"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost
heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid;
and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can
kill me! Ha! ha!"
Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles;
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged
berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound
was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths;
as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances,
a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea.
Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment
in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep.
Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant
like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes,
leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble
trunk of the whale.
"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,
Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates'
boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.
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