Chapter 121.00: CHAPTER 119. The Candles.

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CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
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Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches
in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent but basket
the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes that never swept
tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these resplendent Japanese
seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will
sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a
dazed and sleepy town.

Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
tempest had left for its after sport.

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask were
directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats.
But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the
cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab’s) did not escape. A great rolling
sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship’s high teetering side, stove
in the boat’s bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through
like a sieve.

“Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck,” said Stubb, regarding the wreck, “but
the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can’t fight it. You see, Mr.
Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round
the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all the start
I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind; it’s all
in fun: so the old song says;”—(_sings_.)

Oh! Jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A’ flourishin’ his tail,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

The scud all a flyin’,
That’s his flip only foamin’;
When he stirs in the spicin’,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin’ of this flip,—
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

“Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp
here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy
peace.”

“But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck,
there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And
when that’s done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.”

“Madman! Look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own.”

“What! How can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
mind how foolish?”

“Here!” cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
hand towards the weather bow, “markest thou not that the gale comes from
the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? The very
course he swung to this day noon? Now mark his boat there; where is that
stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand—his
stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
must!

“I don’t half understand ye: what’s in the wind?”

“Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,”
soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb’s question. “The gale
that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that
will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom;
but to leeward, homeward—I see it lightens up there; but not with
the lightning.”

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following the
flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same instant a
volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.

“Who’s there?”

“Old Thunder!” said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
lances of fire.

Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the
perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships
carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this
conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all
contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there,
it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with
some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel’s way in the
water; because of all this, the lower parts of a ship’s lightning-rods are
not always overboard; but are generally made in long slender links, so as
to be the more readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down
into the sea, as occasion may require.

“The rods! The rods!” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to
vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to
light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard? Drop them over, fore and aft.
Quick!”

“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here, though we be the weaker
side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that
all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir.”

“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corpusants! The corpusants!”

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.

“Blast the boat! Let it go!” cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!”—but
slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
immediately shifting his tone he cried—“The corpusants have mercy on
us all!”

To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses from
the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea; but
in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God’s burning
finger has been laid on the ship; when His “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin”
has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.

While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, all
their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed the
black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of Tashtego
revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as if they too had
been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the preternatural light,
Queequeg’s tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body.

The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more the
Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two
passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was
Stubb. “What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the same
in the song.”

“No, no, it wasn’t; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I hope
they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces? —have
they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck—but it’s too
dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
chock a’ block with sperm-oil, d’ye see; and so, all that sperm will work
up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as
three spermaceti candles—that’s the good promise we saw.”

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb’s face slowly beginning to
glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: “See! See!” and once more
the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
supernaturalness in their pallor.

“The corpusants have mercy on us all,” cried Stubb, again.

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the
Parsee was kneeling in Ahab’s front, but with his head bowed away from
him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where they
had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by
the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed
wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like
the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others
remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes upcast.

“Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame
but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast links there;
I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against
fire! So.”

Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his
foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm,
he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

“Oh! Thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once
did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this
hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know
that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt
thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed.
No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power;
but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional,
unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a
personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came;
wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives
in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come
in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of
full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains
indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a
true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

[_Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning; the nine flames leap lengthwise to
thrice their previous height; Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his
right hand pressed hard upon them. _]

“I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then
grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of
these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning
flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten
brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet
blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out
of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!
The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh,
thou magnanimous! Now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my
fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! What hast thou done
with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how
came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou
knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing
thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but
time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my
scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit
immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated
grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! Leap up, and
lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded
with thee; defyingly I worship thee!”

“The boat! The boat!” cried Starbuck, “look at thy boat, old man!”

Ahab’s harpoon, the one forged at Perth’s fire, remained firmly lashed in
its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat’s bow;
but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath
to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame
of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent’s
tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm—“God, God is against thee,
old man; forbear! ’tis an ill voyage! Ill begun, ill continued; let me
square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it
homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”

Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the braces—though
not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast mate’s thoughts
seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling
lightning links to the deck, and snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved
it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor
that but cast loose a rope’s end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more
shrinking from the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay,
and Ahab again spoke:—

“All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and heart,
soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to
what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!”
And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.

As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so
at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him in a
terror of dismay.