393 
THE WHITE WHALE 
free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; 
not that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green 
damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon. 
But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way 
of understanding shall remain’’ (i. e. even while living) “in the con- 
gregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert 
thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom 
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Cat- 
skill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest 
gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny 
spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge 
is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain 
eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they 
soar. 
CHAPTER XCYI 
THE LAMP 
Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pe quod's fore- 
castle, where the off-duty watch were sleeping, for one single moment, 
you would have almost thought you were standing in some illumined 
shrine of canonised kings and counsellors. There they lay in their tri- 
angular oakens vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a score of 
lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. 
In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of 
queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in 
darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he 
seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an 
Aladdin’s lamp, and lays him down in it ; so that in the pitchiest night 
the ship’s black hull still houses an illumination. 
See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of 
lamps — often but old bottles and vials, though — to the copper cooler at 
the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He 
burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore, 
unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral contriv- 
