als, ready and ripe for
their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to
seek out the thing that might destroy them!

"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after
the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet
that way, and then disappears."

It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the
air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--much nearer to the ship
than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick
bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White
Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon
of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of
air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the
distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged
waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his
act of defiance.

"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his
immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for
the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and
stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.

"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and
thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore.
The boats!--stand by!"

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from
his perch.

"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,
rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, th