THE WHITE WHALE «7 
sun, that only calls forth life, hut gives it not again. Yet dost thou, 
darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy un- 
namable imminglings float beneath me here ; I am buoyed by breaths of 
once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. 
“Then hail, for ever hail, 0 sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild 
fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea ; though 
hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers I” 
CHAPTER CXYI 
THE WHALE WATCH 
The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to 
windward ; one, less distant, to leeward ; one ahead ; one astern. These 
last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one 
could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay 
by its side all night ; and that boat was Ahab’s. 
The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale’s spouthole; 
and the lantern hanging from its top cast a troubled flickering glare 
upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, 
which gently chafed the whale’s broad flank, like soft surf upon a 
beach. 
Ahab and all his boat’s crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who 
crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played 
round the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. 
A sound like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven 
ghosts of Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air. 
Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and 
hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in 
a flooded world. “I have dreamed it again,” said he. 
“Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse 
nor coffin can be thine ?” 
“And who are hearsed that die on the sea ?” 
“But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two 
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea ; the first not made by 
mortal hands ; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in 
America.” 
