"
CHAPTER 122
Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning
The Main-top-sail yard - Tashtego passing new lashings around it.
"Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here.
What's the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder;
we want rum; give us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!"
CHAPTER 123
The Musket
During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's
jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by its
spasmodic motions even though preventer tackles had been attached to it--
for they were slack--because some play to the tiller was indispensable.
In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed
shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see
the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round.
It was thus with the Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman
had not failed to notice the whirling velocity with which they
revolved upon the cards; it is a sight that hardly anyone can
behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much,
that through the strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--
one engaged forward and the other aft--the shivered remnants of
the jib and fore and main-top-sails were cut adrift from the spars,
and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers of an albatross,
which sometimes are cast to the winds when that storm-tossed bird
is on the wing.
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