Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship’s mastheads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene, and was now so nigh that Ahab in the water hailed her. “Sail on the—” but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering crest, he shouted, “Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!”
The Pequod’s prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats flew to the rescue.
Dragged into Stubb’s boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles, the long tension of Ahab’s bodily strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body’s doom: for a time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb’s boat, like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.
But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant’s compass great hearts sometimes condense to one great pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men’s whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering, still (if the gods decree it) in their lifetime aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
“The harpoon,” said Ahab, half-way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended arm, “is it safe?”
“Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it,” said Stubb, showing it.
“One, two, three, four, five; there were five oars, sir, and here are five men.”
“That’s good. Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!—Hands off from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab’s bones again! Set the sail; out oars; the helm!”
It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin—swimming with a velocity which plainly showed that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged (if not a hopeless) one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar—a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her; and then hoisting everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross, the Pequod bore down in the wake of Moby Dick. At the well-known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mastheads; and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard. “Whose is the doubloon now? D’ye see him?” And if the reply was, “No, sir,” straightway he commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.