Moby Dick

of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain--
makes the wheelspokes 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 rush down an endless inclined plane!
Hurrah! this whale carries the everlasting mail!"

But the monster's run was a brief one.  Giving a sudden gasp,
he tumultuously sounded.  With a grating rush, the three lines flew round
the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;
while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding
would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might,
they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on;
till at last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined
chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight
down into the blue--the gunwales of the bows were almost even
with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air.
And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they
remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line,
though the position was a little ticklish.  But though boats have
been taken down and lost 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 back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan
into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.
Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted
whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable
to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water,
the more he is exhausted.  Because, owing to the enormous surface of him--
in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet--
the pressure of the water is immense.  We all know what an astonishing
atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here,
above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,
bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean!
It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres.  One whaleman
has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships,
with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea,
gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan
or cry 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 silence and placidity, the utmost
monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!
Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great
Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock.
Suspended? and to what?  To three bits of board.  Is this
the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou
fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears?
The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear,
the dart, nor the habergeon:  he esteemeth iron as straw;
the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!"  This the creature?
this he?  Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.
For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail,
Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea,
to hide him from the Pequod's fishspears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent
down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough
to shade half Xerxes' army.  Who can tell how appalling to the wounded
whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them,
as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale,
so that every oarsman felt them in his seat.  The next moment,
relieved in a great part from the downward strain at the bows,
the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will,
when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.

"Haul in!  Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."

The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's
breadth could have been gained, were now in long quick coils
flung back all dripping into the boats, and soon the whale
broke water within two ship's length 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 whale; one of whose peculiarities it is,
to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels,
so that when pierced even 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 surface, 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;
even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is
in the well-springs of far-off and indiscernible hills.
Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously
drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,
they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound,
which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole
in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending its
affrighted moisture into the air.  From this last vent no blood