329 
THE WHITE WHALE 
and wrenching in agony ! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were 
visible at the hows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads 
the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight- 
day clock ? Suspended ? and to what ? To three bits of boards. Is this 
the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said — “Canst thou 
fill his skin with barbed irons ? or his head with fish-spears ? The 
sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, 
nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot 
make him flee, darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shak- 
ing of a spear !” This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfil- 
ments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a 
thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan has run his head under the 
mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears ! 
In that sloping afternoon sunlight,, the shadows that the three boats 
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and 
broad enough to shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how ap- 
palling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms 
flitting over his head! 
“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines sud- 
denly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, 
as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that 
every oarsmen felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved 
in great part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave 
a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd 
of white bears are scared from it into the sea. 
“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.” 
The lines of which, hardly an instant before, not one handbreath 
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung hack all 
dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two 
ship’s lengths of the hunters. 
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most 
land animals there are certain valves or floodgates in many of their 
veins, whereby, when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least 
instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; 
one of whose peculiarities it is to have an entire non-valvular structure 
of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point as 
