Moby Dick

the way of understanding shall remain" (i.e. even while living)
"in the congregation of the dead."  Give not thyself up, then, to fire,
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 madness.
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 sunny spaces.  And even if he for
ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains;
so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still
higher than other birds upon the plain, even 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 watch were sleeping, for one single 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 dress 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 light, so he lives in light.
He makes his berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it;
so that in the pitchiest night the ship's black hull still
houses an illumination.

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful
of lamps--often but old bottles and vials, though--to the
copper cooler at the tryworks, 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 unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore.
It is sweet as early grass butter in April.  He goes and hunts
for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness,
even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
supper of game.



CHAPTER 98

Stowing Down and Clearing Up


Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
descried from the mast-head; 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 fire;--but now
it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part 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 hold,
where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities,
sliding along beneath the surface :is before; but, alas! never more
to rise and blow.

While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into
the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching
and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous
casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes
perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many land slides,
till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round
the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them,
for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.

At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool,
then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are
thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea.
This done, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed,
like a closet walled up.

In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most
remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling.
One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil;
on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale's head are
profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard;
the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks;
the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire
ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands
the din is deafening.

But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears
in this self-same ship! and were it not for the tell-tale boats
and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent
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 call an affair of oil.  Besides, from the ashes
of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made;
and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains