384 
MOBY DICK; OR 
but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. 
Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of 
the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; 
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and 
among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the mul- 
titudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of 
waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle 
of the loom, and spoke it ; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 
So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal 
reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is 
absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised. 
For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in 
that fishery ; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what 
like abandonment befell myself. 
CHAPTER XCIII 
A SQUEEZE OF THE HAND 
That whale of Stubb’s so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the 
Pequod’s side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations pre- 
viously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the 
Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. 
While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were em- 
ployed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the 
sperm ; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully 
manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon. 
It had cooled and crystallised to such a degree,, that when, with 
several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I 
found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in 
the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into 
fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty ! No wonder that in old times this 
sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweet- 
ener ! such a softener ! such a delicious mollifier ! After having my 
hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, 
as it were, to serpentine and spiralise. 
