Great Paper: "Moby Dick " By Herman Melville ~The Spirit Spout~

Moby Dick - By Herman Melville

~ The Spirit Spout ~

The Men catch sight late at night of the whale that they had been so hard at searching for. There is something of an image of a quite late night in the northern seas. In the dark of the night, in the sea mist and the cold, the clear and clean bright of the stars and moon light up a mostly empty deck, rolling softly side to side in the motion of the oceans dark waves. And either a man watching from the deck, or way up on the crowsnest(which one would see it i dont know), one of these guys would hear a clear blowing sound come from the wild seawater around them. They would look quick in the night, and with the help of the moon and the stars catch a lingering column of mist falling back into the surface of the sea. And its a funny image because, as soon as this happens, everybody on deck is through the roof about jumping in the water with boats and going after the giant animal. One shout from the deck, 

and the whole ship is a writhing colony of bee's all itching to gather there pollen. """XXX 

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Days, weeks passed. 


And under an easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising grounds; that off the Azores; off the cape of Verdes; on the Plate(so called), being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St.Helena.

It was awhile gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlite night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew.

“There she blows!”  Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure.

For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a lowering.  

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail to be spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind.

The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made them buoyant, hovering deck to feel like ai beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her -- one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawningly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab’s face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively the echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was seen no more that night. Every sailor swore that they saw it once, but not a second time.

This midnight spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced; again it was described by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be; disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for-ever alluring us on. 

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unbearable spout was cast by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition , as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage of seas.

These temporary apprehensions, so vauge but so aweful, derived a wonderous potency from the contrasting serinity of the weather, in which, beneath all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days and days we voyaged along through the seas so wearily, lonesomley mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow. 

But at last, when turning to the eastward, the cape winds came howling around us, and we rose and fell along the long troubled seas that and there; when the ivory tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam flakes flew over her bulwarks, and all the desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before. 

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinantly clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting uninhabital craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefor fit for a roosting place for their homeless selves. 

And heaved, and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its black tides were a conscious and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.   

Cape of good hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto as called of yore, for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormentulous sea, where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat the black air without any horizon of land. But calm, snow white and unvarying; still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us on from before, The solitary jet would pronounce itself again, and at times like this be described. 

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