effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over sideways as it
slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of
it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.

Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--some twenty or more feet
out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
overleap its summit with their scud.

*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down
poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
view whatever objects may be encircling him.

But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.
The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book
of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's
insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could still
keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless
Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock
might burst. From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and
mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not
succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.
For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so
planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed
horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed,
still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of
the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that ca