CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.—Thunder and Lightning.
High above the deck, Tashtego clung to the main-top-sail yard, passing new lashings around it, the wind howling around him, lightning flashing close enough to singe his hair, thunder rolling so loud it shook the mast. “Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What’s the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!” He muttered to himself, his fingers numb around the rope, the storm raging around him, a tiny, tired, human voice amid the roaring of the wind and the fury of the tempest.
CHAPTER 123. The Musket.
During the typhoon’s most violent shocks, the jaw-bone tiller had hurled the helmsman to the deck again and again, despite preventer tackles slackened by necessity. In such gales the compass needles whirled round the cards with a velocity that unmanned the beholder; so it was with the Pequod’s, spinning at every shock. After midnight the storm abated enough for Starbuck and Stubb, working fore and aft, to cut away the shredded remnants of sails, which eddied away like albatross feathers, and bend new ones. The ship regained her East-south-east course, and then a blessed thing occurred: the foul wind came round astern. The yards were squared to the chant of “Ho! the fair wind!” and the crew sang for joy.
Mechanically, Starbuck went below to report the change to Ahab, but at the cabin door he paused. The lamp swung in the subterranean silence, throwing fitful light on the loaded muskets shining upright against the bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest man, yet an evil thought strangely evolved in his heart, so blended with its good accompaniments that he hardly knew it for itself. He saw the very musket Ahab had once pointed at him—the one with the studded stock. “He would have shot me once,” he murmured. “Strange that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, and powder in the pan.”
The thought took root: should he kill the sleeping captain to save the ship? Ahab had sworn not to strike spars to any gale, dashed his quadrant, groped by dead reckoning, and refused lightning-rods. Was this crazed old man to be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom? If the ship came to harm, Ahab would be the wilful murderer of thirty men. But how to do it? Make him a prisoner? No—knotted with ropes, chained to ring-bolts, he would be more hideous than a caged tiger; Starbuck could not endure his howlings. The land was hundreds of leagues away; he stood alone on the open sea, between two oceans and a continent, with no law but his own conscience.
“Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together? And would I be a murderer, then?” Slowly, stealthily, half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door. “A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again. Oh Mary! Mary! boy! boy! But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?”
Then from the cabin came Ahab’s tormented muttering: “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!” The levelled musket shook like a drunkard’s arm. Starbuck wrestled with an angel. Turning from the door, he placed the death-tube in its rack and left the place. “He’s too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to the deck here.”
CHAPTER 124. The Needle.
Next morning the sea still rolled in mighty billows, pushing the Pequod on like giants’ palms. The wind was strong and unstaggering, the world booming before it. Ahab stood apart in enchanted silence, watching the sun’s rays. “Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of the sun.” But suddenly he hurried to the helm, demanding the course. “East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman. “Thou liest!” smiting him. “Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”
Every soul was confounded; the phenomenon had escaped them all. Starbuck looked, and lo! the compasses pointed East, but the Pequod was going West. Ahab laughed rigidly: last night’s thunder had turned the needles. Starbuck, pale and gloomy, had never before seen this happen. The narrator explains that lightning can annihilate the loadstone virtue of steel, rendering it useless. Ahab took the precise bearing of the sun, satisfied the needles were inverted, and ordered the course reversed.
Then, to revive the crew’s spirits and demonstrate his mastery, Ahab demanded a lance without a pole, a top-maul, and the smallest sail-maker’s needle. He knocked off the lance’s steel head, held the iron rod upright, and hammered the sail-needle upon it. After strange motions—whether magnetizing or theatrical—he suspended the needle over a compass card. It quivered, then settled. “Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!” One after another the crew peered in and slunk away, abashed. In Ahab’s fiery eyes Starbuck saw the old man’s fatal pride, and looked away.
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