lat upon their
faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook
on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters
pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;
"its wood could only be American!"

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a
time, he lay quiescent.

"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer.
Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only
god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed
prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I
cut off 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 foregone 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 grooves;--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 oarsman, 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 harpooneers
still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric
circles seized the lone