eamen fall
overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly
frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued
in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a
Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in
this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood
fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the
great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the
whale!

CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.

Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious
flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further
and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem
square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous
din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous
sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair
face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass
of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in
pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled.
In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if
peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they
most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not
the mightiest whale is free.

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or