And like circles on the water, which, as they
grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding,
like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would
steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage,
and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were
bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous
and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.
And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all,
alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author
from the dead could adequately tell. So that--let us say it again--
no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts
than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face
of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock,
and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest,
and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher
towards his destined heaven.
Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious
favor he asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch,
when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand,
said that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little
canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isle;
and upon inquiry, he had learned that all whalemen who died
in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes, and that the fancy
of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not unlike
the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior,
stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated
away to the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe
that the stars are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons,
their own mild, uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens;
and so form the white breakers of the milky way.
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