from the last fond pride of meanest
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel
my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your
furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole fore-gone
life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll,
thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with
thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last
breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!
and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! _Thus_, I give
up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
velocity the line ran through the groove;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to
clear it; he did clear it! but the flying turn caught him round the
neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the
heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty
tub, knocked down an oarsmen, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The
ship! Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim,
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous
_Fata Morgana_; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by
infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the
pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its
crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning,
animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the
smallest chip of the _Pequod_ out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag,
which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying
billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm and a hammer
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the
flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home
among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommodin