415 
THE WHITE WHALE 
sacidean holidays with the Lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa 
at Pupella ; a seaside glen not very far distant from what our sailors 
called Bamboo-Town, his capital. 
Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being 
gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought 
together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his 
people could invent ; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices, chis- 
elled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes ; and all these 
distributed among whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, 
tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores. 
Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an 
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his 
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings 
seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped 
of its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the hones become dust dry in the 
sun, then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, 
where a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it. 
The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with 
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics ; in the skull, the priests kept 
up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again 
sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the ter- 
rific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword 
that so affrighted Damocles. 
It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy 
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the 
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet 
on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and 
the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden 
branches ; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses ; the message-carrying 
air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the 
leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied 
verdure. Oh, busy weaver ! unseen weaver ! — pause ! — one word ! — 
whither flows the fabric ? what palace may it deck ? wherefore all these 
ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! — stay thy hand! — but one 
single word with thee! Ha y — the shuttle flies — the figures float 
from forth the loom ; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides 
