383 
THE WHITE WHALE 
But we are all in the hands of the gods ; and Pip jumped again. It 
was under very similar circumstances to the first performance ; but this 
time he did not breast out the line ; and hence, when the whale started 
to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. 
Alas ! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, boun- 
teous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching 
away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out 
to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head 
showed like a head of cloves. Ho boat-knife was lifted when he fell so 
rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him ; and the 
whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean 
was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip 
turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely casta- 
way, though the loftiest and the brightest. 
How, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the 
practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the 
awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self 
in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God ! who can tell it ? 
Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea — mark 
how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides. 
But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? 
Ho; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his 
wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to 
Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerate- 
ness towards oarsmen jeopardised through their own timidity, is not 
always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such 
instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a 
coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar 
to military navies and armies. 
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly 
spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and 
Stubb’s boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon 
his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miser- 
ably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but 
from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at 
least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, 
