Moby Dick

My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day.
Feel thy heart,--beats it yet?  Stir thyself, Starbuck!--
stave it off--move, move! speak aloud!--Mast-head there!
See ye my boy's hand on the hill?--Crazed; aloft there!--
keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--mark well the whale!--
Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he tears the vane"--
pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha, he soars
away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,
oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--
a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded;
but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way
a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining
the profoundest silence, as the head-bent waves hammered and hammered
against the opposing bow.

"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost
heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid;
and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can
kill me!  Ha! ha!"

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged
berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface.  A low rumbling sound
was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths;
as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances,
a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.
Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment
in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.
Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant
like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,
leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble
trunk of the whale.

"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,
Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven.  The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates'
boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks;
and as the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed
one entire flank as he shot by them again; at that moment
a quick cry went up.  Lashed round and round to the fish's back;
pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night,
the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him,
the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

The harpoon dropped from his hand.

"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee!  I see
thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse
that thou didst promise.  But I hold thee to the last letter of thy word.
Where is the second hearse?  Away, mates, to the ship! those boats
are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to me;
if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but
offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon.
Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--
Where's the whale? gone down again?"

But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping
with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last
encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick
was now again steadily swimming forward; and had almost passed
the ship,--which thus far had been sailing in the contrary direction
to him, though for the present her headway had been stopped.
He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent
upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea.

"Oh!  Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now,
the third day, to desist.  See!  Moby Dick seeks thee not.
It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"

Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was
swiftly impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas.
And at last when Ahab was sliding by the vessel, so near
as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he leaned
over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about,
and follow him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval.
Glancing upwards he saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo,
eagerly mounting to the three mast-heads; while the oarsmen
were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been
hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them.
One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,
he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask,
busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances.
As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats;
far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart.
But he rallied.  And now marking that the vane or flag
was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego,
who had just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag,
and a hammer and nails, and so nail it to the mast.

Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the