CHAPTER 116

  The Dying Whale

  Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's

favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch

somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails

fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For next day after

encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain;

and one of them by Ahab.

  It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the

crimson fight were done; and floating in the lovely sunset sea and

sky, sun and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness

and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that

rosy air, that it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green

convent valleys of the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze,

wantonly turned sailor, had gone to sea, freighted with these vesper

hymns.

  Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had

sterned off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings

from the now tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in

all sperm whales dying- the turning sunwards of the head, and so

expiring- that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening,

somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before.

  "He turns and turns him to it,- how slowly, but how steadfastly, his

homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He

too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the

sun!- Oh that these too-favoring eyes should see these too-favoring

sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal

or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions

no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows

have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine

upon the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of

faith, but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse,

and it heads some other way.

  "Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast

builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured

seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in

the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after

calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and

then gone round again, without a lesson to me.

  "Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring,

rainbowed jet!- that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In

vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening

sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou

darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy

unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of

once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.

  "Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild

fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea;

though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my

foster-brothers!"