440 
MOBY DICK; OR 
blow, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast 
bosom friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him 
nigh to his endless end. 
Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown ; 
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to he captain, the 
higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as 
harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, hut — 
as we have elsewhere seen — mount his dead back in a rolling sea ; and 
finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all 
day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clum- 
siest casks and see to their stowage. To he short, among whalemen, the 
harpooneers are the holders, so called. 
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you 
should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him 
there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was 
crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted 
lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow 
proved to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of 
his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever ; and 
at last, after some days’ suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to 
the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away 
in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of 
him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and 
his cheekbones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing 
fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and 
mildly hut deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous 
testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be 
weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, 
expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of 
Eternity. An awe that cannot he named would steal over you as you 
sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his 
face as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. Eor 
whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into 
words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels 
all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author 
from the dead could adequately tell. So that — let us say it again — 
no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier thoughts than those 
