Oh, man! admire and model
thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice.
Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.
Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the
great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man!
in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things!
Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures,
how few vast as the whale!
CHAPTER 69
The Funeral
Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white
body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre;
though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk.
It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away,
the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks,
and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls,
whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale.The vast
white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship,
and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks
and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours
and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen.
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