉 cheer.

At the time, I devoted 3⃣ days to the studious digesting of all
this 🍻, beef, and 🍞, during which many 🔉 thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-🐟, etc., consumed by
every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
🐳 fishery. In the first 🚉, the amount of butter, and Texel and
Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
naturally unctuous natures, being rendered 😯 more unctuous by the
nature of their 📲, and especially by their pursuing their 🔙
in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country
where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of 🏫 oil.

The quantity of 🍻, too, is very large, ❌,800 barrels. Now, as those
polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
climate, so that the whole cruise of 1⃣ of these Dutch whalemen,
including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen 🌊, did not much
🔝 3⃣ months, say, and reckoning 30 🚹 to each of their 🎯
of 180 sail, we have 5⃣,💿 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say,
we have precisely 2⃣ barrels of 🍻 per 👨, for a twelve weeks'
allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
Now, whether these gin and 🍻 harpooneers, so fuddled as 1⃣ might
fancy them to have been, were the right sort of 🚹 to 🐻 up in
a ⛵'s ❓, and 🉑 🔉 🚋 at flying whales; this would seem
somewhat improbable. Yet they did 🚋 at them, and 💥 them too. But
this was very far North, be it remembered, where 🍻 agrees well with
the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, 🍻 would
be apt to 💩 the harpooneer 😪 at the mast-❓ and boozy in his
⛵; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and 🆕 Bedford.

But no more; enough has been said to ® that the old Dutch whalers
of 2⃣ or 3⃣ centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when
cruising in an empty 🚢, if you can get 0⃣ better out of the
👨, get a 🔉 dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the
decanter.



CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.


Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm 🐳, I have chiefly
dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him 😯
further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,
and casting 🆓 the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost
bones, 👗 him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
fishery, pretend to know 0⃣ about the subterranean parts of the
🐳? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, 🐻 lectures
on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, 📖 up a
specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land
a full-grown 🐳 on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a
roast-🐷? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
Ishmael; but have a 😟 how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-🏃 of
leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult 🐳; nevertheless, I have been blessed
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a 🚢 I belonged
to, a small cub Sperm 🐳 was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
👃 or 👜, to 💩 sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance ❌, without using my
⛵-hatchet and 💩-👅, and breaking the seal and reading all the
contents of that 🆕 cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, 1⃣ of the Arsacides.
For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-🚢 Dey
of Algiers, I was invited to spend 🏢 of the Arsacidean holidays with
the lord of Tranque, at his retired 🎀 villa at Pupella; a 🌊-side
glen not very far distant from what our sailors called 🎍-Town, his
capital.

Among many other 🆗 qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;
and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
❓-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had 🐱 upon his shores.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm 🐳, which, after an
unusually long 😠 gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
❓ against a cocoa-🍳 tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
seemed his verdant ⛲. When the vast body had at 🔚 been stripped of
its 🔉-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a
Ⓜ temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the 💀, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic 🔥, so that the ㊙ ❓
again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
terrific 😦 jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
sword that so affrighted Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet
on it, whereof the ⚓-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and
the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden
branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying
air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the
leaves, the great sun seemed a flying 🐦 weaving the unwearied
verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--1⃣ word!--whither
flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless
toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy 🚹!--but 1⃣ 1⃣ word with
thee! Nay--the 🐦 flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the
freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves;
and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal 🔉; and
by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only
when we 🏃 it shall we hear the Ⓜ voices that speak through
it. For 😳 so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that
are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly
heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby
have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in
all this 💥 of the great 👨's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be
overheard afar.

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler! Yet,
as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven
over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but
himself a skeleton. Life folded 🔚; 🔚 trellised Life; the grim
god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous 🐳, and saw the
💀 an altar, and the artificial 🚬 ascending from where the real
⛲ had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as
an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests
should 🏦 that smoky ⛲ of his was genuine. To and fro I paced
before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through the
ribs--and with a 🍳 of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But 🔜 my 🎶 was
out; and following it 🔙, I emerged from the opening where I entered.
I saw no living thing within; 0⃣ was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
From their arrow-slit in the 💀, the priests perceived me taking the
altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st Ⓜ measure
this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests--well, how long do ye 💩
him, then?" But hereupon a fierce contest 🌹 among them, concerning
feet and inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their
Ⓜ-sticks--the great 💀 echoed--and seizing that lucky chance, I
quickly concluded my own admeasurements.

These admeasurements I now propose to 👗 before you. But first, be
it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not 😇 to utter any fancied
measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell
me, in Hull, England, 1⃣ of the whaling ports of that country, where
they have some 🆗 specimens of 5⃣-backs and other whales. Likewise, I
have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in 🆕 Hampshire, they have
what the proprietors ☎ "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or
River 🐳 in the United States." Moreover, at a 🚉 in Yorkshire,
England, Burton Constable by 🔑, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has
in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm 🐳, but of moderate size,
by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these 2⃣ skeletons
belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir
Clifford's 🐳 has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--and swing all day
upon his 😦 jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and
shutters; and a footman will ® round future visitors with a bunch of
keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at
the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the 🔁
in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the 1⃣ ⌚
from his forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to 👗 down are copied
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my 😠
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished
the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was
then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not
trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
enter into a congenial admeasurement of the 🐳.



CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The 🐳's Skeleton.


In the first 🚉, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may 🌹 useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly 🐾
upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest
sized Greenland 🐳 of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, a Sperm 🐳 of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-5⃣ and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
feet in its fullest circumference, such a 🐳 will weigh at least
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen 🚹 to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of 1⃣
Ⓜ 1⃣ 💯 inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
leviathan, to 💩 him at all budge to any landsman's imagination?

Having already in various ways put before you his 💀, spout-hole,
jaw, teeth, 💩, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
unobstructed bones. But as the colossal 💀 embraces so very large
a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the
most complicated 🏢; and as 0⃣ is to be repeated concerning it in
this chapter, you must not 💣 to 🏃 it in your mind, or under your
arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the
general 🚧 we are about to ⌚.

In length, the Sperm 🐳's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-2⃣
Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
been ninety feet long; for in the 🐳, the skeleton loses about 1⃣
fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-2⃣ feet,
his 💀 and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of
plain 🔙-bone. Attached to this 🔙-bone, for something less than a
third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once
enclosed his vitals.

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved 🔙,
extending far away from it in a straight 🎶, not a little resembled
the hull of a great 🚢 🆕-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty
of her naked 🙇-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the
time, but a long, 😕 timber.

The ribs were ❌ on a side. The first, to begin from the neck,
was nearly 6⃣ feet long; the 🔙, third, and fourth were each
successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or 1⃣
of the ♥ ribs, which measured 8⃣ feet and some inches. From
that 🏢, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and 🔚 only
spanned 5⃣ feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore
a seemly correspondence to their length. The ♥ ribs were the most
arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
footpath bridges over small streams.

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
circumstance, so variously repeated in this 📖, that the skeleton of
the 🐳 is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of
the Tranque ribs, 1⃣ of the ♥ ones, occupied that 🏢 of the 🐟
which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
invested body of this particular 🐳 must have been at least sixteen
feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than 8⃣
feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the
living magnitude of that 🏢. Besides, for some way, where I now saw
but a naked 🔙, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of
added bulk in flesh, 💪, blood, and bowels. 😯 more, for the
ample fins, I here saw but a few 😕 joints; and in 🚉 of the
weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled 👨 to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous 🐳, by merely poring over his dead
attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
♥ of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his 😠
flukes; only on the 🔉 unbounded 🌊, can the fully invested 🐳
be truly and livingly found out.

But the 🔙. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
crane, to pile its bones high up on 🔚. No speedy enterprise. But now
it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on
a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of 🔉 masonry. The largest,
a ♥ 1⃣, is in width something less than 3⃣ feet, and in depth
more than 4⃣. The smallest, where the 🔙 tapers away into the
💩, is only 2⃣ inches in width, and looks something like a white
billiard-🍳. I was told that there were 😯 smaller ones, but they
had been 😖 by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children,
who had stolen them to 🏃 marbles with. Thus we 📅 how that the
🔙 of 😳 the hugest of living things tapers off at 🔚 into simple
👶's 🏃.



CHAPTER 104. The Fossil 🐳.


From his mighty bulk the 🐳 affords a most congenial theme whereon
to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
compress him. By 🔉 rights he should only be treated of in imperial
🍃. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to 💩,
and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great
cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
🎶-of-battle-🚢.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me
to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
out to the uttermost 📜 of his bowels. Having already described him
in most of his 🎁 habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it
now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and
antediluvian point of ⌚. Applied to any other creature than the
Leviathan--to an 🐜 or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed
unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the 🐚 is
altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest
words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been
convenient to consult 1⃣ in the 🏃 of these dissertations, I have
invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased
for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal
bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a 🐳 author
like me.

1⃣ often hears of writers that 🌹 and swell with their subject,
though it may seem but an ordinary 1⃣. How, then, with me, writing
of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals. 🍃 me a condor's quill! 🍃 me Vesuvius' crater for an
inkstand! Friends, 📖 my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
thoughts of this Leviathan, they 😩 me, and 💩 me faint with their
outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and 🚹, and
mastodons, past, 🎁, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its
suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and 🆓
theme! We 💥 to its bulk. To produce a mighty 📖, you must choose
a mighty theme. No great and enduring 📖 can ever be written on the
flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I 🎁 my credentials
as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been
a 💎-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,
wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier
geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called
the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted
links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales
hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the 🔚
preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
precisely answer to any known species of the 🎁 time, they are yet
sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to 🆓 their taking
rank as Cetacean fossils.

🆓 😕 fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
found at the 🐾 of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Among the more curious of such remains is 🏢 of a 💀, which in the
year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street
opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's
time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly
👽 Leviathanic species.

But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on
the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of 1⃣ of the fallen
angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed
upon it the 🔑 of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being
taken across the 🌊 to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out
that this alleged reptile was a 🐳, though of a departed species. A
significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this
📖, that the skeleton of the 🐳 furnishes but little clue to the
shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
Zeuglodon; and in his 📰 ® before the London Geological ♣,
pronounced it, in ♥, 1⃣ of the most extraordinary creatures
which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.

When I 🐻 among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to
the existing breeds of 🌊-monsters; but at the same time bearing on
the other 🚹 similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne 🔙
to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
for time began with 👨. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I
obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged
bastions of 🎇 pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in
all the 25,000 miles of this 👨's circumference, not an inhabitable
🚹's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole 👨 was the
🐳's; and, king of creation, he left his wake 🔛 the 🎁 lines
of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can ® a pedigree like Leviathan?
Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems
a 🏫-👦. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck
at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of
the 🐳, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after
all humane ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
print of his 5⃣. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and
dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the
moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there
swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
of the 🐳, in his own osseous 🚉-diluvian reality, as 👗 down by
the venerable 🚽 Leo, the old Barbary traveller.

"Not far from the 🌊-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
of which are made of 🐳-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes 🐱 up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
by a ㊙ 🏢 bestowed by God upon the temple, no 🐳 can pass it
without immediate 🔚. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either
side of the Temple, there are Rocks that 💨 2⃣ Miles into the 🌊,
and wound the Whales when they ✨ upon 'em. They keep a 🐳's Rib
of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the ⚓ with
its convex 🏢 uppermost, makes an Arch, the ❓ of which cannot be
reached by a 👨 upon a 🐫's 🔙. This Rib (says 🚽 Leo) is said
to have layn there a 💯 Years before I saw it. Their Historians
affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple,
and some do not 🐻 to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was 🐱 forth
by the 🐳 at the 🐾 of the Temple."

In this Afric Temple of the 🐳 I 🍃 you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.



CHAPTER 105. Does the 🐳's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?


Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
the ❓-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
in the long 🏃 of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
original bulk of his sires.

But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
🎁 day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
prior to 👨), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
belonging to its latter formations 🔝 in size those of its earlier
ones.

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama 1⃣ mentioned in the 🔚 chapter, and that was less than
seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
that the tape-measure gives seventy-2⃣ feet for the skeleton of a large
sized modern 🐳. And I have heard, on whalemen's 🏢, that
Sperm Whales have been captured near a 💯 feet long at the time of
capture.

But may it not be, that while the whales of the 🎁 hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?

Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny
tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus
of others which measured 8⃣ 💯 feet in length--Rope Walks and
Thames Tunnels of Whales! And 😳 in the days of Banks and Solander,
Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences
setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies)
at 1⃣ 💯 and twenty yards; that is, 3⃣ 💯 and sixty feet.
And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales,
in the very beginning of his 🏃 (page 3⃣), sets down the Right 🐳 at
1⃣ 💯 metres, 3⃣ 💯 and twenty-8⃣ feet. And this 🏃
was published so late as A.D. 1825.

But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The 🐳 of to-day is
as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I ❌ where Pliny
is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will 💩 bold to tell him so.
Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
that were buried thousands of years before 😳 Pliny was born, do not
measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian
and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are
drawn, just as plainly 🌹 that the high-bred, stall-fed, 🏆 cattle
of Smithfield, not only equal, but far 🔝 in magnitude the fattest
of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not 🉑 that of
all animals the 🐳 alone should have degenerated.

But 😯 another ❓ remains; 1⃣ often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs
at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating 😳 through
Behring's straits, and into the remotest ㊙ drawers and lockers
of the 👨; and the Ⓜ harpoons and lances darted 🔛 all
continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long 🏃
so wide a 🐶, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at 🔚
be exterminated from the waters, and the 🔚 🐳, like the 🔚 👨,
🚬 his 🔚 pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
their 💥-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
where now the polite broker sells you land at a 💵 an inch; in such
a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to ® that
the hunted 🐳 cannot now 🏃 speedy extinction.

But you must look at this matter in every ✨. Though so short a
period ago--not a 🔉 lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois
exceeded the census of 🚹 now in London, and though at the 🎁 day
not 1⃣ 🎺 or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of 👨; yet the far
different nature of the 🐳-🏃 peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
🔚 to the Leviathan. Forty 🚹 in 1⃣ 🚢 hunting the Sperm Whales for
forty-8⃣ months think they have done extremely well, and thank God,
if at 🔚 they 🏃 🏠 the oil of forty 🐟. Whereas, in the days
of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when
the far west (in whose sunset suns 😯 🌹) was a wilderness and
a virgin, the same number of moccasined 🚹, for the same number of
months, mounted on 🐴 instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
not forty, but forty Ⓜ and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need
were, could be statistically stated.

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the
gradual extinction of the Sperm 🐳, for example, that in former years
(the latter 🏢 of the 🔚 💯, say) these Leviathans, in
small pods, were encountered much oftener than at 🎁, and, in
consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more
remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,
influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense
caravans, so that to a large degree the 😕 solitaries, yokes, and
pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely
separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems
the conceit, that because the so-called 🐳-bone whales no longer
👻 many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that
species also is declining. For they are only being driven from
promontory to cape; and if 1⃣ coast is no longer enlivened with
their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very
recently startled by the unfamiliar 👓.

Furthermore: concerning these 🔚 mentioned Leviathans, they have 2⃣
🏠 fortresses, which, in all 👨 probability, will for ever remain
impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss
have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and
glades of the ♥ seas, the 🐳-bone whales can at 🔚 resort to
their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and
walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle
of everlasting December, 📲 defiance to all pursuit from 👨.

But as perhaps fifty of these 🐳-bone whales are harpooned for 1⃣
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.
But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west coast by the Americans
alone; yet there are considerations which render 😳 this circumstance
of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.

Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness
of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to
Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at 1⃣ hunting the
King of Siam took 4⃣,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are
numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no
reason to ❓ that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for
thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the
successive monarchs of the 🇪🇸--if they 😯 survive there in great
numbers, much more may the great 🐳 outlast all hunting, since he
has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all
Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, 🆕 Holland, and all the Isles
of the 🌊 combined.

Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity
of whales, their probably attaining the age of a 💯 and more,
therefore at any 1⃣ period of time, several distinct adult generations
must be contemporary. And what that is, we may 🔜 gain some idea
of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and 🏠 vaults of
creation yielding up the live bodies of all the 🚹, women, and children
who were alive seventy-5⃣ years ago; and adding this countless host to
the 🎁 👨 population of the globe.

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the 🐳 immortal in his
species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas
before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he
despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the 👨 is to be again flooded, like
the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal 🐳 will 😯
survive, and rearing upon the topmost 🔝 of the equatorial flood,
spout his frothed defiance to the skies.



CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg.


The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
⛵ that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And
when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so
vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it
was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then,
the already shaken ivory received such an additional 🚧 and 🔧,
that though it 😯 remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for ❓, that for all his
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times 🍃 careful heed to the
🚋 of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he
had been found 1⃣ night lying prone upon the ⚓, and insensible;
by some 👽, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his
ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had 🔙-wise
smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
the 😧 of that then 🎁 suffering was but the 🚋 issue of a
former woe; and he too plainly seemed to 📅, that as the most poisonous
reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought
Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief ❌ further than the
ancestry and posterity of 😂. For, not to hint of this: that it is
an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other 👨,
but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the 😂-childlessness of
all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall 😯
fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs
beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there 😯 seems an
inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while
😳 the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying
pettiness lurking in them, but, at 💺, all heartwoes, a ㊙
significance, and, in some 🚹, an archangelic grandeur; so do their
diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To 🐶 the
genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at 🔚 among the
sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the
glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must
needs 🍃 in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad.
The ineffaceable, sad 🐻-🎶 in the brow of 👨, is but the stamp of
sorrow in the signers.

Unwittingly here a ㊙ has been divulged, which perhaps might more
properly, in 👗 way, have been disclosed before. With many other
particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a ㊙ to some,
why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing
of the Pequod, he had ㊙ himself away with such Ⓜ-Lama-like
exclusiveness; and, for that 1⃣ interval, sought speechless refuge, as
it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited
reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed,
as touching all Ahab's deeper 🏢, every revelation partook more of
significant darkness than of explanatory ✨. But, in the 🔚, it all
came out; this 1⃣ matter did, at least. That 😨 mishap was at
the 💺 of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that
ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed
the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the
above hinted casualty--remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by
Ahab--invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land
of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had
all conspired, so far as in them lay, to 🔇 up the knowledge of
this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable
interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks.

But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
or the vindictive princes and potentates of 🔥, have to do or not
with earthly Ahab, yet, in this 🎁 matter of his leg, he took plain
practical procedures;--he called the carpenter.

And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
👗 about making a 🆕 leg, and directed the mates to 📅 him supplied
with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm 🐳) which had thus
far been accumulated on the voyage, in ♣ that a careful selection
of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to
🍃 all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to
the distrusted 1⃣ in use. Moreover, the 🚢's 🔨 was ordered to be
hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the 📖; and, to accelerate
the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the
forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.



CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.


