Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound
so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly,
that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood
gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing.
High aloft in the cross-trees was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego.
His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand stretched out
like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his cries.
To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being
heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's look-outs
perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could
that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence
as from Tashtego the Indian's.
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly
and eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought
him some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate,
and by those wild cries announcing their coming.
"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"
"Where-away?"
"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"
Instantly all was commotion.
The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating
and reliable uniformity.
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