CHAPTER 124

  The Needle

  Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of

mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her

on like giants' palms outspread. The strong unstaggering breeze

abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole

world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the

invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned

Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a

crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.

  Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every

time the teetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he

turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she

profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's

rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his

undeviating wake.

  "Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the

sea-chariot of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring

the sun to ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive

the sea!"

  But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards

the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

  "East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.

  "Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at

this hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"

  Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then

observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its

very blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

  Thrusting his head half-way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one

glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment

he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked,

and lo! the two compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as

infallibly going West.

  But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew,

the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has

happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our

compasses- that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I

take it."

  "Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale

mate, gloomily.

  Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more

than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic

energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,

essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not

to be much marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where

the lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some

of the spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been

still more fatal; all its loathsome virtue being annihilated, so

that the before magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's

knitting needle. But in either case, the needle never again, of

itself, recovers the original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the

binnacle compasses be affected, the same fate reaches all the others

that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost one inserted into the

kelson.

  Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the

transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended

hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that

the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the

ship's course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and

once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind,

for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her.

  Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said

nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and

Flask- who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his

feelings- likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though

some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than

their fear of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained

almost wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain

magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.

  For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But

chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper

sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

  "Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I

wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So,

so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck- a

lance without the pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the

sail-maker's needles. Quick!"

  Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now

about to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might

have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile

skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.

Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed

needles, though clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed

over by superstitious sailors, without some shudderings and evil

portents.

  "Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed

him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's

needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own,

that will point as true as any."

  Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors,

as this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic

might follow. But Starbuck looked away.

  With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the

lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,

bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with

the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod,

he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less

strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the

rod as before. Then going through some small strange motions with

it- whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely

intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain- he called for

linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed

needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its

middle, over one of the compass cards. At first, the steel went

round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it

settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for

this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing

his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,- "Look ye, for yourselves, if

Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that

compass swears it!"

  One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes

could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they

slunk away.

  In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his

fatal pride.