349 
THE WHITE WHALE 
pletely out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge 
into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body 
are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they 
downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime breach — some- 
where else to be described — this peaking of the whale’s flukes is per- 
haps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the 
bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching 
at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan 
thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw in the flame Baltic of Hell. 
But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in ; if in 
the Dantean, the devils will occur to you ; if in that of Isaiah, the arch- 
angels. Standing at the masthead of my ship during a sunrise that 
crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the 
east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in con- 
cert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand 
embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, 
the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified 
of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing 
him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the 
military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with their 
trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence. 
The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the 
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk 
of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite 
organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively 
belong. For as the mighty elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, 
compared with Leviathan’s tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. 
The most direful blow from the elephant’s trunk were as the playful tap 
of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash of the sperm 
whale’s ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have one after the 
other.hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews into the air, very 
much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls . 1 
1 Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale 
and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant 
stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant ; 
nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude; among 
these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up 
water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a stream. 
