"
"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!
All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at
each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames,
each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air,
like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant,
as a swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft so that its
gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing.
"Blast it!"--but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes
caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The
corpusants have mercy on us all!"
To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear
in the trance of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest;
they will imprecate curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most
they teeter over to a seething sea; but in all my voyagings,
seldom have I heard a common oath when God's burning finger has
been laid on the ship; when His "Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin"
has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from
the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a faraway
constellation of stars.
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