"
At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly
beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried:
"See! see!" and once more the high tapering flames were beheld
with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.
"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.
At the base of the main-mast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,
the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away
from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging,
where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous,
like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig.
In various enchanted attitudes like the standing, or stepping,
or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck;
but all their eyes upcast.
"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well;
the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me
those mainmast links there; I would fain feel this pulse,
and let mine beat against it; blood against fire! So."
Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot
upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm,
he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
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