THE WHITE WHALE 
391 
away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch 
of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. 
Opposite the mouth of the works, on the farther side of the wide 
wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here 
lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red 
heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their 
tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted 
beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth all these 
were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. 
As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of 
terror told in words of mirth ; as their uncivilised laughter forked, up- 
wards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, 
in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge 
pronged forks and dippers ; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, 
and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell 
further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and 
scornfully champed the white hone in her mouth, and viciously spat 
round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with sav- 
ages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into 
that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her 
monomaniac commander’s soul. 
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently 
guided the way of this fire ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that inter- 
val, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, 
the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes be- 
fore me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat 
kindred visions in my soul, as soon as I began to yield to that unac- 
countable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight 
helm. 
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) 
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was 
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jawbone tiller 
smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum 
of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind ; I thought my eyes were 
open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and 
mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all 