💺 thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and 🉑 high
abstracted 👨 alone; and he seems a ❓, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, 🉑 👨 in mass, and for the most 🏢, they
seem a 💍 of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no 🔁;
hence, he now comes in person on this stage.

Like all 🌊-going 🚢 carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;
the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all
those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic
🎶 above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in
those Ⓜ nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring
in a large 🚢, upon a 3⃣ or 4⃣ years' voyage, in uncivilized
and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary
duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of
clumsy-bladed oars, inserting 🐷's eyes in the deck, or 🆕 tree-nails
in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly
pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly
expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and
capricious.

The 1⃣ Ⓜ stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the 🌹 of the Try-works.

A belaying 🎏 is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
the carpenter claps it into 1⃣ of his ever-ready vices, and straightway
files it smaller. A 😖 land-🐦 of strange plumage strays on board,
and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-🐳 bone, and
cross-beams of sperm 🐳 ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon
the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood,
the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes
a fancy to 🐻 shark-bone 👂-rings: the carpenter drills his ears.
Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
1⃣ 🚹 upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow
unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the
handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to 👏 his jaw in
that, if he would have him 🏃 the tooth.

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
deemed but 🔝-blocks; 🚹 themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such
liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some
uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For 0⃣ was
this 👨 more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as
it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding
infinite of things, that it seemed 1⃣ with the general stolidity
discernible in the whole visible 👨; which while pauselessly active
in uncounted modes, 😯 eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,
though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible
stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
heartlessness;--yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now
and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served
to pass the time during the midnight ⌚ on the bearded forecastle
of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long
wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;
but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings
might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an
unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a 🆕-born 👶; living without
premeditated reference to this 👨 or the next. You might almost
say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of
unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to 🏃 so
much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to
it, or by any intermixture of all these, 😳 or uneven; but merely by
a kind of deaf and 🔇, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure
manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had 1⃣, must have early
oozed 🔛 into the muscles of his fingers. He was like 1⃣ of
those unreasoning but 😯 highly useful, MULTUM IN PARVO, Sheffield
contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little swelled--of a
common 👝 👅; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
💥-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that 🏢
of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, 🉑 him up by the
legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere 🚗 of an automaton. If he did not have a
common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
did its duty. What that was, whether ♥ of quicksilver, or a few
drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it
had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept
him a great 🏢 of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning
🚲, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a
⌚-📦 and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the
time to keep himself awake.



CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.

The Deck--First Night ⌚.


(CARPENTER STANDING BEFORE HIS VICE-BENCH, AND BY THE ✨ OF 2⃣
LANTERNS BUSILY FILING THE IVORY JOIST FOR THE LEG, WHICH JOIST IS
FIRMLY FIXED IN THE VICE. SLABS OF IVORY, LEATHER STRAPS, PADS, SCREWS,
AND VARIOUS TOOLS OF ALL SORTS LYING ABOUT THE BENCH. FORWARD, THE 😳
🔥 OF THE 🔨 IS SEEN, WHERE THE BLACKSMITH IS AT 🏃.)


Drat the ®, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,
and that is soft which should be hard. So we ❌, who ® old jaws and
shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better (SNEEZES).
Halloa, this bone dust is (SNEEZES)--why it's (SNEEZES)--yes it's
(SNEEZES)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is what an old
fellow gets now for 🏃 in dead 💷. Saw a live tree, and
you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it
(SNEEZES). Come, come, you old Smut, there, 🉑 a 🚹, and let's have
that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them 🔜. Lucky
now (SNEEZES) there's no knee-joint to 💩; that might puzzle a little;
but a mere shinbone--why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should
like to put a 🔉 🔚 on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I
could 🔧 him out as neat a leg now as ever (SNEEZES) scraped to a lady
in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in 🐀
windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of
🏃 get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (SNEEZES) with washes and
lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must
☎ his old Mogulship, and 📅 whether the length will be all right;
too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the 🐶; we are in luck;
here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain.

AHAB (ADVANCING)

(DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES)


Well, manmaker!

Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now 🎶 the length.
Let me measure, sir.

Measured for a leg! 🔉. Well, it's not the first time. About it!
There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice Ⓜ hast here,
carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does 🔝 some.

Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware!

No fear; I like a 🔉 grip; I like to feel something in this
slippery 👨 that can 📖, 👨. What's Prometheus about there?--the
blacksmith, I mean--what's he about?

He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.

Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the 💪 🏢. He makes a
fierce 😳 🔥 there!

Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of 🆗 🏃.

Um-Ⓜ. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that
old Greek, Prometheus, who made 🚹, they say, should have been a
blacksmith, and animated them with 🔥; for what's made in 🔥 must
properly belong to 🔥; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies!
This must be the 🔚 the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter,
when he's through with that buckle, tell him to 🔨 a 👫 of steel
shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing 💍.

Sir?

📖; while Prometheus is about it, I'll ♣ a complete 👨 after a
desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay
in 1⃣ 🚉; then, arms 3⃣ feet through the wrist; no ♥ at all,
brass forehead, and about a 💩 of an acre of 🆗 brains; and let
me 📅--shall I ♣ eyes to 📅 outwards? No, but put a sky-✨ on
🔝 of his ❓ to illuminate inwards. There, 🉑 the ♣, and away.

Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like
to know? Shall I keep standing here? (ASIDE).

'Tis but indifferent architecture to 💩 a blind dome; here's 1⃣. No,
no, no; I must have a 🏮.

Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are 2⃣, sir; 1⃣ will serve my 🔧.

What 🎨 Ⓜ thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, 👨?
Thrusted ✨ is worse than presented pistols.

I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.


Carpenter? why that's--but no;--a very tidy, and, I may say,
an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business Ⓜ 🎨 in here,
carpenter;--or would'st Ⓜ rather 🏃 in clay?

Sir?--Clay? clay, sir? That's mud; we 🍃 clay to ditchers, sir.

The fellow's impious! What 🎨 Ⓜ sneezing about?

Bone is rather dusty, sir.

🉑 the hint, then; and when Ⓜ 🎨 dead, never bury thyself under
living people's noses.

Sir?--oh! ah!--I guess so;--yes--dear!

Look ye, carpenter, I dare say Ⓜ callest thyself a right 🔉
workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well
for thy 🏃, if, when I come to 🌹 this leg Ⓜ makest, I shall
nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical 🚉 with it; that
is, carpenter, my old 😖 leg; the flesh and blood 1⃣, I mean. Canst
Ⓜ not 🐏 that old Adam away?

Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted 👨 never
entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be 😯
pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?

It is, 👨. Look, put thy live leg here in the 🚉 where mine once
was; so, now, here is only 1⃣ distinct leg to the ♥, yet 2⃣ to the
soul. Where Ⓜ feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a
hair, do I. Is't a riddle?

I should humbly ☎ it a poser, sir.

Hist, then. How dost Ⓜ know that some entire, living, thinking thing
may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
Ⓜ now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
solitary hours, then, dost Ⓜ not fear eavesdroppers? 📖, don't
speak! And if I 😯 feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now
so long dissolved; then, why mayst not Ⓜ, carpenter, feel the fiery
pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!

🔉 Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again;
I think I didn't 🏃 a small figure, sir.

Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.--How long before the
leg is done?

Perhaps an hour, sir.

Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (TURNS TO ❌). Oh, Life! Here
I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for
a bone to 🐻 on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will
not do away with ledgers. I would be 😇 as air; and I'Ⓜ down in the
whole 👨's books. I am so rich, I could have given 📲 for 📲 with
the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was
the 👨's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the 👅 I brag with. By
heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to
1⃣ small, compendious vertebra. So.

CARPENTER (RESUMING HIS 🏃).


Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says
he's queer; says 0⃣ but that 1⃣ sufficient little word queer; he's
queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into
Mr. Starbuck all the time--queer--sir--queer, queer, very queer. And
here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has
a stick of 🐳's jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll 🐻
on this. What was that now about 1⃣ leg standing in 3⃣ places, and
all 3⃣ places standing in 1⃣ hell--how was that? Oh! I don't ❓
he looked so scornful at me! I'Ⓜ a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes,
they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body
like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall,
heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,
and there's a great 😢 for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg!
long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks 1⃣ 👫 of legs lasts
a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a
tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old 🚋-horses. But Ahab;
oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven 1⃣ leg to 🔚, and spavined the
other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there,
you Smut! 🉑 a 🚹 there with those screws, and let's 🔚 it
before the resurrection fellow comes a-📲 with his 🎺 for
all legs, true or false, as brewery-🚹 ❌ round collecting old 🍻
barrels, to 😆 'em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real
live leg, filed down to 0⃣ but the ♥; he'll be standing on this
to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the
little oval 🎫, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So,
so; chisel, ®, and sand-📰, now!



CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.


According to 🛃 they were pumping the 🚢 next 🌅; and lo! no
inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
sprung a bad leak. Much 😟 was shown; and Starbuck went down into
the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*


*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it
is a regular semiweekly duty to 🐻 a hose into the 📖, and drench
the casks with 🌊-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is
removed by the 🚢's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept
damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the
mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.


Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
the Bashee Isles, between which lies 1⃣ of the tropical outlets from
the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with
a general 💹 of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;
and another separate 1⃣ representing the long eastern coasts of the
Japanese islands--Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white 🆕
ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
pruning-👮 of a 💩-👅 in his 🚹, the wondrous old 👨, with his
🔙 to the gangway 🚪, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
courses again.

"Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the 🚪, but not turning round
to it. "On deck! Begone!"

"Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the 📖 is leaking, sir. We
must up Burtons and break out."

"Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing 🗾; heave-to here
for a week to 🐒 a 📦 of old hoops?"

"Either do that, sir, or waste in 1⃣ day more oil than we may 💩 🔉
in a year. What we come twenty Ⓜ miles to get is worth saving,
sir."

"So it is, so it is; if we get it."

"I was speaking of the oil in the 📖, sir."

"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!
I'Ⓜ all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,
but those leaky casks are in a leaky 🚢; and that's a far worse plight
than the Pequod's, 👨. Yet I don't 🔚 to 👊 my leak; for who can
find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to 👊 it, 😳 if
found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons
hoisted."

"What will the owners say, sir?"

"Let the owners 🐻 on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Ⓜ 🎨 always prating to me, Starbuck,
about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But
look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
my conscience is in this 🚢's keel.--On deck!"

"Captain Ahab," said the reddening 👫, moving further into the cabin,
with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed
not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation
of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;
"A better 👨 than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly
enough resent in a younger 👨; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."

"Devils! Dost Ⓜ then so much as dare to critically think of me?--On
deck!"

"Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir--to be forbearing!
Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?"

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming 🏢 of most
South-🌊-🚹's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
exclaimed: "There is 1⃣ God that is Lord over the earth, and 1⃣
Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck!"

For an 💓 in the flashing eyes of the 👫, and his fiery cheeks,
you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
the levelled 🚇. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly 🌹,
and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an 💓 and said: "Ⓜ hast
outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of
Starbuck; Ⓜ wouldst but 😆; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of
thyself, old 👨."

"He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!"
murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said--Ahab
beware of Ahab--there's something there!" Then unconsciously using the
musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
cabin; but 🔜 the thick plaits of his forehead ☺, and
returning the 🔫 to the rack, he went to the deck.

"Ⓜ 🎨 but too 🔉 a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the 👫;
then raising his 🔉 to the crew: "Furl the t'gallant-sails, and
🔚-reef the 🔝-sails, 🙇 and aft; 🔙 the main-Ⓜ; up Burton,
and break out in the main-📖."

It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a 💓 of honesty in him;
or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously
forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
in the important chief officer of his 🚢. However it was, his orders
were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.



CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.


Upon searching, it was found that the casks 🔚 struck into the 📖
were perfectly 🔉, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
slumbers of the huge ⚓-tier butts; and from that black midnight
sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
❌; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-💎 cask
containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,
vainly ⚠ the infatuated old 👨 from the flood. 3⃣ after
3⃣, too, of water, and 🍞, and beef, and shooks of staves, and
iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at 🔚 the piled decks
were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under 🐾, as if
you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the 🌊
like an air-freighted demijohn. 🔝-🔉 was the 🚢 as a dinnerless
student with all Aristotle in his ❓. Well was it that the Typhoons
did not 📲 them then.

Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
♥-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
to his endless 🔚.

Be it said, that in this 📲 of whaling, sinecures are 👽;
dignity and danger ❌ 🚹 in 🚹; till you get to be Captain, the
higher you 🌹 the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as
harpooneer, must not only face all the 😡 of the living 🐳, but--as
we have elsewhere seen--🌹 his dead 🔙 in a rolling 🌊; and
finally descend into the gloom of the 📖, and bitterly sweating
all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
clumsiest casks and 📅 to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
the harpooneers are the holders, so called.

Poor Queequeg! when the 🚢 was about half disembowelled, you should
have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed 🐺 was crawling about
amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the 💺
of a well. And a well, or an 🎇-🏠, it somehow proved to him, poor
pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he
caught a 😨 🆒 which lapsed into a fever; and at 🔚, after
some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, 🔚 to the very sill
of the 🚪 of 🔚. How he wasted and wasted away in those few
long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his
frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones
grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller;
they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply
looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that
immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like
circles on the water, which, as they 🌹 fainter, 💥; so his eyes
seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that
cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this
waning 🐺, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who
were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and
😨 in 👨, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing
near of 🔚, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a 🔚
revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and
holier thoughts than those, whose ㊙ shades you saw creeping
over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying
hammock, and the rolling 🌊 seemed gently rocking him to his final
rest, and the 🌊's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher
towards his destined heaven.

Not a 👨 of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
what he thought of his 🐚 was forcibly shown by a curious favour he
asked. He called 1⃣ to him in the grey 🌅 ⌚, when the day was
just breaking, and taking his 🚹, said that while in Nantucket he
had chanced to 📅 certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich
war-wood of his native isle; and upon ❓, he had learned that all
whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not
unlike the 🛃 of his own 🏃, who, after embalming a dead warrior,
stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to
the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars
are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,
uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the
white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at
the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual
🌊-🛃, tossed like something vile to the 🔚-devouring sharks.
No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial
to him, being a whaleman, that like a 🐳-⛵ these coffin-canoes
were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and
much lee-way adown the dim ages.

Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter
was at once commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might
include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old 💷 aboard,
which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal
groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin
was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of
the ♣, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent
promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took
Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg's
person as he shifted the rule.

"Ah! poor fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the Long Island
sailor.

Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for 🚻 🍶 and general
reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting 2⃣ notches
at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools,
and to 🏃.

When the 🔚 💥 was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted,
he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring
whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.

Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the
people on deck began to 🐏 the coffin away, Queequeg, to every 1⃣'s
consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
dying 🚹 are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will
🔜 trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
indulged.

Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with
an attentive ♥. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
drawn from it, and then had the iron 🏢 placed in the coffin 🔛
with 1⃣ of the paddles of his ⛵. All by his own request, also,
biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of 🆕 water
was placed at the ❓, and a small 👜 of woody earth scraped up in
the 📖 at the 🐾; and a 👨 of sail-cloth being rolled up for a
pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he
might 💩 trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving
a few minutes, then told 1⃣ to ❌ to his 👜 and bring out his little
god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he
called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him.
The ❓ 🏢 turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg
in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in ⌚. "Rarmai"
(it will do; it is easy), he murmured at 🔚, and signed to be replaced
in his hammock.

But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this
while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him
by the 🚹; in the other, holding his tambourine.

"Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this 😩 roving? where
❌ ye now? But if the currents 🏃 ye to those sweet Antilles where
the beaches are only 💓 with water-lilies, will ye do 1⃣ little
errand for me? Seek out 1⃣ Pip, who's now been missing long: I think
he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he
must be very sad; for look! he's left his tambourine 💺;--I found
it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll 💓 ye your dying
march."

"I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in
violent fevers, 🚹, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues;
and that when the ㊙ is probed, it turns out always that in their
wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken
in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip,
in this strange 💐 of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all
our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?--Hark! he speaks
again: but more wildly now."

"Form 2⃣ and 2⃣! Let's 💩 a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon?
Lay it across here.--Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a 🔙 🐓
now to 💺 upon his ❓ and 😤! Queequeg dies 🔙!--mind ye that;
Queequeg dies 🔙!--🉑 ye 🔉 heed of that; Queequeg dies 🔙! I
say; 🔙, 🔙, 🔙! but 🐾 little Pip, he died a coward; died all
a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles
he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from
a 🐳-⛵! I'd never 💓 my tambourine over 🐾 Pip, and hail
him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all
cowards--shame upon them! Let 'em ❌ drown like Pip, that jumped from a
🐳-⛵. Shame! shame!"

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
was led away, and the 🐱 👨 was replaced in his hammock.

But now that he had apparently made every preparation for 🔚; now
that his coffin was proved a 🔉 fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; 🔜
there seemed no need of the carpenter's 📦: and thereupon, when some
expressed their delighted surprise, he, in ♥, said, that the
cause of his sudden convalescence was this;--at a critical moment, he
had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of
his own sovereign will and 😂. He answered, certainly. In a word,
it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a 👨 made up his mind to live, mere
sickness could not kill him: 0⃣ but a 🐳, or a gale, or some
violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.

Now, there is this noteworthy difference between 🐺 and civilized;
that while a 🐱, civilized 👨 may be 6⃣ months convalescing,
generally speaking, a 🐱 🐺 is almost half-well again in a day.
So, in 🔉 time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
and legs, gave himself a 🔉 stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
springing into the ❓ of his hoisted ⛵, and poising a harpoon,
pronounced himself fit for a fight.

With a 😠 whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a 🌊-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas 👜 of 👗, 👗 them in ♣ there.
Many 🆓 hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
his body. And this tattooing had been the 🏃 of a departed prophet and
seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on
his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a ㊙
treatise on the 🎨 of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own
proper person was a riddle to 🌼; a wondrous 🏃 in 1⃣ 📖; but
whose mysteries not 😳 himself could ®, though his own live ♥
💓 against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in
the 🔚 to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were
inscribed, and so be unsolved to the 🔚. And this thought it must
have been which suggested to Ahab that 😠 ❗ of his, when
1⃣ 🌅 turning away from surveying poor Queequeg--"Oh, devilish
tantalization of the gods!"



CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.


When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at 🔚 upon the great South
🌊; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific
with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
answered; that serene 🌊 rolled eastwards from me a Ⓜ leagues
of blue.

There is, 1⃣ knows not what sweet ㊙ about this 🌊, whose gently
😨 stirrings seem to speak of some ㊙ soul beneath; like those
fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
🚽. And 😆 it is, that over these 🌊-pastures, wide-rolling watery
prairies and Potters' Fields of all 4⃣ continents, the waves should
🌹 and fall, and ebb and 🏃 unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed
shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that
we ☎ lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, 😯; tossing like
slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their
restlessness.

