Standing on this were the Tartarean
shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers.
With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into
the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky
flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.
The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship
there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness
to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works,
on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.
This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire,
till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features,
now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards,
and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were
strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.
As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales
of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter
forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace;
as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated
with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on,
and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly
shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea
and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod,
freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse,
and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material
counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
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