您的位置 : 首页 > 英文著作
Moby Dick (or The Whale)
CHAPTER 119 The Candles.
Herman Melville
下载:Moby Dick (or The Whale).txt
本书全文检索:
       _ Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
       crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most
       effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows
       tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that
       in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst
       of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that
       cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.
       Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
       bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
       ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
       thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled
       masts fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of
       the tempest had left for its after sport.
       Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at
       every flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional
       disaster might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb
       and Flask were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer
       lashing of the boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though
       lifted to the very top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat
       (Ahab's) did not escape. A great rolling sea, dashing high up
       against the reeling ship's high teetering side, stove in the boat's
       bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a
       sieve.
       "Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
       "but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You
       see, Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it
       leaps, all round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But
       as for me, all the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck
       here. But never mind; it's all in fun: so the old song
       says;"--(SINGS.)
       Oh! jolly is the gale,
       And a joker is the whale,
       A' flourishin' his tail,--
       Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
       The scud all a flyin',
       That's his flip only foamin';
       When he stirs in the spicin',--
       Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
       Thunder splits the ships,
       But he only smacks his lips,
       A tastin' of this flip,--
       Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!
       "Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
       harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold
       thy peace."
       "But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a
       coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is,
       Mr. Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to
       cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the
       doxology for a wind-up."
       "Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."
       "What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else,
       never mind how foolish?"
       "Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing
       his hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale
       comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby
       Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat
       there; where is that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is
       wont to stand--his stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard,
       and sing away, if thou must!
       "I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"
       "Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
       Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
       question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn
       it into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to
       windward, all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see
       it lightens up there; but not with the lightning."
       At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness,
       following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at
       the same instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.
       "Who's there?"
       "Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
       pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by
       elbowed lances of fire.
       Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry
       off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea
       some ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the
       water. But as this conductor must descend to considerable depth,
       that its end may avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if
       kept constantly towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps,
       besides interfering not a little with some of the rigging, and more
       or less impeding the vessel's way in the water; because of all this,
       the lower parts of a ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard;
       but are generally made in long slender links, so as to be the more
       readily hauled up into the chains outside, or thrown down into the
       sea, as occasion may require.
       "The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished
       to vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting
       flambeaux, to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop them
       over, fore and aft. Quick!"
       "Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the
       weaker side. Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and
       Andes, that all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let
       them be, sir."
       "Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!
       All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
       tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each
       of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air,
       like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.
       "Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a
       swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its
       gunwale violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing.
       "Blast it!"--but slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes
       caught the flames; and immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The
       corpusants have mercy on us all!"
       To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance
       of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate
       curses from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a
       seething sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common
       oath when God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His
       "Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the
       cordage.
       While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from
       the enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
       all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
       constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the
       gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and
       seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted
       mouth of Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely
       gleamed as if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by
       the preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic
       blue flames on his body.
       The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once
       more the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall.
       A moment or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against
       some one. It was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy
       cry; it was not the same in the song."
       "No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I
       hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long
       faces?--have they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr.
       Starbuck--but it's too dark to look. Hear me, then: I take that
       mast-head flame we saw for a sign of good luck; for those masts are
       rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with sperm-oil,
       d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts, like
       sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti
       candles--that's the good promise we saw."
       At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
       to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and
       once more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed
       redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor.
       "The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.
       At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the
       flame, the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head
       bowed away from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging
       rigging, where they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number
       of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung
       pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig.
       In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or
       running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck;
       but all their eyes upcast.
       "Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white
       flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast
       links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against
       it; blood against fire! So."
       Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his
       foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right
       arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.
       "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
       once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
       to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and
       I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor
       reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill;
       and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy
       speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake
       life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the
       midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.
       Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go;
       yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and
       feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in
       thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy
       highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest
       navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still
       remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest
       me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee."
       [SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP
       LENGTHWISE TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST,
       CLOSES HIS EYES, HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]
       "I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it
       wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but
       I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take
       the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take
       it. The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and
       ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some
       stunning ground. Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee.
       Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness
       leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open
       eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now
       I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my
       sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her?
       There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how
       came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy
       beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which
       thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some
       unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy
       eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee,
       thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou
       foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy
       incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with
       haughty agony, I read my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I
       leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee;
       defyingly I worship thee!"
       "The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"
       Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly
       lashed in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his
       whale-boat's bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused
       the loose leather sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb
       there now came a levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent
       harpoon burned there like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab
       by the arm--"God, God is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an
       ill voyage! ill begun, ill continued; let me square the yards, while
       we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a
       better voyage than this."
       Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
       braces--though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the
       aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous
       cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and
       snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them;
       swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a
       rope's end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from
       the fiery dart that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab
       again spoke:--
       "All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
       heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that
       ye may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow
       out the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished
       the flame.
       As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood
       of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render
       it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for
       thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners
       did run from him in a terror of dismay. _
用户中心

