ing 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 far away
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, stil