THE WHITE WHALE 525 
though;— cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry 
ere we die !” 
“Cherries ? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, 
I hope my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few cop- 
pers will come to her now, for the voyage is up.” 
Fiom the ship s bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; 
hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in 
their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; 
all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side 
strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of over- 
spreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, 
swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of 
all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead 
smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some 
fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the 
harpooneers aloft shook on their hull-like necks. Through the 
breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a 
flume. 
“The ship ! The hearse ! — the second hearse !” cried Ahab from 
the boat; “its wood could only be American!” 
Diving beneath the settling ship, the Whale ran quivering along its 
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far 
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab’s boat, where, for a 
time, he lay quiescent. 
“I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego ! let me hear thy 
hammer. Oh ! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine ; thou uncracked 
keel; and only god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, 
and Pole-pointed prow, — death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, 
and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest 
shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I 
feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho ! from all 
your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole 
foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards 
thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I 
grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit 
my last breath at thee. Sink all coifins and all hearses to one common 
pool ! and since neither can be mine let me then tow to pieces, while 
