Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

CHAPTER 119. The Candles.

The warmest climes breed the cruellest fangs: the Bengal tiger crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure, the skies most effulgent basket the deadliest thunders, gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never sweep tame northern lands. So too, in these resplendent Japanese seas, the mariner encounters the direst of all storms: the typhoon, which can burst from a cloudless sky like an exploding bomb on a dazed, sleepy town. Towards evening of one day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, left bare-poled to fight the tempest that struck her directly ahead. When darkness fell, sky and sea roared and split with thunder, blazed with lightning that showed the disabled masts fluttering with the rags of sail left for the storm’s after-sport. Starbuck held by a shroud on the quarter-deck, glancing aloft at every flash to see what new disaster had befallen the rigging, while Stubb and Flask directed the crew lashing the boats tighter. All their pains were for naught: the windward quarter-boat, Ahab’s own, was stove in at the stern by a great rolling sea, left dripping through like a sieve. “Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” Stubb said, regarding the wreck. “But the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start I have to meet it is just across the deck here. But never mind; it’s all in fun, so the old song says.” He sang in a wobbly voice: Oh! jolly is the gale, And a joker is the whale, A’ flourishin’ his tail,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! The scud all a flyin’, That’s his flip only foamin’; When he stirs in the spicin’,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! Thunder splits the ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin’ of this flip,— Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh! “Avast, Stubb,” Starbuck cried. “Let the typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace.” “But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.” “Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.” “What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never mind how foolish?” “Here!” Starbuck seized Stubb by the shoulder, pointing to the weather bow. “Markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? The very course he swung to this day noon? Now mark his boat there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man, where he is wont to stand—his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou must!” “I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?” “Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,” Starbuck soliloquized suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. “The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with the lightning.” At that moment, in an interval of profound darkness between flashes, a voice spoke at his side, and a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead. “Who’s there?” “Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivot-hole, the lightning suddenly making his path plain. The ship’s lightning rods, made of long slender links so they could be hauled up or thrown overboard as needed, were still on deck. “The rods! the rods!” Starbuck cried to the crew, suddenly reminded of danger by a flash of lightning. “Are they overboard? Drop them over, fore and aft. Quick!” “Avast!” Ahab roared. “Let’s have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.” “Look aloft!” Starbuck cried. “The corpusants! the corpusants!” All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire, each of the three masts touched at its tri-pointed lightning-rod end with three tapering white flames, the masts silently burning like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar in the sulphurous air. “Blast the boat! let it go!” Stubb cried, as a swashing sea heaved up under his craft, jamming his hand in the gunwale. He slipped backward on the deck, and his uplifted eyes caught the flames. His tone shifted at once. “The corpusants have mercy on us all!” To sailors, oaths are household words, sworn in the calm and the tempest alike; but seldom is a common oath spoken when God’s burning finger is laid on the ship, when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin” is woven into the shrouds and cordage. While the pallid fire burned aloft, few words were spoken by the enchanted crew, who stood clustered on the forecastle, their eyes gleaming like a distant constellation in the phosphorescent light. Relieved against the ghostly glow, the gigantic jet negro Daggoo loomed to thrice his real stature, like the black cloud from which the thunder came; Tashtego’s parted mouth revealed shark-white teeth tipped with the same pale fire; Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his skin. The tableau waned at last, the flames dying, and the Pequod and all her crew were wrapped in pall again. A moment passed, then Starbuck, going forward, pushed against someone. It was Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man? I heard thy cry; it was not the same as the song.” “No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces? Have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but it’s too dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a’ block with sperm-oil, d’ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti candles—that’s the good promise we saw.” At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face glimmering into view. He glanced upwards, and cried: “See! see!” The tapering flames were beheld again, their pallor redoubled, supernatural. “The corpusants have mercy on us all,” Stubb cried again. At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, his head bowed away from him; near by, a knot of seamen arrested by the glare hung pendulous from the rigging like numbed wasps from a drooping twig. Others stood in enchanted attitudes like skeletons in Herculaneum, all their eyes upcast. “Aye, aye, men!” Ahab cried. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So.” He turned, the last link held fast in his left hand, put his foot upon the Parsee, and stood erect before the three flaming masts, his right arm high-flung, his fixed gaze on the flames. “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.” Sudden repeated flashes of lightning shot the nine flames up to thrice their height; Ahab and the rest closed their eyes, his right hand pressed hard against his brow. “I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!” “The boat! the boat!” Starbuck cried, looking at Ahab’s craft. The harpoon Ahab had forged at Perth’s fire was lashed firmly in its crotch, projecting past the bow; the sea that had stove the boat’s bottom had shaken the leather sheath off the barb, which now burned with a pale, forked flame like a serpent’s tongue. Starbuck grabbed Ahab’s arm. “God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! ’Tis an ill voyage! Ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.” The panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces, half-mutinous, ready to turn the ship home. But Ahab dashed the rattling lightning links to the deck, snatched the burning harpoon, and waved it like a torch among them, swearing to transfix the first sailor who cast loose a rope’s end. Petrified, the men fell back. “All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!” He blew a single, sharp blast of breath, and the flame on the harpoon went out. As in a hurricane, men flee the neighbourhood of a lone, towering elm that is a mark for thunderbolts, so many of the mariners ran from Ahab in terror. The storm raged on, the ship bare-poled, the crew cowering from their captain’s blasphemous defiance.