To any 😔 Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
ever after be the 🌊 of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of
the 👨, the Indian 🌊 and Atlantic being but its arms. The same
waves wash the moles of the 🆕-built Californian towns, but yesterday
planted by the recentest 🏃 of 🚹, and lave the faded but 😯
gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, 👽
Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this ㊙, divine
Pacific zones the 👨's whole bulk about; makes all coasts 1⃣ bay
to it; seems the tide-beating ♥ of earth. Lifted by those eternal
swells, you needs must own the seductive god, 🙇 your ❓ to Pan.

But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing like an
iron statue at his accustomed 🚉 beside the mizen rigging, with 1⃣
nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be 🚶), and with the other
consciously inhaled the salt breath of the 🆕 found 🌊; that 🌊 in
which the hated White 🐳 must 😳 then be swimming. Launched at
length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
cruising-⚓, the old 👨's purpose intensified itself. His 🏠 lips
met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled
like overladen brooks; in his very 😴, his 💍 😢 ran through
the vaulted hull, "💩 all! the White 🐳 spouts thick blood!"



CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.


Availing himself of the mild, summer-🆒 weather that now reigned in
these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active
pursuits 🔜 to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old
blacksmith, had not removed his portable 🔨 to the 📖 again, after
concluding his contributory 🏃 for Ahab's leg, but 😯 retained
it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost
incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do
some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or 🆕 shaping their
various weapons and ⛵ furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an
eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding ⛵-spades, pike-heads,
harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement,
as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old 👨's was a patient 🔨 wielded
by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from
him. 🔇, slow, and solemn; 🙇 over 😯 further his chronically
😕 🔙, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the
🔉 beating of his 🔨 the 🔉 beating of his ♥. And so it
was.--Most miserable!

A peculiar 🚶 in this old 👨, a certain slight but painful appearing
yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
1⃣ now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.

Belated, and not innocently, 1⃣ bitter winter's midnight, on the road
🏃 between 2⃣ country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt
the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
dilapidated 🅱. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both
feet. Out of this revelation, 🏢 by 🏢, at 🔚 came out the 4⃣
acts of the gladness, and the 1⃣ long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth
act of the grief of his life's drama.

He was an old 👨, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been
an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a 🏠
and garden; embraced a youthful, 👧-like, loving wife, and 3⃣
blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking ⛪,
planted in a grove. But 1⃣ night, under 🔝 of darkness, and further
concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into
his happy 🏠, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to
tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly 🐻 this burglar into
his 🏠's ♥. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that
fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his 🏠. Now, for
prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's 🐀 was in
the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so
that always had the 🆕 and loving 🔉 wife listened with no
unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous 😂, to the stout 💍 of
her 🆕-armed old husband's 🔨; whose reverberations, muffled by
passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly,
in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's
infants were rocked to 😴.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, 🔚, why canst Ⓜ not sometimes be timely? Hadst
Ⓜ taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon
him, then had the 🆕 widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a
truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and
all of them a 😟-killing competency. But 🔚 plucked down some
virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the
responsibilities of some other 🏠, and left the worse than useless
old 👨 standing, till the hideous rot of life should 💩 him easier to
harvest.

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement 🔨 every day grew more
and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the 🔚;
the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly
gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the
🔨 choked up with cinders; the 🏠 was sold; the mother dived
down into the long ⛪-Ⓜ 🐀; her children twice followed her
thither; and the houseless, familyless old 👨 staggered off a vagabond
in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey ❓ a scorn to flaxen
curls!

🔚 seems the only desirable sequel for a 📲 like this; but 🔚
is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but
the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the
😠, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the 🔚-longing eyes of
such 🚹, who 😯 have left in them some interior compunctions against
suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive 🌊 alluringly
spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and
wonderful, 🆕-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite
Pacifics, the Ⓜ mermaids 🍑 to them--"Come hither,
😕-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
🔚; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come
hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
abhorring, landed 👨, is more oblivious than 🔚. Come hither! put
up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we
💒 thee!"

Hearkening to these voices, 🇪🇸 and West, by early 🌅, and by fall
of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went
a-whaling.



CHAPTER 113. The 🔨.


With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
mid-day, Perth was standing between his 🔨 and anvil, the latter
placed upon an iron-wood log, with 1⃣ 🚹 holding a pike-❓ in the
coals, and with the other at his 🔨's lungs, when Captain Ahab came
🔛, carrying in his 🚹 a small rusty-looking leathern 👜. While
yet a little distance from the 🔨, moody Ahab paused; till at 🔚,
Perth, withdrawing his iron from the 🔥, began 🔨 it upon the
anvil--the 😳 mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
some of which flew 🔚 to Ahab.

"Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying
in thy wake; birds of 🔉 omen, too, but not to all;--look here, they
🔥; but Ⓜ--Ⓜ liv'st among them without a scorch."

"Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth, resting
for a moment on his 🔨; "I am past scorching; not easily can'st Ⓜ
scorch a scar."

"Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk 🔉 sounds too calmly, sanely woeful
to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others
that is not mad. Ⓜ should'st ❌ mad, blacksmith; say, why dost Ⓜ
not ❌ mad? How can'st Ⓜ 🏃 without being mad? Do the heavens yet
hate thee, that Ⓜ can'st not ❌ mad?--What wert Ⓜ making there?"

"Welding an old pike-❓, sir; there were seams and dents in it."

"And can'st Ⓜ 💩 it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard
🛃 as it had?"

"I think so, sir."

"And I suppose Ⓜ can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never
mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?"

"Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but 1⃣."

"Look ye here, then," cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning
with both hands on Perth's shoulders; "look ye here--HERE--can ye
smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith," sweeping 1⃣ 🚹 across his
ribbed brow; "if Ⓜ could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay
my ❓ upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest 🔨 between my eyes.
Answer! Can'st Ⓜ smoothe this seam?"

"Oh! that is the 1⃣, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but 1⃣?"

"Aye, blacksmith, it is the 1⃣; aye, 👨, it is unsmoothable; for
though Ⓜ only 📅'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the
bone of my 💀--THAT is all wrinkles! But, away with 👶's 🏃; no
more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!" jingling the leathern 👜,
as if it were full of gold coins. "I, too, want a harpoon made; 1⃣ that
a Ⓜ 🔗 of fiends could not 🏢, Perth; something that will
stick in a 🐳 like his own 5⃣-bone. There's the stuff," flinging
the 👝 upon the anvil. "Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered
💥-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses."

"🐴-👞 stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, Ⓜ hast here, then, the
best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever 🏃."

"I know it, old 👨; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
melted bones of murderers. Quick! 🔨 me the harpoon. And 🔨 me
first, twelve rods for its shank; then 👃, and 🚧, and 🔨 these
twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-🎶. Quick! I'll
blow the 🔥."

When at 🔚 the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, 1⃣ by 1⃣, by
spiralling them, with his own 🚹, round a long, 🔉 iron 💨. "A
flaw!" rejecting the 🔚 1⃣. "🏃 that over again, Perth."

This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into 1⃣, when
Ahab stayed his 🚹, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then,
with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to
him the glowing rods, 1⃣ after the other, and the hard pressed 🔨
shooting up its intense straight 🔥, the Parsee passed silently, and
🙇 over his ❓ towards the 🔥, seemed invoking some curse or
some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.

"What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb,
looking on from the forecastle. "That Parsee smells 🔥 like a fusee;
and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan."

At 🔚 the shank, in 1⃣ complete rod, received its final heat; and as
Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face.

"Would'st Ⓜ brand me, Perth?" wincing for a moment with the 😧;
"have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?"

"🙏 God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
harpoon for the White 🐳?"

"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; Ⓜ must 💩 them
thyself, 👨. Here are my razors--the best of steel; here, and 💩 the
barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy 🌊."

For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain
not use them.

"🉑 them, 👨, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
nor 🙏 till--but here--to 🏃!"

Fashioned at 🔚 into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the
shank, the steel 🔜 pointed the 🔚 of the iron; and as the blacksmith
was about 🎁 the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he
cried to Ahab to 🚉 the water-cask near.

"No, no--no water for that; I want it of the true 🔚-temper. Ahoy,
there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye 🍃 me
as much blood as will 🔝 this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of
dark nods replied, Yes. 3⃣ punctures were made in the heathen flesh,
and the White 🐳's barbs were then tempered.

"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!"
deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
baptismal blood.

Now, mustering the 🆓 poles from below, and selecting 1⃣ of hickory,
with the bark 😯 investing it, Ahab fitted the 🔚 to the socket of
the iron. A 📜 of 🆕 tow-🎶 was then unwound, and some fathoms of
it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing
his 🐾 upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-🚋, then eagerly
bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, "🔉! and
now for the seizings."

At 1⃣ extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole
was then driven hard up into the socket; from the 😦 🔚 the rope
was traced half-way 🔛 the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with
intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope--like the 3⃣
Fates--remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the
weapon; the 🔉 of his ivory leg, and the 🔉 of the hickory pole,
both hollowly 💍 🔛 every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,
✨, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous 🔉 was heard. Oh,
Pip! thy wretched 😆, thy idle but unresting ♥; all thy strange
mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the
melancholy 🚢, and mocked it!



CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.


Penetrating further and further into the ♥ of the Japanese cruising
⚓, the Pequod was 🔜 all 🆙 in the fishery. Often, in mild,
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing,
or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy
minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success
for their pains.

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his ⛵, ✨ as a birch canoe; and so
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-💎
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
quietude, when beholding the tranquil 🍑 and brilliancy of the
🌊's skin, 1⃣ forgets the 🐯 ♥ that pants beneath it; and
would not willingly remember, that this velvet ✋ but conceals a
remorseless fang.

These are the times, when in his 🐳-⛵ the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the 🌊; that he
regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant 🚢 revealing
only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high
rolling waves, but through the tall 🐀 of a rolling prairie: as when
the western emigrants' horses only ® their erected ears, while their
㊙ bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.

The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these
there steals the 😯, the hum; you almost 🏦 that 🏃-wearied
children lie 😴 in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when
the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most
㊙ mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,
and form 1⃣ seamless whole.

Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, 💣 of at least as
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these ㊙ golden keys did seem
to open in him his own ㊙ golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon
them 🌹 but tarnishing.

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in
ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye,
🚹 yet may 👋, like 🆕 horses in 🆕 🌅 clover; and for some
few fleeting moments, feel the 🆒 dew of the life immortal on them.
Would to God these blessed calms would 🔚. But the mingled, mingling
threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a
😡 for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the 🔚 1⃣
pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless
faith, adolescence' ❓ (the common doom), then scepticism, then
disbelief, resting at 🔚 in manhood's 😔 repose of If. But once
gone through, we 👻 the round again; and are infants, boys, and 🚹,
and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more? In what rapt ether sails the 👨, of which the weariest will
never 😩? Where is the foundling's 🔰 ㊙? Our souls are like
those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the ㊙ of
our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to ⌚ it.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his ⛵'s side into that
same golden 🌊, Starbuck lowly murmured:--

"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his 🆕 bride's
♥!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep
down and do believe."

And Stubb, 🐟-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same
golden ✨:--

"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
he has always been jolly!"



CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.


And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
before the 👃, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.

It was a Nantucket 🚢, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
🔚 cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
holiday 👗, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
round among the widely-separated ships on the ⚓, previous to
pointing her 🙇 for 🏠.

The 3⃣ 🚹 at her mast-❓ wore long streamers of narrow 😳 bunting
at their hats; from the 💩, a 🐳-⛵ was suspended, 💺 down;
and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long 😦 jaw of the
🔚 🐳 they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours
were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of
her 3⃣ basketed tops were 2⃣ barrels of sperm; above which, in her
🔝-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious
fluid; and nailed to her main 🚚 was a brazen lamp.

As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same
seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a
1⃣ 🐟. Not only had barrels of beef and 🍞 been given away to
💩 room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental
casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were
stowed 🔛 the deck, and in the captain's and officers' state-rooms.
😳 the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the
cabin mess dined off the broad ❓ of an oil-🐐, lashed down to the
floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually
caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously
added, that the cook had clapped a ❓ on his largest boiler, and
filled it; that the steward had plugged his 🆓 ☕-🚽 and filled
it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and
filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands
into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.

As this glad 🚢 of 🔉 luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
barbarian 🔉 of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
😯 nearer, a crowd of her 🚹 were seen standing round her huge
try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like 👃 or 🐻 skin of
the black 🐟, gave forth a loud 💥 to every stroke of the clenched
hands of the crew. On the 💩-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented ⛵, firmly secured
aloft between the foremast and mainmast, 3⃣ Long Island negroes, with
glittering 🎻-bows of 🐳 ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
jig. Meanwhile, others of the 🚢's company were tumultuously busy at
the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been
removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed
Bastille, such 😠 cries they raised, as the now useless brick and
mortar were being hurled into the 🌊.

Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the
🚢's elevated 💩-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was
full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual
diversion.

And Ahab, he too was standing on his 💩-deck, shaggy and black,
with a stubborn gloom; and as the 2⃣ ships crossed each other's
wakes--1⃣ all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings
as to things to come--their 2⃣ captains in themselves impersonated the
whole striking contrast of the scene.

"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the ☀ Bachelor's commander, lifting
a 👓 and a bottle in the air.

"Hast seen the White 🐳?" gritted Ahab in reply.

"No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other
🔉-humoredly. "Come aboard!"

"Ⓜ 🎨 too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast 😖 any 🚹?"

"Not enough to speak of--2⃣ islanders, that's all;--but come aboard,
old hearty, come 🔛. I'll 🔜 🉑 that black from your brow. Come
🔛, will ye (merry's the 🏃); a full 🚢 and homeward-bound."

"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Ⓜ 🎨
a full 🚢 and homeward bound, Ⓜ sayst; well, then, ☎ me an empty
🚢, and outward-bound. So ❌ thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there!
👗 all sail, and keep her to the 👃!"

And thus, while the 1⃣ 🚢 went cheerily before the breeze, the other
stubbornly fought against it; and so the 2⃣ vessels parted; the crew
of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding
Bachelor; but the Bachelor's 🚹 never heeding their gaze for the lively
revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the
homewardbound craft, he took from his 👝 a small vial of sand, and
then looking from the 🚢 to the vial, seemed thereby bringing 2⃣
remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket
soundings.



CHAPTER 116. The Dying 🐳.


Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favourites
sail 🔚 by us, we, though all adroop before, ⌚ somewhat of the
rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails 😆 out. So seemed
it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the ☀ Bachelor,
whales were seen and 4⃣ were slain; and 1⃣ of them by Ahab.

It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the 😊
fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset 🌊 and sky, sun
and 🐳 both stilly died together; then, such a 💐 and such
plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that 😳 air, that
it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of
the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had
gone to 🌊, freighted with these vesper hymns.

Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned
off from the 🐳, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now
tranquil ⛵. For that strange 👓 observable in all sperm whales
dying--the turning sunwards of the ❓, and so expiring--that strange
👓, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a
wondrousness 👽 before.

"He turns and turns him to it,--how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his 🔚 dying motions. He too
worships 🔥; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!--Oh
that these too-favouring eyes should 📅 these too-favouring sights.
Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of 👨 weal or woe;
in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have 😯
rolled on speechless and 🔇 to, as stars that shine upon the
Niger's 👽 source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but
📅! no sooner dead, than 🔚 whirls round the corpse, and it heads
some other way.

"Oh, Ⓜ dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
thy separate 🚽 somewhere in the ♥ of these unverdured seas;
Ⓜ 🎨 an infidel, Ⓜ queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the 😯 burial of its after calm. Nor
has this thy 🐳 sunwards turned his dying ❓, and then gone round
again, without a lesson to me.

"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of 🏢! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed
⛲!--that 1⃣ strivest, this 1⃣ jettest all in vain! In vain, oh
🐳, dost Ⓜ seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that
only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost Ⓜ, darker
half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable
imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living
things, exhaled as air, but water now.

"Then hail, for ever hail, ⭕ 🌊, in whose eternal tossings the 😠
🐦 finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the 🌊; though
hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"



CHAPTER 117. The 🐳 ⌚.


The 4⃣ whales slain that evening had died wide apart; 1⃣, far to
windward; 1⃣, less distant, to leeward; 1⃣ ahead; 1⃣ astern. These
🔚 3⃣ were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward 1⃣
could not be reached till 🌅; and the ⛵ that had killed it lay
by its side all night; and that ⛵ was Ahab's.

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead 🐳's spout-hole; and
the 🏮 hanging from its 🔝, 🐱 a troubled flickering glare
upon the black, glossy 🔙, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
gently chafed the 🐳's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.

Ahab and all his ⛵'s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching
in the 🙇, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the
🐳, and tapped the ✨ cedar planks with their tails. A 🔉
like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of
Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and
hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the 🔚 🚹 in a
flooded 👨. "I have dreamed it again," said he.

"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old 👨, that neither hearse nor
coffin can be thine?"

"And who are hearsed that die on the 🌊?"

"But I said, old 👨, that ere Ⓜ couldst die on this voyage, 2⃣
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the 🌊; the first not made by
mortal hands; and the visible wood of the 🔚 1⃣ must be grown in
America."

"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:--a hearse and its plumes
floating over the 🌊 with the waves for the 💨-bearers. Ha! Such a
sight we shall not 🔜 📅."

"Believe it or not, Ⓜ canst not die till it be seen, old 👨."

"And what was that saying about thyself?"

"Though it come to the 🔚, I shall 😯 ❌ before thee thy pilot."

"And when Ⓜ 🎨 so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere I can
⌚, Ⓜ must 😯 appear to me, to pilot me 😯?--Was it not
so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here 2⃣
pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."

"🉑 another pledge, old 👨," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
like 🔥-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee."

"The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on 🌊," cried
Ahab, with a 😆 of derision;--"Immortal on land and on 🌊!"

Both were 🔇 again, as 1⃣ 👨. The grey 🌅 came on, and the
slumbering crew arose from the ⛵'s 💺, and ere noon the dead
🐳 was brought to the 🚢.



CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.


The season for the 🎶 at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
coming from his cabin, 🐱 his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly 🏃 to
the braces, and would 🐻 there with all their eyes centrally fixed
on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the ♣ to point the 🚢's
🙇 for the equator. In 🔉 time the ♣ came. It was hard upon high
noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted ⛵, was
about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to ⌚ his
latitude.

