nd counsellors. There they lay
in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.

In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an
Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night
the ship's black hull still houses an illumination.

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
lamps--often but old bottles and vials, though--to the copper cooler at
the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He
burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He
goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
supper of game.

CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.

Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside
and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of
old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded
surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he
is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his
spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but now it
remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by
rehearsing--singing, if I may--the romantic proceeding of decanting off
his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where
once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along
beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.

While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling
this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed
round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot
across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last
man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round