THE WHITE WHALE 463 
may avoid all contact with the hull; and as, moreover, if kept con- 
stantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides inter- 
fering not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding 
the vessel’s way in the water ; because of all this, the lower parts of a 
ship’s lightning-rods are not always overboard ; but are generally made 
in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the 
chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require. 
“The rods ! the rods !” cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admon- 
ished to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting 
flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. “Are they overboard ? drop them 
over, fore and aft. Quick !” 
“Avast!” cried Ahab; “let’s have fair play here though we be the 
weaker side. Yet I’ll contribute to raise rods on the Himalayas and 
Andes, that all the world may be secured ; but out on privileges ! Let 
them be, sir.” 
“Look aloft!” cried Starbuck. “The corposants! the corposants!” 
All the yardarms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at 
each tri-pointed lightning-rod end with three tapering white flames, 
each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, 
like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar. 
“Blast the boat ! let it go ! cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing 
sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently 
jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. “Blast it!” — but slip- 
ping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and 
immediately shifting his tone, he cried — “The corposants have mercy 
on us all!” 
To sailors, oaths are household words ; they will swear in the trance 
of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest ; they will imprecate curses 
from the topsail-yardarms, when most they teeter over to a seething sea ; 
but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when 
God’s burning finger has been laid on the ship ; when His “Mene, Mene, 
Tekel Upharsin” has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage. 
While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from 
the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle, 
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far-away 
constellation of stars. Believed against the ghostly light, the gigantic 