Now, in that Japanese 🌊, the days in summer are as freshets of
effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing
focus of the glassy 🌊's immeasurable burning-👓. The sky looks
lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness
of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's 🚽.
Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through
which to 🉑 sight of that solar 🔥. So, swinging his seated form
to the 👋 of the 🚢, and with his astrological-looking instrument
placed to his ♥, he remained in that posture for some moments to
⌚ the precise 💓 when the sun should gain its precise 🔝.
Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling
beneath him on the 🚢's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's,
was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded
their orbs, and his 😠 face was 😯 to an earthly passionlessness.
At length the desired observation was taken; and with his 📝 upon
his ivory leg, Ahab 🔜 calculated what his latitude must be at that
precise 💓. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked up
towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Ⓜ 🌊-🎶! Ⓜ high and
mighty Pilot! Ⓜ tellest me truly where I AM--but canst Ⓜ 🐱 the
least hint where I SHALL be? Or canst Ⓜ tell where some other thing
besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This 💓 Ⓜ
must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very ♥ that is
😳 now beholding him; aye, and into the ♥ that is 😳 now equally
beholding the objects on the 👽, thither side of thee, Ⓜ sun!"

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, 1⃣ after the other, its
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
"Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and
Captains; the 👨 brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what
after all canst Ⓜ do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where Ⓜ
thyself happenest to be on this wide 📡, and the 🚹 that holds
thee: no! not 1⃣ jot more! Ⓜ canst not tell where 1⃣ drop of water
or 1⃣ grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence
Ⓜ insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, Ⓜ vain toy; and cursed
be all the things that 🐱 👨's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live
vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are 😳 now scorched
with thy ✨, ⭕ sun! 😳 by nature to this earth's horizon are the
glances of 👨's eyes; not shot from the 🔝 of his ❓, as if God
had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, Ⓜ quadrant!"
dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I 🏃 my earthly way by thee;
the 😳 🚢's compass, and the 😳 deadreckoning, by log and by
🎶; THESE shall 🐻 me, and ® me my 🚉 on the 🌊. Aye,"
lighting from the ⛵ to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, Ⓜ paltry
thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

As the frantic old 👨 thus spoke and thus trampled with his live
and dead feet, a sneering 😤 that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--these passed over
the 🔇, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he 🌹 and glided away;
while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered
together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,
shouted out--"To the braces! Up helm!--square in!"

In an 💓 the yards swung round; and as the 🚢 half-wheeled upon
her 🐶, her 3⃣ 🏠-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon
her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the 3⃣ Horatii pirouetting on 1⃣
sufficient steed.

Standing between the 🐴-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's
tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching 🔛 the deck.

"I have sat before the dense coal 🔥 and watched it all aglow, full of
its 😧 🔥 life; and I have seen it wane at 🔚, down, down,
to dumbest dust. Old 👨 of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine,
what will at length remain but 1⃣ little 🚌 of ashes!"

"Aye," cried Stubb, "but 🌊-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr.
Starbuck--🌊-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab
mutter, 'Here some 1⃣ thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine;
swears that I must 🏃 them, and no others.' And 💩 me, Ahab, but
Ⓜ actest right; live in the 🔙, and die in it!"



CHAPTER 119. The Candles.


Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the 🐯 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 💣 upon a 🌁 and 😪 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 🌊 roared and split with the
💥, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
fluttering here and there with the rags which the first 😡 of the
tempest had left for its after sport.

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the 💩-deck; at every
💓 of the lightning glancing aloft, to 📅 what additional disaster
might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask
were directing the 🚹 in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the
boats. But all their pains seemed 0⃣. Though lifted to the very
🔝 of the cranes, the windward 💩 ⛵ (Ahab's) did not 🏃.
A great rolling 🌊, dashing high up against the reeling 🚢's high
teetering side, stove in the ⛵'s 💺 at the 💩, and left it
again, all dripping through like a sieve.

"Bad 🏃, bad 🏃! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
"but the 🌊 will have its way. Stubb, for 1⃣, can't fight it. You 📅,
Mr. Starbuck, a 👋 has such a great long start before it leaps, all
round the 👨 it runs, and then comes the ⛲! But as for me, all
the start I have to 😆 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 🐳,
  A' flourishin' his 💩,--
  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the 🌊, oh!

  The 💨 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 🌊, oh!

  💥 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 🌊, oh!


"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon 🍑, and strike his
harp here in our rigging; but if Ⓜ 🎨 a brave 👨 Ⓜ wilt 📖 thy
peace."

"But I am not a brave 👨; never said I was a brave 👨; I am a coward;
and I 🍑 to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.
Starbuck, there's no way to 🔚 my singing in this 👨 but to cut my
throat. And when that's done, ❌ to 1⃣ I 🍑 ye the doxology for a
👃-up."

"Madman! look through my eyes if Ⓜ hast none of thine own."

"What! how can you 📅 better of a dark night than anybody else, never
mind how foolish?"

"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
🚹 towards the weather 🙇, "markest Ⓜ not that the gale comes from
the 🇪🇸, the very 🏃 Ahab is to 🏃 for Moby Dick? the very
🏃 he swung to this day noon? now 🎶 his ⛵ there; where is
that stove? In the 💩-sheets, 👨; where he is wont to 🐻--his
🐻-point is stove, 👨! Now 🌹 overboard, and 🍑 away, if Ⓜ
must!

"I don't half understand ye: what's in the 👃?"

"Yes, yes, round the Cape of 🔉 Hope is the shortest way to
Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
❓. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can 🔧 it
into a fair 👃 that will 🐏 us towards 🏠. Yonder, to windward,
all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I 📅 it lightens up
there; but not with the lightning."

At that moment in 1⃣ of the intervals of 🔉 darkness, following
the flashes, a 🔉 was heard at his side; and almost at the same
💓 a volley of 💥 peals rolled overhead.

"Who's there?"

"Old 💥!" said Ahab, groping his way 🔛 the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
lances of 🔥.

Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to 🏃 off
the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at 🌊 some
ships 🏃 to each mast, is intended to 🐻 it into the water. But
as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its 🔚 may
avoid all 🔗 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 😦 parts of a
🚢'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 🌊, 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 ✨ Ahab to his 🚉. "Are they overboard? drop them over, 🙇 and
aft. Quick!"

"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair 🏃 here, though we be the weaker
side. Yet I'll contribute to 🔥 rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that
all the 👨 may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir."

"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!"

All the Ⓜ-arms were tipped with a pallid 🔥; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-🔚 with 3⃣ tapering white flames, each of
the 3⃣ tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
3⃣ gigantic 🌹 tapers before an altar.

"🐚 the ⛵! let it ❌!" cried Stubb at this 💓, as a swashing
🌊 heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
jammed his 🚹, as he was passing a lashing. "🐚 it!"--but
slipping 🔙 on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
immediately shifting his 🎶 he cried--"The corpusants have mercy on us
all!"

To sailors, oaths are 🏠 words; they will 🏦 in the trance of
the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
from the topsail-Ⓜ-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething
🌊; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when
God's burning finger has been laid on the 🚢; 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 1⃣ thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
constellation of stars. 😌 against the ghostly ✨, the gigantic
⛲ negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed
the black ☁ from which the 💥 had come. The parted 👄 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 ✨, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue
flames on his body.

The tableau all waned at 🔚 with the pallidness aloft; and once more
the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a 💨. A moment
or 2⃣ passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some 1⃣. It
was Stubb. "What thinkest Ⓜ now, 👨; I heard thy 😢; 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, 😯. But do they only have mercy on long faces?--have
they no bowels for a 😆? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck--but it's too dark
to look. Hear me, then: I 🉑 that mast-❓ 🔥 we saw for a 🏠
of 🔉 luck; for those masts are rooted in a 📖 that is going to be
chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye 📅; and so, all that sperm will
🏃 up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our 3⃣ masts will
yet be as 3⃣ spermaceti candles--that's the 🔉 📲 we saw."

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
to glimmer into sight. Glancing 🆙, he cried: "📅! 📅!" 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 🐾 of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the 🔥,
the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his ❓ 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 🏃 skeletons in
Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes
upcast.

"Aye, aye, 🚹!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; 🎶 it well; the white
🔥 but lights the way to the White 🐳! 🚹 me those mainmast
links there; I would fain feel this 💓, and let mine 💓 against it;
blood against 🔥! So."

Then turning--the 🔚 🔗 held fast in his left 🚹, he put his 🐾
upon the Parsee; and with fixed 🆙 ♥, and high-flung right arm, he
stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed 3⃣ of flames.

"Oh! Ⓜ 🔝 ♥ of 🔝 🔥, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to
this hour I 🉑 the scar; I now know thee, Ⓜ 🔝 ♥, and I now
know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence
wilt Ⓜ be kind; and 🇪🇸'en for hate Ⓜ canst but kill; and all
are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,
placeless 🏢; but to the 🔚 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 ❌; yet while I earthly live,
the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war
is 😧, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will
kneel and 💋 thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal 🏢;
and though Ⓜ launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that
in here that 😯 remains indifferent. Oh, Ⓜ 🔝 ♥, of thy
🔥 Ⓜ madest me, and like a true 👶 of 🔥, I breathe it 🔙 to
thee."

[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE ♣ FLAMES LEAP LENGTHWISE
TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS 🔝; AHAB, WITH THE REST, CLOSES HIS EYES,
HIS RIGHT 🚹 PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]

"I own thy speechless, placeless 🏢; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
from me; nor do I now drop these links. Ⓜ canst blind; but I can then
grope. Ⓜ canst consume; but I can then be ashes. 🉑 the homage of
these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not 🉑 it. The lightning
flashes through my 💀; mine ♥-balls 💴 and 💴; my whole beaten
brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ⚓. Oh, oh!
Yet blindfold, yet will I 🍑 to thee. ✨ though Ⓜ be, Ⓜ
leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of ✨, leaping
out of thee! The javelins 🔚; open eyes; 📅, or not? There 🔥 the
flames! Oh, Ⓜ magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But Ⓜ
🎨 but my fiery 🔰; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what
hast Ⓜ done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.
Ⓜ knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten;
certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I
know that of me, which Ⓜ knowest not of thyself, oh, Ⓜ omnipotent.
There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, Ⓜ 🔝 ♥, to whom
all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through
thee, thy 🔥 self, my scorched eyes do dimly 📅 it. Oh, Ⓜ
foundling 🔥, Ⓜ hermit immemorial, Ⓜ too hast thy incommunicable
riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I ®
my sire. Leap! leap up, and 👊 the sky! I leap with thee; I 🔥 with
thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"

"The ⛵! the ⛵!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy ⛵, old 👨!"

Ahab's harpoon, the 1⃣ forged at Perth's 🔥, remained firmly lashed
in its conspicuous crotch, so that it 😌 beyond his 🐳-⛵'s
🙇; but the 🌊 that had stove its 💺 had caused the 🆓 leather
sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a
levelled 🔥 of pale, forked 🔥. As the 🔇 harpoon burned there
like a 🐍's 👅, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm--"God, God
is against thee, old 👨; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill
continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old 👨, and 💩 a
fair 👃 of it homewards, to ❌ 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
👫's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous 😢. But
dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the
burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a 🔦 among them; swearing to
transfix with it the first sailor that but 🐱 🆓 a rope's 🔚.
Petrified by his aspect, and 😯 more shrinking from the fiery 💨
that he held, the 🚹 fell 🔙 in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--

"All your oaths to 🏃 the White 🐳 are as 🔙 as mine; and
♥, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye
may know to what tune this ♥ beats; look ye here; thus I blow out
the 🔚 fear!" And with 1⃣ 🐚 of his breath he extinguished the
🔥.

As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, 🚹 fly the neighborhood of
some lone, gigantic elm, whose very 🔝 and strength but render it so
much the more unsafe, because so much the more a 🎶 for thunderbolts;
so at those 🔚 words of Ahab's many of the mariners did 🏃 from him
in a terror of dismay.



CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the 🔚 of the First Night ⌚.

AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM. STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM.


"We must 🚢 down the main-🔝-sail Ⓜ, sir. The 💍 is 🏃 🆓
and the lee 🌹 is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?"

"Strike 0⃣; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up
now."

"Sir!--in God's 🔑!--sir?"

"Well."

"The anchors are 🏃, sir. Shall I get them inboard?"

"Strike 0⃣, and stir 0⃣, but lash everything. The 👃 rises,
but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and 📅 to it.--By
masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some
coasting smack. 🚢 down my main-🔝-sail Ⓜ! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest
trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-🚚 of mine now
sails amid the ☁-💨. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards
🚢 down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft
there! I would 🇪🇸'en 🉑 it for sublime, did I not know that the colic
is a noisy malady. Oh, 🉑 medicine, 🉑 medicine!"



CHAPTER 121. Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks.


STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER
THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING.


"No, Stubb; you may 🔨 that knot there as much as you please, but you
will never 🔨 into me what you were just now saying. And how long
ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't you once say that
whatever 🚢 Ahab sails in, that 🚢 should 🐻 something extra on its
insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft
and boxes of lucifers forward? 🔚, now; didn't you say so?"

"Well, suppose I did? What then? I've 🏢 changed my flesh since that
time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with powder
barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little 👨, you have
pretty 😳 hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake yourself; you're
Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might 😆 pitchers at your 🍰
👮. Don't you 📅, then, that for these extra risks the Marine
Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But
hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First 🉑 your leg off
from the 🔝 of the ⚓ here, though, so I can pass the rope;
now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's
lightning-rod in the 😡, and standing 🔚 by a mast that hasn't
got any lightning-rod at all in a 😡? Don't you 📅, you timber-❓,
that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first
struck? What are you talking about, then? Not 1⃣ 🚢 in a 💯
carries rods, and Ahab,--aye, 👨, and all of us,--were in no more
danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ❌ Ⓜ
ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-🚉, you, I suppose you would
have every 👨 in the 👨 ❌ about with a small lightning-rod 🏃
up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather,
and trailing 💺 like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's
easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any 👨 with half an ♥ can be
sensible."

"I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard."

"Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be sensible, that's
a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; ⌚ the
🔧 there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors
now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these 2⃣
anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a 👨's hands 💺 him. And what
big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists,
hey? What a 📖 they have, too! I ❓, Flask, whether the 👨 is
anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable,
though. There, 🔨 that knot down, and we've done. So; next to
touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just
🔧 out my 👑 skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They 😆 at long-togs
so, Flask; but seems to me, a Long tailed 🍰 ought always to be worn
in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to 🏃
off the water, d'ye 📅. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-🔚
eave-troughs, Flask. No more 👿-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I
must 🌹 a 🉑-💩, and 🐏 down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew!
there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come
from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad."



CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.--💥 and Lightning.


THE MAIN-🔝-SAIL Ⓜ.--TASHTEGO PASSING 🆕 LASHINGS AROUND IT.


"Um, um, um. 🔚 that 💥! Plenty too much 💥 up here. What's
the use of 💥? Um, um, um. We don't want 💥; we want rum; 🍃
us a 👓 of rum. Um, um, um!"



CHAPTER 123. The Musket.


During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the 👨 at the Pequod's
jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by
its spasmodic motions, 😳 though preventer tackles had been attached
to it--for they were ☺--because some 🏃 to the tiller was
indispensable.

In a severe gale like this, while the 🚢 is but a tossed 🐦
to the 🐚, it is by no means uncommon to 📅 the needles in the
compasses, at intervals, ❌ round and round. It was thus with the
Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to 🎶
the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is
a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted
emotion.

Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--1⃣ engaged forward and the
other aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and 🙇 and main-🔝-sails
were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like
the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are 🐱 to the winds when
that 😡-tossed 🐦 is on the wing.

The 3⃣ corresponding 🆕 sails were now bent and reefed, and a
😡-trysail was 👗 further aft; so that the 🚢 🔜 went through
the water with some precision again; and the 🏃--for the 🎁,
🇪🇸-south-🇪🇸--which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the
🚢 as near her 🏃 as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo!
a 🔉 🏠! the 👃 seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze
became fair!

Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE
FAIR 👃! OH-YE-HO, CHEERLY 🚹!" the crew singing for 😂, that so
promising an event should so 🔜 have falsified the evil portents
preceding it.

In compliance with the standing ♣ of his commander--to report
immediately, and at any 1⃣ of the twenty-4⃣ hours, any decided change
in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to
the breeze--however reluctantly and gloomily,--than he mechanically went
below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.

Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it
a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was
burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old 👨's bolted
🚪,--a thin 1⃣, with fixed blinds inserted, in 🚉 of upper panels.
The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming
😯 to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the 💥 of
the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
upright 👨; but out of Starbuck's ♥, at that 💓 when he saw
the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with
its neutral or 🔉 accompaniments that for the 💓 he hardly knew
it for itself.

"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very musket
that he pointed at me;--that 1⃣ with the studded stock; let me 👻
it--🌹 it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,
strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must 📅. Aye, aye; and
powder in the pan;--that's not 🔉. Best spill it?--wait. I'll cure
myself of this. I'll 📖 the musket boldly while I think.--I come
to report a fair 👃 to him. But how fair? Fair for 🔚 and
doom,--THAT'S fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair 👃 that's only fair for
that accursed 🐟.--The very 🚇 he pointed at me!--the very 1⃣;
THIS 1⃣--I 📖 it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I
handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say
he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly
quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere
dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did
he not 🏦 that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed
old 👨 be tamely suffered to drag a whole 🚢's company down to doom
with him?--Yes, it would 💩 him the wilful murderer of thirty 🚹 and
more, if this 🚢 come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my
soul swears this 🚢 will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this
💓--put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in
his 😴? Yes, just there,--in there, he's 😴. 😴? aye,
but 😯 alive, and 🔜 awake again. I can't withstand thee, then, old
👨. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt Ⓜ hearken to;
all this Ⓜ scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is
all Ⓜ breathest. Aye, and say'st the 🚹 have vow'd thy vow; say'st
all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? no
lawful way?--💩 him a prisoner to be taken 🏠? What! hope to wrest
this old 👨's living 🏢 from his own living hands? Only a fool
would try it. Say he were pinioned 😳; knotted all over with ropes
and hawsers; chained down to ☎-bolts on this cabin floor; he would
be more hideous than a caged 🐯, then. I could not 🏃 the
sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, 😴 itself,
inestimable reason would 🍃 me on the long intolerable voyage. What,
then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked 🗾
the nearest. I 🐻 alone here upon an open 🌊, with 2⃣ oceans and
a whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--Is heaven
a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,
tindering sheets and skin together?--And would I be a murderer, then,
if"--and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the
loaded musket's 🔚 against the 🚪.

"On this 😳, Ahab's hammock swings within; his ❓ this way. A
👻, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and 👶 again.--Oh
Mary! Mary!--👦! 👦! 👦!--But if I wake thee not to 🔚, old 👨,
who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week
may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where 🎨 Ⓜ? Shall I? shall
I?--The 👃 has gone down and shifted, sir; the 🙇 and main topsails
are reefed and 👗; she heads her 🏃."

"💩 all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy ♥ at 🔚!"

Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old 👨's
😧 😴, as if Starbuck's 🔉 had caused the long 🔇 dream
to speak.

