With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms;
but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads
to gain the uttermost stern.
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out,
as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way;
and from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be
darted at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him,
as it were; and while the other boats involuntarily paused,
as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that
monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe,
which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated;
frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his
naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.
As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him;
the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped,
as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft,
bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast
again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.
These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew at
the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold
fast to the oars to lash them across.
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