“Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm.  Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me.

“Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power!  Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—­that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain!  In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again.  Yet dost thou darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.  All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now.

“Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest.  Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!”

CHAPTER 117

The Whale Watch

The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to windward; one less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern.  These last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab’s.

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spout-hole; and the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.

Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails.  A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a flooded world.  “I have dreamed it again,” said he.

“Of the hearses?  Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be thine?”

“And who are hearsed that die on the sea?”

“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in America.”

“Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee!—­a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers.  Ha!  Such a sight we shall not soon see.”

“Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man.”