The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;
Starbuck seemed wrestling with an 👼; but turning from the 🚪, he
placed the 🔚-🚇 in its rack, and left the 🚉.

"He's too 🔉 asleep, Mr. Stubb; ❌ Ⓜ down, and wake him, and tell
him. I must 📅 to the deck here. Ⓜ know'st what to say."



CHAPTER 124. The Needle.


Next 🌅 the not-yet-subsided 🌊 rolled in long slow billows of
mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling 🏃, pushed her on
like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded
so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole 👨
boomed before the 👃. Muffled in the full 🌅 ✨, the invisible
sun was only known by the spread intensity of his 🚉; where his
bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian
kings and queens, reigned over everything. The 🌊 was as a crucible of
molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with ✨ and heat.

Long maintaining an enchanted 😯, Ahab stood apart; and every time
the tetering 🚢 loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to ♥
the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by
the 💩, he turned 💺, and saw the sun's 🔙 🚉, and how
the same 🐔 rays were blending with his undeviating wake.

"Ha, ha, my 🚢! Ⓜ mightest well be taken now for the 🌊-chariot of
the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my 🙇, I bring the sun to ye!
🔗 on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I 🐏 the 🌊!"

But suddenly reined 🔙 by some counter thought, he hurried towards the
helm, huskily demanding how the 🚢 was heading.

"🇪🇸-sou-🇪🇸, sir," said the frightened steersman.

"Ⓜ liest!" smiting him with his clenched ✊. "Heading 🇪🇸 at this
hour in the 🌅, and the sun astern?"

Upon this every soul was 😖; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every 1⃣ else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

Thrusting his ❓ half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught 1⃣ glimpse
of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
seemed to stagger. Standing 💺 him Starbuck looked, and lo! the 2⃣
compasses pointed 🇪🇸, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.

But ere the first 😠 alarm could get out abroad among the crew,
the old 👨 with a rigid 😆 exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened
before. Mr. Starbuck, 🔚 night's 💥 turned our compasses--that's
all. Ⓜ hast before now heard of such a thing, I 🉑 it."

"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale 👫,
gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
1⃣ 🐚 occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially 1⃣ with
the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled
at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has
actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and
rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been 😯 more fatal;
all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic
steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in
either 🐚, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original
virtue thus marred or 😖; and if the binnacle compasses be affected,
the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the 🚢; 😳 were
the lowermost 1⃣ inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
compasses, the old 👨, with the sharp of his extended 🚹, now took
the precise bearing of the sun, and 😆 that the needles were
exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the 🚢's 🏃 to be
changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod
thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing 👃, for the supposed fair
1⃣ had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own ㊙ thoughts, Starbuck said 0⃣,
but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask--who
in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings--likewise
unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the 🚹, though some of them lowly
rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as
ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;
or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their
congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.

For a space the old 👨 walked the deck in rolling reveries. But
chancing to slip with his ivory 🐶, he saw the crushed 🐷
sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

"Ⓜ poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked
thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But
Ahab is lord over the 😳 loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck--a lance without
a pole; a 🔝-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles.
Quick!"

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about
to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old
👨 well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,
without some shudderings and evil portents.

"🚹," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the 👫 handed
him the things he had demanded, "my 🚹, the 💥 turned old Ahab's
needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can 💩 1⃣ of his own, that
will point as true as any."

Abashed glances of servile ❓ were exchanged by the sailors, as this
was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
⌚. But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the 🔝-maul Ahab knocked off the steel ❓ of the
lance, and then handing to the 👫 the long iron rod remaining, bade
him 📖 it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul,
after repeatedly smiting the upper 🔚 of this iron rod, he placed the
blunted needle endwise on the 🔝 of it, and less strongly hammered
that, several times, the 👫 😯 holding the rod as before. Then
going through some small strange motions with it--whether indispensable
to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe
of the crew, is uncertain--he called for linen 🎀; and moving to the
binnacle, slipped out the 2⃣ reversed needles there, and horizontally
suspended the sail-needle by its ♥, over 1⃣ of the compass-cards.
At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at
either 🔚; but at 🔚 it settled to its 🚉, when Ahab, who had
been intently watching for this 🍃, stepped frankly 🔙 from the
binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look
ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the 😳 loadstone! The sun
is 🇪🇸, and that compass swears it!"

1⃣ after another they peered in, for 0⃣ but their own eyes could
persuade such ignorance as theirs, and 1⃣ after another they slunk
away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and 😤, you then saw Ahab in all his
fatal pride.



CHAPTER 125. The Log and 🎶.


While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
and 🎶 had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
upon other means of determining the vessel's 🚉, some merchantmen,
and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the
log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's 🍶 than
anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary 🎫 the
🏃 steered by the 🚢, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden
reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the
railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and
👃 had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he
happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,
and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic
oath about the 😳 log and 🎶. The 🚢 was sailing plungingly;
astern the billows rolled in riots.

"Forward, there! Heave the log!"

2⃣ seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. "🉑
the reel, 1⃣ of ye, I'll heave."

They went towards the extreme 💩, on the 🚢's lee side, where the
deck, with the oblique energy of the 👃, was now almost dipping into
the creamy, sidelong-rushing 🌊.

The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the 😌
handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of 🎶 revolved, so
stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
turns to form a preliminary 🚹-📜 to toss overboard, when the old
Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the 🎶, made bold to
speak.

"Sir, I mistrust it; this 🎶 looks far gone, long heat and wet have
spoiled it."

"'Twill 📖, old 👨. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
Ⓜ seem'st to 📖. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not Ⓜ it."

"I 📖 the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these
grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
superior, who'll ne'er confess."

"What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's
granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient. Where wert
Ⓜ born?"

"In the little rocky Isle of 👨, sir."

"Excellent! Ⓜ'st 💥 the 👨 by that."

"I know not, sir, but I was born there."

"In the Isle of 👨, hey? Well, the other way, it's 🔉. Here's a 👨
from 👨; a 👨 born in once independent 👨, and now unmanned of 👨;
which is sucked in--by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
butts all inquiring heads at 🔚. Up with it! So."

The log was heaved. The 🆓 coils rapidly straightened out in a long
dragging 🎶 astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
🔧, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.

"📖 hard!"

Snap! the overstrained 🎶 sagged down in 1⃣ long festoon; the tugging
log was gone.

"I 🐚 the quadrant, the 💥 turns the needles, and now the mad
🌊 parts the log-🎶. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;
reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter 💩 another log, and
mend Ⓜ the 🎶. 📅 to it."

"There he goes now; to him 0⃣'s happened; but to me, the skewer
seems loosening out of the ♥ of the 👨. Haul in, haul in,
Tahitian! These lines 🏃 whole, and whirling out: come in 😕, and
dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"

"Pip? whom ☎ ye Pip? Pip jumped from the 🐳-⛵. Pip's missing.
Let's 📅 now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags
hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul
in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet!
a hatchet! cut it off--we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."

"Peace, Ⓜ crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
"Away from the 💩-deck!"

"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.
"Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest Ⓜ Pip was, 👦?

"Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!"

"And who 🎨 Ⓜ, 👦? I 📅 not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
thy eyes. Oh God! that 👨 should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve
through! Who 🎨 Ⓜ, 👦?"

"🔔-👦, sir; 🚢's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip!
1⃣ 💯 pounds of clay reward for Pip; 5⃣ feet high--looks
😨--quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the
coward?"

"There can be no hearts above the snow-🎶. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look
down here. Ye did beget this luckless 👶, and have abandoned him,
ye creative libertines. Here, 👦; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's 🏠
henceforth, while Ahab lives. Ⓜ touchest my inmost ♥, 👦; Ⓜ
🎨 tied to me by cords woven of my ♥-strings. Come, let's down."

"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's 🚹,
and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,
perhaps he had ne'er been 😖! This seems to me, sir, as a 👨-rope;
something that weak souls may 📖 by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come
and rivet these 2⃣ hands together; the black 1⃣ with the white, for I
will not let this ❌."

"Oh, 👦, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in
gods all goodness, and in 👨 all ill, lo you! 📅 the omniscient gods
oblivious of suffering 👨; and 👨, though idiotic, and knowing not
what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!
I feel prouder ⭐ thee by thy black 🚹, than though I grasped an
Emperor's!"

"There ❌ 2⃣ daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "1⃣ daft with
strength, the other daft with weakness. But here's the 🔚 of the rotten
🎶--all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a 🆕
🎶 altogether. I'll 📅 Mr. Stubb about it."



CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.


Steering now south-🇪🇸 by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress
solely determined by Ahab's 😳 log and 🎶; the Pequod held on
her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed
the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.

At 🔚, when the 🚢 drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
Equatorial fishing-⚓, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
🌅, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the ⌚--then headed
by Flask--was startled by a 😢 so plaintively 😠 and unearthly--like
half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered
Innocents--that 1⃣ and all, they started from their reveries, and for
the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly
listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that 😠 😢 remained
within hearing. The Christian or civilized 🏢 of the crew said it was
mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled.
Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that the 😠
thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of 🆕 drowned 🚹
in the 🌊.

Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey 🌅, when
he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
explained the ❓.

Those rocky islands the 🚢 had passed were the resort of great numbers
of seals, and some 🆕 seals that had 😖 their dams, or some dams
that had 😖 their cubs, must have risen nigh the 🚢 and kept company
with her, crying and 😭 with their 👨 sort of wail. But this
only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a
very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their
peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the 👨 look of their
round heads and semi-🔉 faces, seen peeringly uprising from
the water alongside. In the 🌊, under certain circumstances, seals have
more than once been mistaken for 🚹.

But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
confirmation in the fate of 1⃣ of their number that 🌅. At
sun-🌹 this 👨 went from his hammock to his mast-❓ at the 🙇;
and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his 😴 (for
sailors sometimes ❌ aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus
with the 👨, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he
had not been long at his perch, when a 😢 was heard--a 😢 and a
rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
looking down, a little tossed 🚌 of white bubbles in the blue of the
🌊.

The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the 💩, where it
always hung obedient to a cunning ⛲; but no 🚹 🌹 to seize it,
and the sun having long 💓 upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and
the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the 💺, as if to
🐻 him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard 1⃣.

And thus the first 👨 of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
for the White 🐳, on the White 🐳's own peculiar ⚓; that 👨
was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the
time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at
least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil
in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They
declared that now they knew the reason of those 😠 shrieks they had
heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.

The 😖 life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to 📅
to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as
in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of
the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
connected with its final 🔚, whatever that might 🌹 to be;
therefore, they were going to 🍃 the 🚢's 💩 unprovided with a
buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint
concerning his coffin.

"A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.

"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.

"It will 💩 a 🔉 enough 1⃣," said Flask, "the carpenter here can
👗 it easily."

"Bring it up; there's 0⃣ else for it," said Starbuck, after a
melancholy pause. "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--the coffin,
I mean. Dost Ⓜ hear me? Rig it."

"And shall I 💥 down the lid, sir?" moving his 🚹 as with a 🔨.

"Aye."

"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his 🚹 as with a
caulking-iron.

"Aye."

"And shall I then 🐻 over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his 🚹 as
with a pitch-🚽.

"Away! what possesses thee to this? 💩 a life-buoy of the coffin, and
no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."

"He goes off in a huff. The whole he can 🏃; at the parts he baulks.
Now I don't like this. I 💩 a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it
like a 👨; but I 💩 a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won't put
his ❓ into it. Are all my pains to ❌ for 0⃣ with that coffin?
And now I'Ⓜ ordered to 💩 a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old
🍰; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don't like this
cobbling sort of business--I don't like it at all; it's undignified;
it's not my 🚉. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their
betters. I like to 🉑 in 🚹 none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square
mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and
is at the ♥ when midway, and comes to an 🔚 at the 🔚; not
a cobbler's job, that's at an 🔚 in the ♥, and at the beginning at
the 🔚. It's the old 👩's tricks to be 🎁 cobbling jobs. Lord!
what an ♥ all old women have for tinkers. I know an old 👩 of
sixty-5⃣ who ran away with a bald-headed 🆕 🐒 once. And that's
the reason I never would 🏃 for lonely widow old women ashore, when
I kept my job-🐀 in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their
lonely old heads to 🏃 off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at
🌊 but snow-caps. Let me 📅. 💥 down the lid; caulk the seams; 🐻
over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the
snap-⛲ over the 🚢's 💩. Were ever such things done before
with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied
up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I'Ⓜ made of knotty
Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing
about with a grave-Ⓜ tray! But never mind. We workers in woods 💩
bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We
🏃 by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask
the why and wherefore of our 🏃, unless it be too 😖 cobbling,
and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I'll do the job, now, tenderly.
I'll have me--let's 📅--how many in the 🚢's company, all told? But
I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed
life-lines, each 3⃣ feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then,
if the hull ❌ down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for
1⃣ coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come 🔨,
caulking-iron, pitch-🚽, and marling-👂! Let's to it."



CHAPTER 127. The Deck.


THE COFFIN LAID UPON 2⃣ 🎶-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE OPEN
HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE 🚋 OF TWISTED OAKUM
SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE 👋 OF IT PLACED IN THE ♥ OF
HIS 👗.--AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND HEARS PIP
FOLLOWING HIM.


"🔙, lad; I will be with ye again 🔜. He goes! Not this 🚹
complies with my humor more genially than that 👦.--♥ aisle of a
⛪! What's here?"

"Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
hatchway!"

"Thank ye, 👨. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."

"Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does."

"🎨 not Ⓜ the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy
🐀?"

"I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule 🐻, sir?"

"Well enough. But 🎨 Ⓜ not also the undertaker?"

"Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
they've 👗 me now to turning it into something else."

"Then tell me; 🎨 Ⓜ not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
monopolising, heathenish old 👿, to be 1⃣ day making legs, and the
next day coffins to 👏 them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
same coffins? Ⓜ 🎨 as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
💩-of-all-trades."

"But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do."

"The gods again. Hark ye, dost Ⓜ not ever 🍑 🏃 about a
coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the 🏃 sings, ♠ in
🚹. Dost Ⓜ never?"

"🍑, sir? Do I 🍑? Oh, I'Ⓜ indifferent enough, sir, for that; but
the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there
was none in his ♠, sir. But the caulking 🐞 is full of it. Hark
to it."

"Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in
all things makes the sounding-board is this--there's 0⃣ beneath. And
yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
Hast Ⓜ ever helped 🏃 a bier, and heard the coffin knock against
the churchyard gate, going in?

"Faith, sir, I've--"

"Faith? What's that?"

"Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of ❗-like--that's all,
sir."

"Um, um; ❌ on."

"I was about to say, sir, that--"

"🎨 Ⓜ a silk-worm? Dost Ⓜ spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
Look at thy ♥! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."

"He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
latitudes. I've heard that the Isle of Albemarle, 1⃣ of the Gallipagos,
is cut by the Equator right in the ♥. Seems to me some sort of
Equator cuts yon old 👨, too, right in his ♥. He's always under
the 🎶--fiery hot, I tell ye! He's looking this way--come, oakum;
quick. Here we ❌ again. This wooden 🐞 is the cork, and I'Ⓜ the
professor of musical glasses--🐛, 🐛!"

(AHAB TO HIMSELF.)

"There's a sight! There's a 🔉! The grey-headed woodpecker tapping
the hollow tree! Blind and 🔇 might well be envied now. 📅! that
thing rests on 2⃣ 🎶-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,
that fellow. 🐀-tat! So 👨's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
now's the very 😨 🔣 of grim 🔚, by a mere hap, made
the expressive 🏠 of the help and hope of most endangered life.
A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it ❌ further? Can it be that in some
spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,
that its other side, the theoretic bright 1⃣, seems but uncertain
twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed
🔉? I ❌ below; let me not 📅 that thing here when I return
again. Now, then, Pip, we'll 🍑 this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee! Some 👽 conduits from the 👽 worlds
must empty into thee!"



CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.


Next day, a large 🚢, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with 🚹. At the
time the Pequod was making 🔉 speed through the water; but as the
broad-winged windward 👽 shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from
the smitten hull.

"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
commander, who, with 🎺 to 👄, stood up in his ⛵; ere he
could hopefully hail, Ahab's 🔉 was heard.

"Hast seen the White 🐳?"

"Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a 🐳-⛵ adrift?"

Throttling his 😂, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected ❓;
and would then have fain boarded the 👽, when the 👽 captain
himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen descending her
side. A few keen pulls, and his ⛵-👮 🔜 clinched the Pequod's
main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by
Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.

"Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing.
"How was it?"

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while
3⃣ of the 👽's boats were engaged with a 🏫 of whales, which
had led them some 4⃣ or 5⃣ miles from the 🚢; and while they were
yet in swift 🐶 to windward, the white hump and ❓ of Moby Dick had
suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,
the fourth rigged ⛵--a reserved 1⃣--had been instantly lowered in
🐶. After a keen sail before the 👃, this fourth ⛵--the swiftest
keeled of all--seemed to have succeeded in fastening--at least, as
well as the 👨 at the mast-❓ could tell anything about it. In the
distance he saw the diminished dotted ⛵; and then a swift gleam
of bubbling white water; and after that 0⃣ more; whence it was
concluded that the stricken 🐳 must have indefinitely 🏃 away with
his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no
positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging;
darkness came on; and forced to pick up her 3⃣ far to windward
boats--ere going in quest of the fourth 1⃣ in the precisely opposite
direction--the 🚢 had not only been necessitated to 🍃 that ⛵ to
its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance
from it. But the rest of her crew being at 🔚 safe aboard, she crowded
all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing ⛵; kindling a 🔥
in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other 👨 aloft on the look-out.
But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the
presumed 🚉 of the absent ones when 🔚 seen; though she then
paused to 😦 her 🆓 boats to 🔧 all around her; and not finding
anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and
though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least
glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.

The story told, the 👽 Captain immediately went on to reveal his
object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that 🚢 to 🔗 with his
own in the search; by sailing over the 🌊 some 4⃣ or 5⃣ miles
apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a 🔁 horizon, as it were.

"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some 1⃣
in that missing ⛵ wore off that Captain's best 🍰; mayhap, his
⌚--he's so cursed anxious to get it 🔙. Who ever heard of 2⃣
pious 🐳-ships cruising after 1⃣ missing 🐳-⛵ in the 🔝 of
the whaling season? 📅, Flask, only 📅 how pale he looks--pale in the
very buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the 🍰--it must have been
the--"

"My 👦, my own 👦 is among them. For God's 🍶--I 🙏, I
conjure"--here exclaimed the 👽 Captain to Ahab, who thus far
had but icily received his petition. "For 8⃣-and-forty hours let me
charter your 🚢--I will gladly 🐻 for it, and roundly 🐻 for it--if
there be no other way--for 8⃣-and-forty hours only--only that--you
must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."

