, and the third the evening
and the end of that thing--be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what
is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to
see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming? My legs
feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,--beats
it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--stave it off--move, move!
speak aloud!--Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the
hill?--Crazed;--aloft there!--keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--

"Mark well the whale!--Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he
tears the vane"--pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha!
he soars away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,
oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--a
downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but
intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little
sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest
silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the
opposing bow.

"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no
hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!"

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of
ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
marble trunk of the whale.

"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in
him,