CHAPTER 119

  The Candles

  Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal

crouches in spaced 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 mast 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 faraway 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 main-mast, 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 eve, 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 unconditional, unintegral mastery in

me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands

here. Though but a point at best; whenceso'er I came; whereso'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 eyeballs ache and ache;

my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling in 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! 't is 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.