"His 👦!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his 👦 he's 😖! I 🉑 🔙 the
🍰 and ⌚--what says Ahab? We must 😌 that 👦."

"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, 🔚 night," said the old Manx
sailor standing 💺 them; "I heard; all of ye heard their spirits."

Now, as it 🔜 turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's
the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was 1⃣ of the
Captain's sons among the number of the missing ⛵'s crew; but among
the number of the other ⛵'s crews, at the same time, but on the other
🚹, separated from the 🚢 during the dark vicissitudes of the 🐶,
there had been 😯 another 👦; as that for a time, the wretched
🔰 was plunged to the 💺 of the cruellest perplexity; which
was only solved for him by his chief 👫's instinctively adopting the
ordinary procedure of a 🐳-🚢 in such emergencies, that is, when
placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the
majority first. But the captain, for some 👽 constitutional reason,
had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by
Ahab's iciness did he allude to his 1⃣ yet missing 👦; a little lad,
but twelve years old, whose 🔰 with the earnest but unmisgiving
hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to
🔰 him in the perils and wonders of a 📲 almost immemorially
the destiny of all his 🏃. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that
Nantucket captains will 🚢 a 👦 of such tender age away from them,
for a protracted 3⃣ or 4⃣ years' voyage in some other 🚢 than
their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's 📲 shall
be unenervated by any chance display of a 🔰's natural but untimely
partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and 😟.

Meantime, now the 👽 was 😯 beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;
and Ahab 😯 stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without
the least quivering of his own.

"I will not ❌," said the 👽, "till you say aye to me. Do to me
as you would have me do to you in the like 🐚. For YOU too have a 👦,
Captain Ahab--though but a 👶, and 🍟 safely at 🏠 now--a
👶 of your old age too--Yes, yes, you relent; I 📅 it--🏃, 🏃,
🚹, now, and 🐻 by to square in the yards."

"Avast," cried Ahab--"👻 not a rope-yarn"; then in a 🔉 that
prolongingly moulded every word--"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
😳 now I lose time. 🔉-bye, 🔉-bye. God bless ye, 👨, and may I
forgive myself, but I must ❌. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle ⌚,
and in 3⃣ minutes from this 🎁 💓 ⚠ off all strangers:
then 👫 forward again, and let the 🚢 sail as before."

Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter
rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,
Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his
⛵, and returned to his 🚢.

🔜 the 2⃣ ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
was in ⌚, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark 🏢,
however small, on the 🌊. This way and that her yards were swung round;
starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she 💓 against a
❓ 🌊; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her
masts and yards were thickly clustered with 🚹, as 3⃣ tall 🍒
trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.

But by her 😯 halting 🏃 and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw
that this 🚢 that so wept with spray, 😯 remained without comfort.
She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.



CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.


(AHAB MOVING TO ❌ ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE 🚹 TO ⌚.)

"Lad, lad, I tell thee Ⓜ must not ⌚ Ahab now. The hour is coming
when Ahab would not 💨 thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.
There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.
Like cures like; and for this 🏃, my malady becomes my most desired
health. Do Ⓜ 🐻 below here, where they shall serve thee, as if
Ⓜ wert the captain. Aye, lad, Ⓜ shalt 💺 here in my own screwed
chair; another screw to it, Ⓜ must be."

"No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
your 1⃣ 😖 leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a
🏢 of ye."

"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
fidelity of 👨!--and a black! and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like
applies to him too; he grows so sane again."

"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
drowned bones now ® white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must ❌ with
ye."

"If Ⓜ speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him.
I tell thee no; it cannot be."

"Oh 🔉 master, master, master!

"😢 so, and I will murder thee! have a 😟, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and Ⓜ wilt often hear my ivory 🐾 upon the deck, and 😯
know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy 🚹!--Met! True 🎨
Ⓜ, lad, as the circumference to its ♥. So: God for ever bless
thee; and if it come to that,--God for ever 😌 thee, let what will
befall."

(AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS 1⃣ 👣 FORWARD.)


"Here he this 💓 stood; I 🐻 in his air,--but I'Ⓜ alone. Now
were 😳 poor Pip here I could 🏃 it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip!
Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? He must be up here; let's try the
🚪. What? neither 🔒, nor 💨, nor 🍰; and yet there's no opening
it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this
screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll 💺 me, against the transom,
in the 🚢's full ♥, all her keel and her 3⃣ masts before me.
Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great
admirals sometimes 💺 at table, and lord it over rows of captains and
lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come
crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to 📅 ye; 😆 up, monsieurs!
What an odd feeling, now, when a black 👦's host to white 🚹 with gold
lace upon their coats!--Monsieurs, have ye seen 1⃣ Pip?--a little
negro lad, 5⃣ feet high, hang-🐶 look, and 😨! Jumped from a
🐳-⛵ once;--seen him? No! Well then, 😆 up again, captains, and
let's drink shame upon all cowards! I 🔑 no names. Shame upon them!
Put 1⃣ 🐾 upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.--Hist! above there,
I hear ivory--Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you 🚶
over me. But here I'll stay, though this 💩 strikes rocks; and they
👝 through; and oysters come to 🔗 me."



CHAPTER 130. The Hat.


And now that at the proper time and 🚉, after so long and wide a
preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to
have chased his foe into an 🌊-fold, to slay him the more securely
there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a
vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with
various ships contrastingly concurred to ® the demoniac indifference
with which the white 🐳 tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned
against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old 👨's eyes,
which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to 📅. As the unsetting
polar 🌠, which through the livelong, arctic, 6⃣ months' night
sustains its piercing, steady, 🔑 gaze; so Ahab's purpose now
fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
1⃣ spear or 🍃.

In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
vanished. Stubb no more strove to 🔥 a 😁; Starbuck no more strove
to ⌚ 1⃣. Alike, 😂 and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ⚓ to
finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of
Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever
conscious that the old 👨's despot ♥ was on them.

But did you deeply scan him in his more ㊙ ㊙ hours; when
he thought no glance but 1⃣ was on him; then you would have seen that
😳 as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance
awed his; or somehow, at least, in some 😠 way, at times affected it.
Such an added, gliding strangeness began to 💺 the thin Fedallah
now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the 🚹 looked dubious
at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal
♥, or else a tremulous shadow 🐱 upon the deck by some unseen
being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
night, 😳, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to 😴, or ❌
below. He would 🐻 😯 for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan
but wondrous eyes did plainly say--We 2⃣ watchmen never rest.

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now 👣 upon the
deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
exactly pacing the planks between 2⃣ undeviating limits,--the main-mast
and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,--his
living 🐾 advanced upon the deck, as if to 👣; his hat slouched
heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the
days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock;
yet ㊙ beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly
whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether
he was 😯 intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in
the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-🔇
gathered in beads of dew upon that 💎-carved 🍰 and hat. The
👗 that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him;
and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath
the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.

He ate in the same open air; that is, his 2⃣ only meals,--breakfast and
dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew
all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which 😯 🌹
idly on at naked 🐾, though perished in the upper verdure. But though
his whole life was now become 1⃣ ⌚ on deck; and though the Parsee's
㊙ ⌚ was without intermission as his own; yet these 2⃣ never
seemed to speak--1⃣ 👨 to the other--unless at long intervals some
passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell
seemed secretly to 🔗 the 👫; openly, and to the awe-struck crew,
they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak 1⃣ word;
by night, 🔇 🚹 were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal
interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a 1⃣ hail, they
stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by
the mainmast; but 😯 fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the
Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned
♥.

And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
and every 💓, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab
seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. 😯 again both
seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the 🏃 😎
siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel
was solid Ahab.

At the first faintest glimmering of the 🌅, his iron 🔉 was heard
from aft,--"👨 the mast-heads!"--and all through the day, till after
sunset and after twilight, the same 🔉 every hour, at the striking of
the helmsman's 🔔, was heard--"What d'ye 📅?--sharp! sharp!"

But when 3⃣ or 4⃣ days had slided by, after meeting the
children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
old 👨 seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least, of nearly
all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to ❓, 😳, whether
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if
these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.

"I will have the first sight of the 🐳 myself,"--he said. "Aye!
Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest
of basketed bowlines; and sending a 🚹 aloft, with a 1⃣ sheaved
block, to secure to the main-mast ❓, he received the 2⃣ ends of the
downward-reeved rope; and attaching 1⃣ to his basket prepared a 🎏 for
the other 🔚, in ♣ to fasten it at the 🚋. This done, with that
🔚 yet in his 🚹 and standing beside the 🎏, he looked round upon
his crew, sweeping from 1⃣ to the other; pausing his glance long upon
Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his
🏠 relying ♥ upon the chief 👫, said,--"🉑 the rope, sir--I 🍃
it into thy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his person in the basket,
he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being
the 1⃣ who secured the rope at 🔚; and afterwards stood near it. And
thus, with 1⃣ 🚹 clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad
upon the 🌊 for miles and miles,--ahead, astern, this side, and
that,--within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a 🔝.

When in 🏃 with his hands at some lofty almost isolated 🚉 in
the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at 🌊 is
hoisted up to that 🏢, and sustained there by the rope; under these
circumstances, its fastened 🔚 on deck is always given in strict 👢
to some 1⃣ 👨 who has the special ⌚ of it. Because in such a
wilderness of 🏃 rigging, whose various different relations aloft
cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the
deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes
🐱 down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,
unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some
carelessness of the crew be 🐱 adrift and fall all swooping to the
🌊. So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only
strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the 1⃣
only 👨 who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the
slightest degree approaching to decision--1⃣ of those too, whose
faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to ❓ somewhat;--it was
strange, that this was the very 👨 he should select for his watchman;
freely 🎁 his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands.

Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ❌
minutes; 1⃣ of those 😳-billed 🐺 🌊-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously 🔚 round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; 1⃣ of these birds came wheeling and 😱 round his ❓
in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a Ⓜ feet
straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying
again round his ❓.

But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to 🎶 this 😠 🐦; nor, indeed, would any 1⃣ else have marked
it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
heedful ♥ seemed to 📅 some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
sight.

"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
being posted at the mizen-mast-❓, stood directly 💺 Ahab, though
somewhat 😦 than his 😳, and with a deep gulf of air dividing
them.

But already the sable wing was before the old 👨's eyes; the long
hooked 🎶 at his ❓: with a 😢, the black hawk darted away with
his 🏆.

An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's ❓, removing his 👑 to replace
it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would
be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the 👑 was that omen
accounted 🔉. Ahab's hat was never restored; the 😠 hawk flew on and
on with it; far in advance of the 🙇: and at 🔚 disappeared; while
from the point of that disappearance, a minute black 🏢 was dimly
discerned, falling from that vast 🔝 into the 🌊.



CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The 😂.


The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
life-buoy-coffin 😯 lightly swung; and another 🚢, most miserably
misnamed the 😂, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships,
cross the 💩-deck at the 🔝 of 8⃣ or ♣ feet; serving to
🏃 the 🆓, unrigged, or disabled boats.

Upon the 👽's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
some few splintered planks, of what had once been a 🐳-⛵; but you
now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you 📅 through the peeled,
half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a 🐴.

"Hast seen the White 🐳?"

"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with
his 🎺 he pointed to the wreck.

"Hast killed him?"

"The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the
other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered
sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.

"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
held it out, ❗--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this 🚹 I 📖
his 🔚! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs;
and I 🏦 to temper them triply in that hot 🚉 💺 the 5⃣,
where the White 🐳 most feels his accursed life!"

"Then God keep thee, old 👨--📅'st Ⓜ that"--pointing to the
hammock--"I bury but 1⃣ of 5⃣ stout 🚹, who were alive only
yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only THAT 1⃣ I bury; the rest were
buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." Then turning to his
crew--"Are ye ready there? 🚉 the plank then on the 🚋, and
🌹 the body; so, then--Oh! God"--advancing towards the hammock with
uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life--"

"👫 forward! Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his 🚹.

But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to 🏃 the 🔉
of the splash that the corpse 🔜 made as it struck the 🌊; not so
quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled
her hull with their ghostly baptism.

As Ahab now glided from the dejected 😂, the strange life-buoy
hanging at the Pequod's 💩 came into conspicuous relief.

"Ha! yonder! look yonder, 🚹!" cried a foreboding 🔉 in her wake.
"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but 🔧 us your
taffrail to ® us your coffin!"



CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.


It was a 🔝 steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and 🌊 were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the 😔 air was
transparently pure and soft, with a 👩's look, and the robust and
👨-like 🌊 heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's
chest in his 😴.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
mighty leviathans, sword-🐟, and sharks; and these were the strong,
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine 🌊.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
shadows without; those 2⃣ seemed 1⃣; it was only the sex, as it were,
that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed 🎁 this gentle
air to this bold and rolling 🌊; 😳 as bride to 🍛. And at the
girdling 🎶 of the horizon, a soft and tremulous ❓--most seen
here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing 🏦, the loving
alarms, with which the poor bride gave her ♥ away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly 🏠
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that 😯 glow in the
ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair 👧's
forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
oblivious were ye of old Ahab's 🔚-coiled woe! But so have I seen
little Miriam and Martha, 😆-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
aromas in that enchanted air did at 🔚 seem to dispel, for a moment,
the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome
sky, did at 🔚 stroke and caress him; the 👣-mother 👨, so long
cruel--forbidding--now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck,
and did seem to joyously 😭 over him, as if over 1⃣, that however
wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her ♥ to 😌 and to
bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the 🌊;
nor did all the Pacific 🐻 such wealth as that 1⃣ wee drop.

Starbuck saw the old 👨; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
and he seemed to hear in his own true ♥ the measureless 😭 that
stole out of the ♥ of the serenity around. Careful not to 👻
him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.

Ahab turned.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir."

"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild 👃, and a mild looking sky. On such
a day--very much such a 💐 as this--I struck my first 🐳--a
👦-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty--forty--forty years ago!--ago! Forty
years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
😡-time! forty years on the pitiless 🌊! for forty years has Ahab
forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to 💩 war on the horrors
of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not
spent 3⃣ ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation
of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's
exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of
solitary command!--when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so
keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry
salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!--when the
poorest landsman has had 🆕 fruit to his daily 🚹, and 😕 the
👨's 🆕 🍞 to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away, from
that 🆕 👧-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape 🎺
the next day, leaving but 1⃣ dent in my 💒 pillow--wife?
wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor
👧 when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the 😡, the frenzy,
the boiling blood and the 🚬 brow, with which, for a Ⓜ
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey--more a
demon than a 👨!--aye, aye! what a forty years' fool--fool--old fool,
has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the 🐶? why 😩, and palsy
the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or
better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this
😩 load I 🉑, 1⃣ poor leg should have been snatched from under
me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to 😢.
Locks so grey did never 🌹 but from out some ashes! But do I look
very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and
humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled
centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my ♥!--stave my
brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have
I lived enough 😂 to 🐻 ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?
🔚! 🐻 🔚 to me, Starbuck; let me look into a 👨 ♥; it is
better than to gaze into 🌊 or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By
the green land; by the bright hearth-💎! this is the magic 👓,
👨; I 📅 my wife and my 👶 in thine ♥. No, no; stay on board, on
board!--😦 not when I do; when branded Ahab gives 🐶 to Moby Dick.
That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away 🏠 I 📅
in that ♥!"

"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! Ⓜ old ♥, after all! why
should any 1⃣ 🍃 🐶 to that hated 🐟! Away with me! let us
fly these deadly waters! let us 🏠! Wife and 👶, too, are
Starbuck's--wife and 👶 of his brotherly, sisterly, 🏃-fellow
youth; 😳 as thine, sir, are the wife and 👶 of thy loving,
longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!--this 💓 let me alter
the 🏃! How cheerily, how hilariously, ⭕ my Captain, would we 🎳
on our way to 📅 old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such
mild blue days, 😳 as this, in Nantucket."

"They have, they have. I have seen them--some summer days in the
🌅. About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the 👦
vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come 🔙
to dance him again."

"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my 👦, every 🌅,
should be carried to the hill to ⌚ the first glimpse of his 🔰's
sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we ❓ for Nantucket! Come, my
Captain, study out the 🏃, and let us away! 📅, 📅! the 👦's face
from the window! the 👦's 🚹 on the hill!"

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
🐱 his 🔚, cindered 🍎 to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
cozening, ㊙ lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural ♥, I durst not
so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this
arm? But if the great sun 🏃 not of himself; but is as an errand-👦
in heaven; nor 1⃣ 1⃣ 🌠 can revolve, but by some invisible 🏢;
how then can this 1⃣ small ♥ 💓; this 1⃣ small brain think
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, 👨, we are turned round and round in
this 👨, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all
the time, lo! that 😁 sky, and this unsounded 🌊! Look! 📅 yon
Albicore! who put it into him to 🐶 and fang that flying-🐟? Where
do murderers ❌, 👨! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged
to the 🍰? But it is a mild, mild 👃, and a mild looking sky; and
the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been
making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the
mowers are 😴 among the 🆕-mown hay. 😴? Aye, toil we how
we may, we all 😴 at 🔚 on the field. 😴? Aye, and rust amid
greenness; as 🔚 year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
swaths--Starbuck!"

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the 👫 had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
2⃣ reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
leaning over the same 🚋.



CHAPTER 133. The 🐶--First Day.


That night, in the mid-⌚, when the old 👨--as his wont at
intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
up the 🌊 air as a sagacious 🚢's 🐶 will, in drawing nigh to
some barbarous isle. He declared that a 🐳 must be near. 🔜 that
peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the
living sperm 🐳, was palpable to all the ⌚; nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the 🐶-vane, and
then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible,
Ahab rapidly ordered the 🚢's 🏃 to be slightly altered, and the
sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
at 🌅, by the sight of a long sleek on the 🌊 directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
tide-rip, at the 👄 of a deep, rapid stream.

"👨 the mast-heads! ☎ all hands!"

Thundering with the butts of 3⃣ clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their 👗 in their hands.

"What d'ye 📅?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

"0⃣, 0⃣ sir!" was the 🔉 hailing down in reply.

"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"

All sail being 👗, he now 🐱 🆓 the life-🎶, reserved for
swaying him to the main royal-mast ❓; and in a few moments they were
hoisting him thither, when, while but 2⃣ thirds of the way aloft,
and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
main-🔝-sail and 🔝-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like 😢 in the
air. "There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is
Moby Dick!"

Fired by the 😢 which seemed simultaneously taken up by the 3⃣
look-outs, the 🚹 on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
🐳 they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
beneath him on the 👑 of the 🔝-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's
❓ was almost on a 😳 with Ahab's 🐶. From this 🔝 the 🐳
was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every 👋 of the 🌊 revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his 🔇 spout into the
air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same 🔇 spout they had
so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

"And did none of ye 📅 it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched 🚹
all around him.

"I saw him almost that same 💓, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
cried out," said Tashtego.

