Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon the logger
head itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little
Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;
for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously
rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask
seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.
Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask
would now and then stamp with impatience; but not one added
heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest.
So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living
magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her
seasons for that.
Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing solicitudes.
The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace
the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from
his hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather.
He loaded it, and rammed home the loading with his thumb-end;
but hardly had he ignited his match across the rough sandpaper
of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer, whose eyes had been
setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly dropped like light
from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a quick phrensy
of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!"
To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish
white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it,
and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from
white rolling billows.
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