Moby Dick

See to it."

"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me,
the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.
Haul in, haul in, Tahitian!  These lines run whole, and whirling out:
come in broken, and dragging slow.  Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"

"Pip? whom call ye Pip?  Pip jumped from the whaleboat.
Pip's missing.  Let's see now if ye haven't fished him
up here, fisherman.  It drags hard; I guess he's holding on.
Jerk him, Tahiti!  Jerk him off we haul in no cowards here.
Ho! there's his arm just breaking water.  A hatchet! a hatchet!
cut it off--we haul in no cowards here.  Captain Ahab! sir,
sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."

"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
"Away from the quarter-deck!"

"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.
"Hands off from that holiness!  Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?

"Astern there, sir, astern!  Lo! lo!"

"And who art thou, boy?  I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils
of thy eyes.  Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls
to sieve through!  Who art thou, boy?"

"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding!  Pip!  Pip!  Pip!  One
hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks cowardly--
quickest known by that!  Ding, dong, ding!  Who's seen Pip the coward?"

"There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen
heavens! look down here.  Ye did beget this luckless child,
and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines.  Here, boy;
Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives.
Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords
woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."

"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand,
and feeling it.  "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,
perhaps he had ne'er been lost!  This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;
something that weak souls may hold by.  Oh, sir, let old Perth now come
and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white,
for I will not let this go."

"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee
to worse horrors than are here.  Come, then, to my cabin.
Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill,
lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man;
and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full
of the sweet things of love and gratitude.  Come!  I feel prouder
leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's!"

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman.
"One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness.
But here's the end of the rotten line--all dripping, too.
Mend it, eh?  I think we had best have a new line altogether.
I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."



CHAPTER 126

The Life-Buoy


Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel,
and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and line;
the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator.  Making so long
a passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships,
and ere long, sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds,
over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed the strange calm
things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were,
of the Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that
goes before the dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets;
the watch--then headed by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively
wild and unearthly--like half-articulated wailings of the ghosts
of all Herod's murdered Innocents--that one and all, they started
from their reveries, and for the space of some moments stood,
or sat, or leaned all transfixed by listening, like the carved
Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing.
The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids,
and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled.
Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that
the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly
drowned men in the sea.

Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn,
when he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask,
not unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings.  He hollowly laughed,
and thus explained the wonder.

Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers
of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams
that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept
company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail.
But this only the more affected some of them, because most mariners
cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from