"Not the same 💓; not the same--no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the
White 🐳 first. There she blows!--there she blows!--there she blows!
There again!--there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic
tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the 🐳's visible jets.
"He's going to 🔉! In stunsails! Down 🔝-gallant-sails! 🐻 by
3⃣ boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the 🚢.
Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, 👨, steady! There ❌
flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? 🐻 by,
🐻 by! 😦 me, Mr. Starbuck; 😦, 😦,--quick, quicker!" and he
slid through the air to the deck.

"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from
us; cannot have seen the 🚢 yet."

"Be 🔇, 👨! 🐻 by the braces! Hard down the helm!--👫 up!
Shiver her!--shiver her!--So; well that! Boats, boats!"

🔜 all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the ⛵-sails
👗--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, 🔚-glimmer lit up
Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous ❓ gnawed his 👄.

Like noiseless nautilus shells, their ✨ prows sped through the 🌊;
but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the 🌊 grew
😯 more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came
so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump
was distinctly visible, sliding 🔛 the 🌊 as if an isolated thing,
and continually 👗 in a revolving ☎ of finest, fleecy, greenish
✨. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly 😌 ❓
beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went
the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical
rippling playfully accompanying the 😎; and 💺, the blue waters
interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;
and on either 🚹 bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But
these were 😕 again by the ✨ toes of hundreds of ☀ 🐦 softly
feathering the 🌊, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
some 🎏-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
shattered pole of a recent lance 😌 from the white 🐳's 🔙;
and at intervals 1⃣ of the ☁ of soft-toed fowls hovering, and
to and fro skimming like a canopy over the 🐟, silently perched and
rocked on this pole, the long 💩 feathers streaming like pennons.

A gentle 😂--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
the gliding 🐳. Not the white 🐷 Jupiter swimming away with
ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White 🐳 as he so
divinely swam.

On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once
leaving him, then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the 🐳
shed off enticings. No ❓ there had been some among the hunters who
namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, 🐳! Ⓜ glidest on, to all
who for the first time ♥ thee, no matter how many in that same way
Ⓜ may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical 🌊, among
waves whose 🚹-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
Dick moved on, 😯 withholding from sight the full terrors of his
submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
But 🔜 the 🙇 🏢 of him slowly 🌹 from the water; for an 💓
his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural
Bridge, and warningly 👋 his bannered flukes in the air, the
Ⓜ god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly
halting, and dipping on the wing, the white 🌊-fowls longingly lingered
over the agitated pool that he left.

With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the
3⃣ boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.

"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his ⛵'s 💩; and he gazed
beyond the 🐳's 🚉, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
vacancies to leeward. It was only an 💓; for again his eyes seemed
whirling round in his ❓ as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now
freshened; the 🌊 began to swell.

"The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego.

In long Indian ®, as when herons 🉑 wing, the white birds were
now all flying towards Ahab's ⛵; and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
expectant cries. Their vision was keener than 👨's; Ahab could 🔑
no 🏠 in the 🌊. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its
depths, he profoundly saw a white living 🏢 no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it 🌹,
till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed 2⃣ long crooked
rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable
💺. It was Moby Dick's open 👄 and scrolled jaw; his vast,
shadowed bulk 😯 half blending with the blue of the 🌊. The
glittering 👄 yawned beneath the ⛵ like an open-doored marble
tomb; and 🎁 1⃣ sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled
the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, 📲 upon
Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and
seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and
🐻 by to 💩.

Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the ⛵ upon its axis, its
🙇, by anticipation, was made to face the 🐳's ❓ while yet
under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that
malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself,
as it were, in an 💓, shooting his pleated ❓ lengthwise beneath
the ⛵.

Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
an 💓, the 🐳 obliquely lying on his 🔙, in the manner of
a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
👄, so that the long, narrow, scrolled 😦 jaw curled high up into
the open air, and 1⃣ of the teeth caught in a row-🔒. The bluish
pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within 6⃣ inches of Ahab's
❓, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White 🐳
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel 🐱 her 🐭. With
unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
🐯-🐔 crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the
uttermost 💩.

And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
🐳 dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
body being submerged beneath the ⛵, he could not be darted at from
the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and
while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, 😠 with
this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to 🔧 it from
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in 👫,
and locked themselves fast again in the 🌊, midway between the 2⃣
floating wrecks. These floated aside, the 😕 ends drooping, the crew
at the 💩-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to 📖 fast
to the oars to lash them across.

At that preluding moment, ere the ⛵ was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
to perceive the 🐳's intent, by the crafty upraising of his ❓, a
movement that loosed his 📖 for the time; at that moment his 🚹
had made 1⃣ final 😓 to push the ⛵ out of the bite. But only
slipping further into the 🐳's 👄, and tilting over sideways as it
slipped, the ⛵ had shaken off his 📖 on the jaw; spilled him out of
it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the 🌊.

Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white ❓ up and down in the
billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
so that when his vast wrinkled forehead 🌹--some twenty or more feet
out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
😯 higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half 😖 Channel
billows only recoil from the 🐾 of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
overleap its 🔝 with their 💨.


*This ❓ is peculiar to the sperm 🐳. It receives its designation
(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down
🆒 of the 🐳-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
described. By this ❓ the 🐳 must best and most comprehensively
⌚ whatever objects may be encircling him.


But 🔜 resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
wake, as if lashing himself up to 😯 another and more deadly assault.
The sight of the splintered ⛵ seemed to madden him, as the blood of
grapes and mulberries 🐱 before Antiochus's elephants in the 📖
of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the ✨ of the 🐳's
insolent 💩, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could 😯
keep afloat, 😳 in the ♥ of such a whirlpool as that; helpless
Ahab's ❓ was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock
might burst. From the ⛵'s fragmentary 💩, Fedallah incuriously and
mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting 🔚, could not
succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.
For so revolvingly appalling was the White 🐳's aspect, and so
planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed
horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed,
😯 hovered hard by; 😯 they dared not 🔧 into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the 💓 🔚 of
the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that 🐚 could they
themselves hope to 🏃. With straining eyes, then, they remained on
the outer edge of the 😨 zone, whose ♥ had now become the old
👨's ❓.

Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the 🚢's
mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on
the"--but that moment a breaking 🌊 dashed on him from Moby Dick, and
whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing
to 🌹 on a towering 🔝, he shouted,--"Sail on the 🐳!--🐏 him
off!"

The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she
effectually parted the white 🐳 from his victim. As he sullenly swam
off, the boats flew to the rescue.

Dragged into Stubb's ⛵ with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did
crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying
all crushed in the 💺 of Stubb's ⛵, like 1⃣ trodden under 🐾
of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
abbreviate it. In an 💓's compass, great hearts sometimes condense
to 1⃣ deep pang, the ♥ total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
through feebler 🚹's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary
in each 1⃣ suffering; 😯, if the gods decree it, in their
life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
intensities; for 😳 in their pointless centres, those noble natures
🐻 the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on 1⃣
bended arm--"is it safe?"

"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.

"Lay it before me;--any missing 🚹?"

"1⃣, 2⃣, 3⃣, 4⃣, 5⃣;--there were 5⃣ oars, sir, and here are
5⃣ 🚹."

"That's 🔉.--Help me, 👨; I wish to 🐻. So, so, I 📅 him! there!
there! going to leeward 😯; what a leaping spout!--Hands off from me!
The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! 👗 the sail; out oars;
the helm!"

It is often the 🐚 that when a ⛵ is stove, its crew, being picked
up by another ⛵, help to 🏃 that 🔙 ⛵; and the 🐶 is thus
continued with what is called 🔁-banked oars. It was thus now. But
the added 🏢 of the ⛵ did not equal the added 🏢 of the 🐳,
for he seemed to have treble-banked his every 5⃣; swimming with a
velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,
pushed on, the 🐶 would 🌹 an indefinitely prolonged, if not a
hopeless 1⃣; nor could any crew 🏃 for so long a period, such an
unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable
only in some 1⃣ brief vicissitude. The 🚢 itself, then, as it
sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of
overtaking the 🐶. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
🔜 swayed up to their cranes--the 2⃣ parts of the wrecked ⛵ having
been previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her
side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it
with stun-sails, like the 🔁-jointed wings of an albatross; the
Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known,
methodic intervals, the 🐳's glittering spout was regularly announced
from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone
down, Ahab would 🉑 the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-⌚
in 🚹, so 🔜 as the 🔚 🔙 of the allotted hour expired, his
🔉 was heard.--"Whose is the doubloon now? D'ye 📅 him?" and if the
reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to 🌹 him to his
perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless;
anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.

As he was thus 🚶, uttering no 🔉, except to hail the 🚹 aloft,
or to 📲 them hoist a sail 😯 higher, or to spread 1⃣ to a 😯
greater breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at
every 🔧 he passed his own wrecked ⛵, which had been dropped upon
the 💩-deck, and lay there reversed; 😕 🙇 to shattered 💩.
At 🔚 he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky 🆕
troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old 👨's face
there now stole some such added gloom as this.

Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant 🚉 in
his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed--"The
thistle the ass refused; it pricked his 👄 too keenly, sir; ha! ha!"

"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? 👨, 👨! did
I not know thee brave as fearless 🔥 (and as mechanical) I could 🏦
Ⓜ wert a poltroon. Groan nor 😆 should be heard before a wreck."

"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight; an omen,
and an ill 1⃣."

"Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
👨, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
🍃 an old wives' darkling hint.--Begone! Ye 2⃣ are the opposite poles
of 1⃣ thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and
ye 2⃣ are all 👨; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of
the peopled earth, nor gods nor 🚹 his neighbors! Cold, cold--I
shiver!--How now? Aloft there! D'ye 📅 him? 🍑 out for every spout,
though he spout ❌ times a 🔙!"

The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
🔜, it was almost dark, but the look-out 🚹 😯 remained unset.

"Can't 📅 the spout now, sir;--too dark"--cried a 🔉 from the air.

"How heading when 🔚 seen?"

"As before, sir,--straight to leeward."

"🔉! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and 🔝-gallant
stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not 🏃 over him before 🌅; he's
making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her
full before the 👃!--Aloft! come down!--Mr. Stubb, 🚢 a 🆕 🚹
to the 🙇-mast ❓, and 📅 it manned till 🌅."--Then advancing
towards the doubloon in the main-mast--"🚹, this gold is mine, for I
earned it; but I shall let it 🐻 here till the White 🐳 is dead;
and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be
killed, this gold is that 👨's; and if on that day I shall again 🔥
him, then, ❌ times its ♥ shall be divided among all of ye! Away
now!--the deck is thine, sir!"

And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
slouching his hat, stood there till 🌅, except when at intervals
rousing himself to 📅 how the night wore on.



CHAPTER 134. The 🐶--🔙 Day.


At day-break, the 3⃣ mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.

"D'ye 📅 him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the ✨
to spread.

"📅 0⃣, sir."

"🔧 up all hands and 💩 sail! he travels faster than I thought
for;--the 🔝-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all
night. But no matter--'tis but resting for the 👢."

Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of 1⃣ particular 🐳,
continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing
by no means unprecedented in the South 🌊 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 🐳 when 🔚 descried, they
will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately 📲 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
🔜 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 🎁 visible, in ♣ the more certainly to 💥 aright
the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the
fisherman, at his compass, with the 🐳; for after being chased, and
diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night
obscures the 🐟, the creature's future wake through the darkness
is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's 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, 🚹 time his rate as
doctors that of a 👶's 💓; and lightly say of it, the up 🏫 or
the down 🏫 will ✋ such or such a 🏢, at such or such an hour;
😳 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 🐳 will have
gone 2⃣ 💯 miles, will have about reached this or that degree of
latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in
the 🔚, the 👃 and the 🌊 must be the whaleman's allies; for of what
🎁 avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that
assures him he is exactly ninety-3⃣ leagues and a 💩 from his
port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile
matters touching the 🐶 of whales.

The 🚢 tore on; leaving such a furrow in the 🌊 as when a
cannon-🍳, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the 😳
field.

"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift ❓ of the deck
creeps up 1⃣'s legs and tingles at the ♥. This 🚢 and I are 2⃣
brave fellows!--Ha, ha! Some 1⃣ 🉑 me up, and launch me, 🔙-wise,
on the 🌊,--for by live-oaks! my 🔙's a keel. Ha, ha! we ❌ the gait
that leaves no dust 💺!"

"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!" was now the
mast-❓ 😢.

"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't 🏃--blow on and
split your spout, ⭕ 🐳! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your
🎺--blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller
shuts his watergate upon the stream!"

And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies
of the 🐶 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 😕 up, and on all sides routed,
as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The 🚹
of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of
the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed,
unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their 😠 craft went plunging
towards its flying 🎶; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
🔛. The 👃 that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the 🔣 of
that unseen 🏢 which so enslaved them to the 🏃.

They were 1⃣ 👨, not thirty. For as the 1⃣ 🚢 that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,
and 💴 wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each
other in the 1⃣ concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
directed by the long 🔑 keel; 😳 so, all the individualities of
the crew, this 👨's valor, that 👨's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal
🔚 which Ahab their 1⃣ 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 1⃣
🚹, 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 😯 strove through that infinite blueness to
seek out the thing that might destroy them!

"Why 🍑 ye not out for him, if ye 📅 him?" cried Ahab, when, after
the lapse of some minutes since the first 😢, no more had been heard.
"Sway me up, 🚹; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts 1⃣ odd ⛲
that way, and then disappears."

It was 😳 so; in their headlong eagerness, the 🚹 had mistaken some
other thing for the 🐳-spout, as the event itself 🔜 proved; for
hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
🎏 on deck, when he struck the 🔑-🎶 to an orchestra, that made the
air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--much nearer to the 🚢
than the 🚉 of the imaginary ⛲, less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick
bodily burst into ⌚! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
by the peaceable gush of that ㊙ ⛲ in his ❓, did the White
🐳 now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon
of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
the Sperm 🐳 thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of
air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling ✨, shows his 🚉 to the
distance of 7⃣ 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.

"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the 😢, as in his
immeasurable bravadoes the White 🐳 tossed himself salmon-like to
Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the 🌊, and 😌
against the 😯 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 🚿 in a vale.

"Aye, breach your 🔚 to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and
thy harpoon are at 🚹!--Down! down all of ye, but 1⃣ 👨 at the 🙇.
The boats!--🐻 by!"

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the 🚹, like
shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but 😯 rapidly was dropped from
his perch.

"😦 away," he cried, so 🔜 as he had reached his ⛵--a 🆓 1⃣,
rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the 🚢 is thine--keep
away from the boats, but keep near them. 😦, all!"

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
3⃣ crews. Ahab's ⛵ was 🔑; and cheering his 🚹, he told them
he would 🉑 the 🐳 ❓-and-❓,--that is, 🔧 straight up to his
forehead,--a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such
a 🏃 excludes the coming onset from the 🐳's sidelong vision.
But ere that 🔚 limit was gained, and while yet all 3⃣ boats were
plain as the 🚢's 3⃣ masts to his ♥; the White 🐳 churning
himself into 😠 speed, almost in an 💓 as it were, rushing
among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing 💩, offered appalling
battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every
⛵, 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 plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's
unearthly slogan tore every other 😢 but his to shreds.

But at 🔚 in his untraceable evolutions, the White 🐳 so crossed
and recrossed, and in a Ⓜ ways entangled the ☺ of the 3⃣
lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
for a moment the 🐳 drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
tremendous 👢. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more
🎶: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--hoping
that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--a sight more 🐺
than the embattled teeth of sharks!

Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the 🎶, 🆓 harpoons
and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing
and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's ⛵. Only 1⃣
thing could be done. Seizing the ⛵-👅, he critically reached
within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel; dragged in
the 🎶 beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice
sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the intercepted fagot of
steel into the 🌊; and was all fast again. That 💓, the White
🐳 made a sudden 👢 among the remaining tangles of the other lines;
by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and
Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like 2⃣ rolling husks on
a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the 🌊, disappeared in
a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of
the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly
stirred 🎳 of 👊.

While the 2⃣ crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
the revolving 🎶-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while
aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his
legs 🆙 to 🏃 the 😨 jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily
singing out for some 1⃣ to ladle him up; and while the old 👨's
🎶--now 🍃--admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to
rescue whom he could;--in that 😠 simultaneousness of a Ⓜ
concreted perils,--Ahab's yet unstricken ⛵ seemed drawn up towards
Heaven by invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly
from the 🌊, the White 🐳 dashed his broad forehead against its
💺, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell
again--gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his 🚹 struggled out from under
it, like seals from a 🌊-side cave.

The first uprising momentum of the 🐳--modifying its direction as
he struck the 🌹--involuntarily launched him 🔛 it, to a little
distance from the ♥ of the 🔚 he had made; and with his
🔙 to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from
side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least 🍟
or 🐀 of the boats touched his skin, his 💩 swiftly drew 🔙, and
came sideways smiting the 🌊. But 🔜, as if 😆 that his 🏃
for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the
🌊, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his
leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace.

As before, the attentive 🚢 having descried the whole fight, again
came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a ⛵, 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 😳 serious ill seemed to have befallen any 1⃣. As
with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to
his ⛵'s 😕 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 😯 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 1⃣ short sharp splinter.

"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to 🏃 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 🔉 🏃 into that leg."

"But no bones 😕, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true 😟.

"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye 📅 it.--But 😳 with
a 😕 bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of
mine 1⃣ jot more me, than this dead 1⃣ that's 😖. Nor white 🐳,
nor 👨, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being. Can any 🍃 👻 yonder floor, any mast scrape
yonder roof?--Aloft there! which way?"

"Dead to leeward, sir."

"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, 🚢 keepers! down the rest of
the 🆓 boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the ⛵'s
crews."

"Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."

"Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven 👫!"

"Sir?"

"My body, 👨, not thee. 🍃 me something for a cane--there, that
shivered lance will do. Muster the 🚹. Surely I have not seen him yet.
By heaven it cannot be!--missing?--quick! ☎ them all."

The old 👨's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
Parsee was not there.

"The Parsee!" cried Stubb--"he must have been caught in--"

"The black 🐱 🔧 thee!--🏃 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 🎶--I
thought I saw him dragging under."

"MY 🎶! MY 🎶? Gone?--gone? What means that little word?--What
🔚-💍 rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--d'ye 📅 it?--the forged
iron, 🚹, the white 🐳's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this 🚹 did
💨 it!--'tis in the 🐟!--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 🔧 on all the
sheets!--helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ❌ times girdle
the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay
him yet!

"Great God! but for 1⃣ 1⃣ 💓 ® thyself," cried Starbuck;
"never, never wilt Ⓜ capture him, old 👨--In Jesus' 🔑 no more of
this, that's worse than devil's 😡. 2⃣ days chased; twice stove
to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
shadow gone--all 🔉 angels mobbing thee with warnings:--

"What more wouldst Ⓜ have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous 🐟
till he swamps the 🔚 👨? Shall we be dragged by him to the 💺
of the 🌊? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal 👨? Oh,
oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to 🏃 him more!"

