At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! see!” and once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.
“e corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.
At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.
“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those main-mast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So.”
en turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high- flung right arm, he stood ere
before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental a so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee.”
Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap length-wise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.
“I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. ough but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe.
Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.
[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his right hand pressed hard upon them.] I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. ou canst blind; but I can then grope. ou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these
poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. e lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.
Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! e javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? ere burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now do I glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? ere lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. ou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. ere is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical.
rough thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”
“e boat! the boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”
Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projeed beyond his whale- boat’s bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! t’is an ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”
Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end.
Petrified by his aspe, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:—
“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!” And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay.
CHAPTER CXII.
THE DECK TOWARDS THE
END OF THE FIRST WATCH
Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him.
“We must send down the main-top-sail yard, Sir. e band is working loose, and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, Sir?”
“Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I’d sway them up now.”
“Sir?—in God’s name!—Sir?”
“Well.”
“e anchors are working, Sir. Shall I get them inboard?”
“Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. e wind rises, but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.—By masts and keels!
he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that?
Oh, none but cowards send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft there! I would e’en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!”
“
CHAPTER CXIII.
MIDNIGHT
ALOFT—THUNDER AND
