Chapter 71.00: CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.

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CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.
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“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 sea-vultures 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.