"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that
hour we both saw--Ⓜ know'st what, in 1⃣ another's eyes. But in this
matter of the 🐳, be the front of thy face to me as the 🎀 of this
🚹--a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, 👨. This
whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
years before this 🌊 rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act
under orders. Look Ⓜ, underling! that Ⓜ obeyest mine.--🐻 round
me, 🚹. Ye 📅 an old 👨 cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered
lance; propped up on a lonely 🐾. 'Tis Ahab--his body's 🏢; but
Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a 💯 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, 🚹, in
the things called omens? Then 😆 aloud, and 😢 encore! For ere they
drown, drowning things will twice 🌹 to the 🌹; then 🌹 again,
to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick--2⃣ days he's floated--tomorrow
will be the third. Aye, 🚹, he'll 🌹 once more,--but only to spout
his 🔚! D'ye feel brave 🚹, brave?"

"As fearless 🔥," cried Stubb.

"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the 🚹 went forward, he
muttered on: "The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same
to Starbuck there, concerning my 😕 ⛵. Oh! how valiantly I seek
to 🐏 out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!--The
Parsee--the Parsee!--gone, gone? and he was to ❌ before:--but 😯 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 🎶
of judges:--like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'LL, I'LL solve it,
though!"

When dusk descended, the 🐳 was 😯 in sight to leeward.

So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as
on the previous night; only, the 🔉 of hammers, and the hum of the
grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the 🚹 toiled by lanterns
in the complete and careful rigging of the 🆓 boats and sharpening
their 🆕 weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the 😕 keel of
Ahab's wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while 😯 as
on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his
hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone 🔙 on its dial; sat due
🇪🇸 for the earliest sun.



CHAPTER 135. The 🐶.--Third Day.


The 🌅 of the third day dawned fair and 🆕, and once more the
solitary night-👨 at the 🙇-mast-❓ was 😌 by crowds of the
daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.

"D'ye 📅 him?" cried Ahab; but the 🐳 was not yet in sight.

"In his infallible wake, though; but ⌚ that wake, that's all. Helm
there; steady, as Ⓜ goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
again! were it a 🆕-made 👨, and made for a summer-🏠 to the
angels, and this 🌅 the first of its throwing open to them, a
fairer day could not 🌅 upon that 👨. 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 👨! 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 💓 too much
for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--frozen
calm, this old 💀 cracks so, like a 👓 in which the contents
turned to 🎇, and shiver it. And 😯 this hair is growing now; this
moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort
of common 🐀 that will 🌹 anywhere, between the earthy clefts of
Greenland 🎇 or in Vesuvius lava. How the 😠 winds blow it; they whip
it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed 🚢 they
cling to. A vile 👃 that has no ❓ blown ere this through prison
corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and
now comes blowing hither as 😇 as fleeces. Out upon it!--it's
tainted. Were I the 👃, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable
👨. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a
noble and heroic thing, the 👃! who ever conquered it? In every fight
it has the 🔚 and bitterest blow. 🏃 tilting at it, and you but 🏃
through it. Ha! a coward 👃 that strikes stark naked 🚹, but will not
🐻 to receive a 1⃣ blow. 😳 Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler
thing than THAT. Would now the 👃 but had a body; but all the things
that most exasperate and outrage mortal 👨, 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 🏦 it now, that there's something all glorious and
gracious in the 👃. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the
🔝 heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous
mildness; and veer not from their 🎶, however the baser currents of
the 🌊 may 🔧 and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift
and swerve about, uncertain where to ❌ at 🔚. And by the eternal
Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my 🔉 🚢 on; these
Trades, or something like them--something so unchangeable, and full as
strong, blow my keeled soul 🔛! To it! Aloft there! What d'ye 📅?"

"0⃣, sir."

"0⃣! and noon at 🚹! The doubloon goes a-begging! 📅 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 🏃 him by
🔚 night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
outs! 👨 the braces!"

Steering as she had done, the 👃 had been somewhat on the Pequod's
💩, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
🚢 sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
white wake.

"Against the 👃 he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to
himself, as he coiled the 🆕-hauled main-👫 upon the 🚋. "God keep
us, but already my bones feel 🔇 within me, and from the inside wet my
flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"

"🐻 by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.
"We should 😆 him 🔜."

"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 🔚, some 3⃣ points off the
weather 🙇, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the 3⃣
mast-heads 3⃣ shrieks went up as if the tongues of 🔥 had voiced
it.

"Forehead to forehead I 😆 thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
there!--👫 sharper up; crowd her into the 👃's ♥. He's too
far off to 😦 yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! 🐻 over that
helmsman with a 🔝-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But
let me have 1⃣ more 🔉 round look aloft here at the 🌊; there's
time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so 🆕; aye, and
not changed a 💓 since I first saw it, a 👦, from the sand-hills of
Nantucket! The same!--the same!--the same to Noah as to me. There's
a soft 🚿 to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must 🍃
somewhere--to something else than common land, more palmy than the
palms. Leeward! the white 🐳 goes that way; look to windward,
then; the better if the bitterer 💩. But 🔉 bye, 🔉 bye, old
mast-❓! What's this?--green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.
No such green weather stains on Ahab's ❓! There's the difference now
between 👨's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both 🌹 old
together; 🔉 in our hulls, though, are we not, my 🚢? 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 🚹 made of the most vital stuff of
vital fathers. What's that he said? he should 😯 ❌ before me, my
pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the
💺 of the 🌊, 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 Ⓜ told'st 😨 truth as touching thyself, ⭕ Parsee;
but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. 🔉-bye, mast-❓--keep a 🔉
♥ upon the 🐳, the while I'Ⓜ gone. We'll 🍑 to-morrow, nay,
to-night, when the white 🐳 lies down there, tied by ❓ and 💩."

He gave the word; and 😯 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
💩, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
👫,--who held 1⃣ of the tackle-ropes on deck--and bade him pause.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir?"

"For the third time my soul's 🚢 starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."

"Aye, sir, Ⓜ wilt have it so."

"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
Starbuck!"

"Truth, sir: saddest truth."

"Some 🚹 die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of
the flood;--and I feel now like a 🎈 that's all 1⃣ crested comb,
Starbuck. I am old;--shake hands with me, 👨."

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.

"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble ♥--❌ not--❌ not!--📅, it's a
brave 👨 that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"

"😦 away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the 👫's arm from him. "🐻 by
the crew!"

In an 💓 the ⛵ was pulling round 🔚 under the 💩.

"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a 🔉 from the low cabin-window there;
"⭕ master, my master, come 🔙!"

But Ahab heard 0⃣; for his own 🔉 was high-lifted then; and the
⛵ leaped on.

Yet the 🔉 spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the 🚢, 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 ⛵ with their
bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the 🐳-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 🇪🇸. But these were the first sharks that had been
observed by the Pequod since the White 🐳 had been first descried;
and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such 🐯-🐔
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 ⌚ that 1⃣ ⛵ without molesting the others.

"♥ of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
following with his eyes the receding ⛵--"canst Ⓜ yet ☎ boldly
to that sight?--lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by
them, open-mouthed to the 🐶; and this the critical third day?--For
when 3⃣ days 🏃 together in 1⃣ continuous intense pursuit; be sure
the first is the 🌅, the 🔙 the noon, and the third the evening
and the 🔚 of that thing--be that 🔚 what it may. Oh! my God! what
is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
expectant,--fixed at the 🔝 of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
Mary, 👧! Ⓜ fadest in pale glories 💺 me; 👦! I seem to
📅 but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's 🔚 coming? My legs
feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy ♥,--beats
it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--stave it off--🏃, 🏃!
speak aloud!--Mast-❓ there! 📅 ye my 👦's 🚹 on the
hill?--Crazed;--aloft there!--keep thy keenest ♥ upon the boats:--

"🎶 well the 🐳!--Ho! again!--🐏 off that hawk! 📅! he pecks--he
tears the vane"--pointing to the 😳 🎏 flying at the main-🚚--"Ha!
he soars away with it!--Where's the old 👨 now? 📅'st Ⓜ 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 🐳 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
😯, as the ❓-💓 waves hammered and hammered against the
opposing 🙇.

"🐏, 🐏 in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
🐏 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
🎇, swiftly rising to the 🌹. A low rumbling 🔉 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 🌊. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of ☁, it
hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping 🔙
into the deep. Crushed thirty feet 🆙, the waters flashed for
an 💓 like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a 🚿 of
flakes, leaving the circling 🌹 creamed like 🆕 milk round the
marble trunk of the 🐳.

"🍃 way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the 🔥; but maddened by yesterday's 🆕 irons that corroded in
him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as ❓ on, he came churning his 💩 among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the 2⃣
mates' boats, and dashing in 1⃣ side of the upper 🏢 of their bows,
but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
🐳 swimming out from them, turned, and showed 1⃣ entire flank as he
shot by them again; at that moment a quick 😢 went up. Lashed round
and round to the 🐟's 🔙; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
during the past night, the 🐳 had reeled the involutions of the lines
around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable 👗
frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

The harpoon dropped from his 🚹.

"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long 🏃 breath--"Aye, Parsee! I
📅 thee again.--Aye, and Ⓜ goest before; and this, THIS then is the
hearse that Ⓜ didst 📲. But I 📖 thee to the 🔚 letter of
thy word. Where is the 🔙 hearse? Away, mates, to the 🚢! those
boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to
me; if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, 🚹! the first thing that but
offers to 🌹 from this ⛵ I 🐻 in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
not other 🚹, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--Where's the
🐳? gone down again?"

But he looked too nigh the ⛵; for as if bent upon escaping with the
corpse he bore, and as if the particular 🚉 of the 🔚 encounter had
been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily
swimming forward; and had almost passed the 🚢,--which thus far had
been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the 🎁
her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost
velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the
🌊.

"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, 😳 now, the third
day, to desist. 📅! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is Ⓜ, Ⓜ, that
madly seekest him!"

Setting sail to the rising 👃, the lonely ⛵ was swiftly impelled to
leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at 🔚 when Ahab was sliding
by the vessel, so near as plainly to 🔑 Starbuck's face as he
leaned over the 🚋, he hailed him to 🔧 the vessel about, and ⌚
him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing 🆙, he
saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the 3⃣
mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the 2⃣ staved boats
which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at 🏃 in
repairing them. 1⃣ after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,
he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves
on deck among bundles of 🆕 irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he
heard the hammers in the 😕 boats; far other hammers seemed driving
a 💥 into his ♥. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or
🎏 was gone from the main-mast-❓, he shouted to Tashtego, who had
just gained that perch, to descend again for another 🎏, and a 🔨
and nails, and so 💥 it to the mast.

Whether fagged by the 3⃣ days' 🏃 🐶, and the resistance
to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
🐳's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the ⛵ so rapidly
nearing him once more; though indeed the 🐳's 🔚 start had not been
so long a 1⃣ as before. And 😯 as Ahab glided over the waves the
unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the
⛵; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became
jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the 🌊, at almost
every dip.

"Heed them not! those teeth but 🍃 🆕 rowlocks to your oars. 🔧 on!
'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water."

"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades 🌹 smaller and smaller!"

"They will 🔚 long enough! 🔧 on!--But who can tell"--he
muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the 🐳 or on
Ahab?--But 🔧 on! Aye, all alive, now--we near him. The helm! 🉑 the
helm! let me pass,"--and so saying 2⃣ of the oarsmen helped him forward
to the bows of the 😯 flying ⛵.

At length as the craft was 🐱 to 1⃣ side, and ran ranging 🔛
with the White 🐳's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
advance--as the 🐳 sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the
smoky mountain ☁, which, thrown off from the 🐳's spout, curled
round his great, Monadnock hump; he was 😳 thus 🔚 to him; when,
with body arched 🔙, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
🆒, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
hated 🐳. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh
flank against the 🙇, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly
canted the ⛵ over, that had it not been for the elevated 🏢 of the
gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed
into the 🌊. As it was, 3⃣ of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the
precise 💓 of the 💨, and were therefore unprepared for its
effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an 💓 2⃣ of
them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its 😳 on a combing
👋, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third 👨 helplessly
dropping astern, but 😯 afloat and swimming.

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White 🐳 darted through the weltering
🌊. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to 🉑 🆕 turns with
the 🎶, and 📖 it so; and commanded the crew to 🔧 round on their
seats, and tow the ⛵ up to the 🎶; the moment the treacherous 🎶
felt that 🔁 strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!

"What breaks in me? Some 💪 cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!
Burst in upon him!"

Hearing the tremendous 👢 of the 🌊-crashing ⛵, the 🐳 wheeled
round to 🎁 his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
catching sight of the nearing black hull of the 🚢; seemingly seeing
in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it--it may be--a
larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
🙇, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of ✨.

Ahab staggered; his 🚹 smote his forehead. "I 🌹 blind; hands!
stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night?"

"The 🐳! The 🚢!" cried the cringing oarsmen.

"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, ⭕ 🌊, that ere it be for
ever too late, Ahab may slide this 🔚, 🔚 time upon his 🎶! I 📅:
the 🚢! the 🚢! 💨 on, my 🚹! Will ye not 😌 my 🚢?"

But as the oarsmen violently forced their ⛵ through the
sledge-🔨 seas, the before 🐳-smitten 🙇-ends of 2⃣ planks
burst through, and in an 💓 almost, the temporarily disabled ⛵
lay nearly 😳 with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying
hard to 🔚 the gap and bale out the pouring water.

Meantime, for that 1⃣ beholding 💓, Tashtego's mast-❓ 🔨
remained suspended in his 🚹; and the 😳 🎏, half-wrapping him as
with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
forward-flowing ♥; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as 🔜
as he.

"The 🐳, the 🐳! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air,
now hug me 🔚! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a 👩's
fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the
🔚 of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab,
Ahab, lo, thy 🏃. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again!
He turns to 😆 us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards 1⃣,
whose duty tells him he cannot 🍃. My God, 🐻 by me now!"

"🐻 not by me, but 🐻 under me, whoever you are that will now help
Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I 😁 at thee, Ⓜ 😁 🐳!
Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking
♥? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too
soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I 😁 at thee, Ⓜ
😁 🐳! Look ye, sun, 🌔, and stars! I ☎ ye assassins of
as 🔉 a fellow as ever spouted up his 👻. For all that, I would yet
☎ glasses with ye, would ye but 🚹 the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! Ⓜ
😁 🐳, but there'll be plenty of gulping 🔜! Why fly ye
not, ⭕ Ahab! For me, off shoes and 👑 to it; let Stubb die in
his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted 🔚, though;--cherries!
cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for 1⃣ 😳 🍒 ere we die!"

"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they 🌹. Oh, Stubb, I hope
my poor mother's drawn my 🏢-🐻 ere this; if not, few coppers will
now come to her, for the voyage is up."

From the 🚢's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their
hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their
enchanted eyes intent upon the 🐳, which from side to side strangely
vibrating his predestinating ❓, sent a broad 💍 of overspreading
semicircular ✨ before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance,
eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal
👨 could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the 🚢's
starboard 🙇, till 🚹 and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their
faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook
on their 🐷-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters
pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

"The 🚢! The hearse!--the 🔙 hearse!" cried Ahab from the ⛵;
"its wood could only be American!"

Diving beneath the settling 🚢, the 🐳 ran quivering 🔛 its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the 🌹 again, far
off the other 🙇, but within a few yards of Ahab's ⛵, where, for a
time, he lay quiescent.

"I 🔧 my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy 🔨.
Oh! ye 3⃣ unsurrendered spires of mine; Ⓜ uncracked keel; and only
god-bullied hull; Ⓜ 🏠 deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed
🙇,--🔚-glorious 🚢! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I
cut off from the 🔚 fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh,
lonely 🔚 on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in
my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in,
ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and 🔝 this 1⃣ piled comber
of my 🔚! Towards thee I 👋, Ⓜ all-destroying but unconquering
🐳; to the 🔚 I grapple with thee; from hell's ♥ I 🔪 at
thee; for hate's 🍶 I 👅 my 🔚 breath at thee. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to 1⃣ common pool! and since neither can be mine, let
me then tow to pieces, while 😯 chasing thee, though tied to thee,
Ⓜ damned 🐳! THUS, I 🍃 up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken 🐳 flew forward; with igniting
velocity the 🎶 ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to
🔝 it; he did 🔝 it; but the flying 🔧 caught him round the
neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
shot out of the ⛵, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next 💓, the
🔉 ♥-💒 in the rope's final 🔚 flew out of the stark-empty
🛀, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the 🌊, disappeared in its
depths.

For an 💓, the tranced ⛵'s crew stood 😯; then turned. "The
🚢? Great God, where is the 🚢?" 🔜 they through dim, bewildering
mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana;
only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or
fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers
😯 maintained their sinking lookouts on the 🌊. And now, concentric
circles seized the lone ⛵ itself, and all its crew, and each floating
oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all
round and round in 1⃣ vortex, carried the smallest 🍟 of the Pequod
out of sight.

But as the 🔚 whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
sunken ❓ of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the 🎏,
which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying
billows they almost touched;--at that 💓, a 😳 arm and a 🔨
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing
the 🎏 faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
tauntingly had followed the main-🚚 downwards from its natural 🏠
among the stars, pecking at the 🎏, and incommoding Tashtego there;
this 🐦 now chanced to 🐛 its broad fluttering wing between the
🔨 and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial 👢,
the submerged 🐺 beneath, in his 🔚-gasp, kept his 🔨 frozen
there; and so the 🐦 of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his
imperial beak thrust 🆙, and his whole captive form folded in the
🎏 of Ahab, went down with his 🚢, which, like Satan, would not sink
to hell till she had dragged a living 🏢 of heaven 🔛 with her, and
helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew 😱 over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
surf 💓 against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
shroud of the 🌊 rolled on as it rolled 5⃣ Ⓜ years ago.




Epilogue

"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.

The drama's done. Why then here does any 1⃣ 👣 forth?--Because 1⃣
did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the
Fates ordained to 🉑 the 🚉 of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman
assumed the vacant 🚉; the same, who, when on the 🔚 day the 3⃣
🚹 were tossed from out of the rocking ⛵, was dropped astern. So,
floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it,
when the halfspent suction of the sunk 🚢 reached me, I was then,
but slowly, drawn towards the 🔚 vortex. When I reached it, it had
subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting
towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling
circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
♥, the black bubble 🆙 burst; and now, liberated by reason of
its cunning ⛲, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great
🐏, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the 🌊, fell over, and
floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost 1⃣ whole day
and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks,
they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the 🐺 🌊-hawks
sailed with sheathed beaks. On the 🔙 day, a sail drew near, nearer,
and picked me up at 🔚. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in
her retracing search after her missing children, only found another
orphan.