69. CHAPTER LXIX.
THE FUNERAL.
“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled
white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre;
though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything
in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and
more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate
sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of
screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards
in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats
further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats,
what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls,
augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the
almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the
unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant
sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death
floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.
There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The seavultures
all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously
in black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped
the whale, I ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon
the banquet of his funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh,
horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest
whale is free.
Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful
ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some
timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar,
when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless
still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white
spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming
corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log—
shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for
years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it
as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally
leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of
precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story
of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the
earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!
Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a
real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless
panic to a world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other
ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor
Johnson who believe in them.
