“Heart of wrought steel!” murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with his eyes the receding boat—­“canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?—­lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?—­For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing—­be that end what it may.  Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—­fixed at the top of a shudder!  Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.  Mary, girl; thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy!  I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue.  Strangest problems of life seem clearing; but clouds sweep between—­Is my journey’s end coming?  My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day.  Feel thy heart,—­beats it yet?  Stir thyself, Starbuck!—­ stave it off—­move, move! speak aloud!—­Mast-head there!  See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—­Crazed; aloft there!—­ keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—­mark well the whale!—­ Ho! again!—­drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—­he tears the vane”—­ pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck—­“Ha, he soars away with it!—­Where’s the old man now? see’st thou that sight, oh Ahab!—­shudder, shudder!”

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—­ a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-bent waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow.

“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:—­and hemp only can kill me!  Ha! ha!”

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface.  A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.  Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.  Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.

“Give way!” cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday’s fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.  The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates’ boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab’s almost without a scar.