mattrass that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood!
I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars!
I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost.
For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand
the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty
of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and
jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over
salted death, though;--cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for
one red cherry ere we die!"

"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I
hope my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers
will now come to her, for the voyage is up."

From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive;
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained
in their hands, just as they had darted from their various
employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which
from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a
broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he
rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his
whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid
white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till
men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like
dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their
bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as
mountain torrents down a flume.

"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the
boat; "its wood could only be American!"

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for
a time, he lay quiescent.

"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy
hammer. Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked
keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm,
and Pole-pointed prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish,
and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I
feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all
your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole
foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards
thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last
I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's
sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses
to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to
pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned
whale! THUS, I give up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with
igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab
stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him
round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their
victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.
Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out
of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea,
disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned.
"The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim,
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the
gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while
fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty
perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking
lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone
boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every
lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round
in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of
the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the
flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the
destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm
and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act
of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A
sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from
its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and
incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its
broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and
simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage
beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the
bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak
thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of
Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to
hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and
helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the
great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years
ago.



Epilogue



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