510 MOBY DICK; OR 
The rigging lived. The mastheads, like the tops of tall palms, were 
outspreadingly tufted with -arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with 
one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings ; others, 
shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking 
yards ; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their 
fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek 
out the thing that might destroy them ! 
“Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?” cried Ahab, when, 
after the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been 
heard. “Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick 
casts one odd jet that way, and then disappears.” 
It is even so ; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some 
other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for 
hardly had Ahab reached his perch ; hardly was the rope belayed to its 
pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the 
air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant 
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as — much nearer to the 
ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead — 
Moby Dick bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and in- 
dolent spoutings; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain 
in his head, did the White Whaler now reveal his vicinity ; but by the 
far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost 
velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his 
entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of 
dazzling foam, shows ’his place to the distance of seven miles 
and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes 
off seem his mane; in some cases this breaching is his act of de- 
fiance. 
“There she breaches! there she breaches!” was the cry, as in his 
immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like 
to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved 
against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for 
the moment, intolerably glittered -and glared like a glacier; and stood 
there gradually fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the 
dim and fading mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale. 
“Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!” cried Ahab, “thy 
