Moby Dick

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching
the precise nature of the whale spout.  It will not do for him
to be peering into it, and putting his face in it.  You cannot go
with your pitcher to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away.
For even when coming into slight contact with the outer,
vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will
feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so touching it.
And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the spout,
whether with some scientific object in view, 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 doubt it,
that if the jet 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.

Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish.
My hypothesis is this:  that the spout is nothing but mist.
And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled,
by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity
of the Sperm Whale; 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 profound.  And I am convinced that from
the heads of all ponderous profound 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 place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,
a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head.
The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after six cups of hot tea 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, misty monster,
to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea;
his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor,
engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor--
as you will sometimes see it--glorified by a rainbow,
as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
For d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air;
they only irradiate vapor.  And so, through all the thick
mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now
and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few along 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 man who regards them both with equal eye.



CHAPTER 86

The Tail


Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial,
I celebrate a tail.

Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at
that point of the trunk where it tapers to about the girth
of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area
of at least fifty square feet.  The compact round body of its
root expands into two broad, firm, 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 beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes.
At its utmost expansion in the full grown whale, the tail
will considerably exceed twenty feet across.

The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews;
but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata
compose it:--upper, middle, and lower.  The fibres in the upper
and lower layers, are long and horizontal; those of the middle one,
very short, and running crosswise between the outside layers.
This triune structure, as much as anything else, imparts power
to the tail.  To the student of old Roman walls, the middle layer
will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always
alternating with the stone 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 power in the tendinous tail 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 running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them,
and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
measureless force of the whole whale 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 tend to cripple
the graceful flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease
undulates through a Titanism of power.  On the contrary,
those motions derive their most appalling beauty from it.
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it;
and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with