Moby Dick

resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore;
or whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him:
whichever was true, the White Whale's way now began to abate,
as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing him once more;
though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a one
as before.  And still as Ahab glided over the waves the unpitying
sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat;
and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades
became jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea,
at almost every dip.

"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars.
Pull on! 'tis the better rest, the sharks' jaw than the yielding water."

"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"

"They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--
he muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale
or on Ahab?--But pull on!  Aye, all alive, now--we near him.
The helm! take the helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the
oarsmen helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat.

At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging
along with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely
oblivious of its advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab
was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off
from the whale's spout, curled round his great Monadnock hump;
he was even thus close to him; when, with body arched back,
and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted
his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.
As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into
a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled
his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole
in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been
for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung,
Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea.
As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the precise
instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects--
these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two
of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on
a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third
man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the
weltering sea.  But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take
new turns with the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew
to turn round on their seats, and tow the boat up to the mark;
the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain and tug,
it snapped in the empty air!

"What breaks in me?  Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!
Burst in upon him!"

Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale
wheeled round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in
that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship;
seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions;
bethinking it--it may be--a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden,
he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery
showers of foam.

Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead.  "I grow blind;
hands! stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way.
Is't night?"

"The whale!  The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.

"Oars! oars!  Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea that ere
it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time
upon his mark!  I see:  the ship! the ship!  Dash on, my men!
Will ye not save my ship?"

But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through
the sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends
of two planks burst through, and in an instant almost,
the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly level with the waves;
its half-wading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop the gap
and bale out the pouring water.

Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head
hammer remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag,
half-wrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself
straight out from him, as his own forward-flowing heart;
while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the bowsprit beneath,
caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon as he.

"The whale, the whale!  Up helm, up helm!  Oh, all ye sweet powers
of air, now hug me close!  Let not Starbuck die, if die he must,
in a woman's fainting fit.  Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw!
Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?
Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work.  Steady! helmsman, steady.  Nay, nay!
Up helm again!  He turns to meet us!  Oh, his unappeasable brow
drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart.
My God, stand by me now!"

"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will
now help Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here.  I grin at thee,
thou grinning whale!  Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake,
but Stubb's own unwinking eye?  And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon