Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

Ahab’s Address to the Sphynx-Like Whale Head

With the task completed at noon, the seamen descended below for their dinner, leaving the deck deserted in profound silence. An intense copper calm, resembling a universal yellow lotus, increasingly unfolded its noiseless leaves upon the sea. Shortly thereafter, Ahab emerged alone from his cabin, took several turns on the quarter-deck, paused to gaze over the side, then slowly made his way into the main-chains. He retrieved Stubb’s long spade—still remaining after the whale’s decapitation—drove it into the lower part of the half-suspended mass, and positioned its other end crutch-wise under one arm. Leaning over the head with attentively fixed eyes, Ahab confronted what appeared as a black, hooded head. In the midst of such intense calm, it resembled the Sphynx in the desert. Addressing it reverently, Ahab demanded that this vast and venerable head reveal its secret. He acknowledged that though garnished with no beard, it appeared hoary with mosses in places, and declared that of all divers, this head had descended the deepest. He spoke of how that head had moved amid the world’s foundations, witnessed unrecorded names and navies rusting, untold hopes and anchors rotting, and the frigate earth ballasted with countless drowned bones in its murderous hold. Ahab declared that the head had been the most familiar home in that awful water-land, had ventured where bell or diver never went, had slept beside countless sailors while sleepless mothers would surrender their lives merely to lie beside them. He recounted how the head had witnessed locked lovers leap from their flaming ship, heart to heart sinking beneath the exulting wave, true to each other when heaven seemed false. He described how it saw a murdered mate thrown by pirates from a midnight deck, falling for hours into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw while his murderers sailed on unharmed. Concluding his tirade, Ahab exclaimed that the head had seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, yet not one syllable had it spoken.