40 
MOBY DICK; OR 
lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of convicts’ 
cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and dusty 
as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little state- 
room ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and 
Jonah gasps. Then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the 
ship’s water-line, Jonah finds the heralding presentiment of that sti- 
fling hour, when the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels’ 
wards. 
“Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly os- 
cillates in Jonah’s room ; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf 
with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, 
though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with 
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it 
but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The 
lamp alarms and frightens Jonah ; as lying in his berth his tormented 
eyes roll around the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds 
no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp 
more and more appalls him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are 
all awry. ‘Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!’ he groans, ‘straight 
upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crooked- 
ness !’ 
“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still 
reeling, but with- conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of 
the Roman racehorse but so much the more strike his steel tags into 
him ; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy 
anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and 
at last amid the whirl of woe he feels a deep stupor steal over him, 
as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and 
there’s naught to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, 
Jonah’s prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to 
sleep. 
“And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; 
and from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all 
careening, glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of 
recorded smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; 
he will not bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the 
ship is like to break. But now when tKe boatswain calls all hands to 
