Moby Dick

every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
The burning ship 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 flame for sails, bore down upon
the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the top 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 whale-ship'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 catch them by the feet.
The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps.  To every pitch of the ship
there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness
to leap into their faces.  Opposite the mouth of the works,
on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.
This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire,
till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.  Their tawny features,
now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, 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 upwards 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 wind howled on,
and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly
shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea
and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod,
freighted with savages, and laden with fire, 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 fire-ship on the sea.
Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better
saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.
The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half
in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions
in my soul, so soon as I began to yield 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 sleep,
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 wind;
I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting
my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still
further apart.  But, spite of all this, I could see 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.
Nothing seemed before me but a jet 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, bewildered feeling, as of death, 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 sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting
the ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass.
In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel
from flying up into the wind, 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 fire, O man!  Never dream
with thy hand on the helm!  Turn not thy back to the compass;
accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the
artificial fire, 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 show 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 moon.
The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth,
and which is two thirds of this earth.  So, therefore, that mortal
man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man
cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped.  With books the same.
The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest
of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine
hammered steel of woe.  "All is vanity."  ALL.  This wilful
world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet.
But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast
crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of operas than hell;
calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men;
and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais
as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted
to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould
with unfathomably wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of