THE WHITE WHALE 
33 
though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands ; how it is that 
to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so 
significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he 
but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth ; why the Life 
Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what 
eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies an- 
tique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago ; how it is that we still 
refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwell- 
ing in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the 
dead ; wherefore but the rumour of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a 
whole city. All these things are not without their meanings. 
But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these 
dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. 
It needs scarcely to he told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nan- 
tucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light 
of that darkened doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had 
gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may he thine. But 
somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine 
chance for promotion, it seems — aye, a stove boat will make me an im- 
mortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a 
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what 
then ? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and 
Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my 
true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are 
too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking 
that thick water the thinnest of air. 
Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take 
my body who will, take it I say, it is not myself. And therefore three 
cheers for Nantucket, and come a stove boat and stove body when they 
will, for stave my soul, who can do this ? 
CHAPTER VIII 
THE PUEPIT 
I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable ro- 
bustness entered j immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon 
