526 
MOBY DICK; OR 
still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus , I 
give up the spear ! ” 
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with ig- 
niting velocity the line ran through the groove ; ran foul. Ahab stopped 
to clear it ; he did clear it ; but the flying turn caught him round the 
neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bow-string their victims, he was 
shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the 
heavy eyesplice in the rope’s final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, 
knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its 
depths. 
For an instant, the tranced boat’s crew stood still; then turned. 
“The ship? Great God, where is the ship? Soon they through dim, 
bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gas- 
eous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed 
by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan 
harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And 
now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and 
each floating oar, and every lance-pole and spinning, animate and in- 
animate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip 
of the Pequod out of sight. 
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the 
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of 
the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, 
which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying 
billows they almost touched ; — at that instant, a red arm and a hammer 
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the 
flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that 
tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural 
home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego 
there ; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing be- 
tween the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that 
ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept 
his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with unearthly 
shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive 
form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like 
Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of 
heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. 
