131. CHAPTER CXXXI.
THE PEQUOD MEETS THE DELIGHT.
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days
went by; the life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another
ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was descried. As
she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upom her broad beams, called
shears, which, in some whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at
the height of eight or nine feet; serving to carry the spare,
unrigged, or disabled boats.
Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white
ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a
whale-boat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as
you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton
of a horse.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail;
and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.
“Hast killed him?”
“The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever do that,”
answered the other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock
on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless sailors were
busy in sewing together.
“Not forged!” and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the
crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer;
here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and
tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper
them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White
Whale most feels his accursed life!”
“Then God keep thee, old man—see'st thou that”—pointing
to the hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who
were alive only yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only that
one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon
their tomb.” Then turning to his crew—“Are ye ready there?
place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then—
Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock with uplifted
hands—“may the resurrection and the life—”
“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to
his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to
escape the sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it
struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying
bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.
As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange
life-buoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous
relief.
“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice
in her wake. “In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial;
ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin!”
