284 
MOBY DICK; OR 
CHAPTEK LXVIII 
THE FUNERAL 
“Haul in the chains ! Let the carcase go astern !” 
The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body 
of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed 
in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. 
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it tom and 
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with repacious 
flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting pon- 
iards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats farther 
and farther from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seems 
square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous 
din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous 
sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the 
fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great 
mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives. 
There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral ! The sea-vultures 
all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or 
speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I 
ween, if peradventure he had needed it ; but upon the banquet of his 
funeral they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vulturism of earth ! 
from which not the mightiest whale is free. 
Hor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost 
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of- 
war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscur- 
ing the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating 
in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it ; straightway the 
whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log 
— shoals, rocks and breakers hereabouts beware! And for years 
afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly 
sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there 
when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your 
utility of traditions ; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old 
beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the 
air! 
