Chapter 104.00: CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.

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CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.
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Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters, and
casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost bones,
set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional
skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery,
pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale? Did
erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy
of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a specimen rib for
exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a full-grown whale on
your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a roast-pig? Surely not. A
veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you
seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the
joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings,
making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats,
dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath
the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed with an
opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small
cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag,
to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the
lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my boat-hatchet and
jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that
young cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to
my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For
being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey of
Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the
lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side glen not
very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his capital.

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together
in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his people could
invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells,
inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and all these distributed
among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering
waves had cast upon his shores.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed
his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of its
fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the
skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand
temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again
sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the terrific
lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so
affrighted Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen; the
trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the industrious
earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it,
whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living
flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the
shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these
unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun
seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver!
Unseen weaver! —pause! —one word! —whither flows the
fabric? What palace may it deck? Wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?
Speak, weaver! —stay thy hand! —but one single word with thee!
Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom;
the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he
weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice;
and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only
when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.
For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are
inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard
without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have
villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! Then, be heedful; for so, in all
this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be
overheard afar.

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler!
Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over
with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself
a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived
with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real jet
had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an object
of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests should swear
that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced before this skeleton—brushed
the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and with a ball of
Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many winding, shaded
colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and following it back, I
emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no living thing within;
naught was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st thou measure
this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long do ye
make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning
feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with their yard-sticks—the
great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly
concluded my own admeasurements.

These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it
recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer
to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in
Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have
some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard
that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the
proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale
in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton
Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession
the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the
full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo’s.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons belonged,
were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar grounds. King
Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir Clifford, because he was
lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir Clifford’s whale has been
articulated throughout; so that, like a great chest of drawers, you can
open and shut him, in all his bony cavities—spread out his ribs like
a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be
put upon some of his trap-doors and shutters; and a footman will show
round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side. Sir Clifford
thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery in the
spinal column; threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his
cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the
other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then
composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did
not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.