So with poor Queequeg,
who, as harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the
living whale, but--as we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back
in a rolling sea; and finally descend into the gloom of the hold,
and bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement,
resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see to their stowage.
To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the holders, so called.
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled,
you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down
upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers,
the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness
and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well.
And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan;
where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings,
he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever;
and at last, after some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock,
close to the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted
and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there
seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing.
But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper,
his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller;
they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but
deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous
testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die,
or be weakened.
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