Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville.
CHAPTER 119. The Candles.
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent
but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes
that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these
resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all
storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless
sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask
were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the
boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very
top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.
A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's high
teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern, and left it
again, all dripping through like a sieve.
"Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
"but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see,
Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all
round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all
the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never
mind; it's all in fun: so the old song says;"--(SINGS.)
Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale,
A' flourishin' his tail,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
The scud all a flyin',
That's his flip only foamin';
When he stirs in the spicin',--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
Thunder splits the ships,
But he only smacks his lips,
A tastin' of this flip,--
Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy
peace."
"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.
Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my
throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a
wind-up."
"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."
"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
mind how foolish?"
"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale comes from
the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very
course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is
that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--his
stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
must!
"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"
"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it
into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,
all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up
there; but not with the lightning."
At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following
the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
"Who's there?"
"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
lances of fire.
Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off
the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some
ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But
as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may
avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly
towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering
not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the
vessel's way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a
ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the
chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may requ
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