Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out
of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea,
disappeared in its depths.
For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned.
"The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim,
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous
Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed
by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,
the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking look-outs on
the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself,
and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole,
and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex,
carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over
the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches
of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards
of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings,
over the destroying billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red
arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act
of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.
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