ence and
placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot
hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as
straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh!
that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength
of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the
wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
scared from it into the sea.

"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."

The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two
ship's lengths of the hunters.

His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities
it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so
that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly
drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is
heightened b