THE WHITE WHALE 503 
yellow crew were tumbling over each other’s head to gain the utter- 
most stern. 
And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, 
as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and 
from his body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted 
at from the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were ; 
and while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis 
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious 
with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and 
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized 
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from 
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him ; the 
frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an 
enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, 
and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two 
floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the 
crew at the stern- wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold 
fast to the oars to lash them across. 
At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the 
first, to perceive the whale’s intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, 
a movement that loosed his hold for the time ; at that moment his hand 
had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only 
slipping further into the whale’s mouth, and tilting over sideways as it 
slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out 
of it, as he leaned to the push ; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea. 
Kipplinglv withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little 
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in 
the billows ; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole splendid 
body; so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose — some twenty or 
more feet out of the water — the now rising swells, with all their con- 
fluent waves, dazzling’ broke against it ; vindictively tossing their shiv- 
ered spray still higher into the air. 1 So, in a gale, the but half baffled 
1 This motion is peculiar to the Sperm whale. It receives its designa- 
tion (pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down 
poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously de- 
scribed. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively 
yi$w whatever objects may be encircling him, 