本站图书检索

本书目录

Etymology
Abstract
CHAPTER 1 Loomings.
CHAPTER 2 The Carpet-Bag.
CHAPTER 3 The Spouter-Inn.
CHAPTER 4 The Counterpane.
CHAPTER 5 Breakfast
CHAPTER 6 The Street.
CHAPTER 7 The Chapel.
CHAPTER 8 The Pulpit.
CHAPTER 9 The Sermon.
CHAPTER 10 A Bosom Friend.
CHAPTER 11 Nightgown.
CHAPTER 12 Biographical.
CHAPTER 13 Wheelbarrow.
CHAPTER 14 Nantucket.
CHAPTER 15 Chowder.
CHAPTER 16 The Ship.
CHAPTER 17 The Ramadan.
CHAPTER 18 His Mark.
CHAPTER 19 The Prophet.
CHAPTER 20 All Astir.
CHAPTER 21 Going Aboard.
CHAPTER 22 Merry Christmas.
CHAPTER 23 The Lee Shore.
CHAPTER 24 The Advocate.
CHAPTER 25 Postscript.
CHAPTER 26 Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 27 Knights and Squires.
CHAPTER 28 Ahab.
CHAPTER 29 Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.
CHAPTER 30 The Pipe.
CHAPTER 31 Queen Mab.
CHAPTER 32 Cetology.
CHAPTER 33 The Specksynder.
CHAPTER 34 The Cabin-Table.
CHAPTER 35 The Mast-Head.
CHAPTER 36 The Quarter-Deck.
CHAPTER 37 Sunset.
CHAPTER 38 Dusk.
CHAPTER 39 First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 40 Midnight, Forecastle.
CHAPTER 41 Moby Dick.
CHAPTER 42 The Whiteness of The Whale.
CHAPTER 43 Hark!
CHAPTER 44 The Chart.
CHAPTER 45 The Affidavit.
CHAPTER 46 Surmises.
CHAPTER 47 The Mat-Maker.
CHAPTER 48 The First Lowering.
CHAPTER 49 The Hyena.
CHAPTER 50 Ahab's Boat and Crew.
CHAPTER 51 The Spirit-Spout.
CHAPTER 52 The Albatross.
CHAPTER 53 The Gam.
CHAPTER 54 The Town-Ho's Story.
CHAPTER 55 Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.
CHAPTER 56 Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
CHAPTER 57 Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.
CHAPTER 58 Brit.
CHAPTER 59 Squid.
CHAPTER 60 The Line.
CHAPTER 61 Stubb Kills a Whale.
CHAPTER 62 The Dart.
CHAPTER 63 The Crotch.
CHAPTER 64 Stubb's Supper.
CHAPTER 65 The Whale as a Dish.
CHAPTER 66 The Shark Massacre.
CHAPTER 67 Cutting In.
CHAPTER 68 The Blanket.
CHAPTER 69 The Funeral.
CHAPTER 70 The Sphynx.
CHAPTER 71 The Jeroboam's Story.
CHAPTER 72 The Monkey-Rope.
CHAPTER 73 Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him.
CHAPTER 74 The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 75 The Right Whale's Head--Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 76 The Battering-Ram.
CHAPTER 77 The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
CHAPTER 78 Cistern and Buckets.
CHAPTER 79 The Prairie.
CHAPTER 80 The Nut.
CHAPTER 81 The Pequod Meets The Virgin.
CHAPTER 82 The Honour and Glory of Whaling.
CHAPTER 83 Jonah Historically Regarded.
CHAPTER 84 Pitchpoling.
CHAPTER 85 The Fountain.
CHAPTER 86 The Tail.
CHAPTER 87 The Grand Armada.
CHAPTER 88 Schools and Schoolmasters.
CHAPTER 89 Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.
CHAPTER 90 Heads or Tails.
CHAPTER 91 The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.
CHAPTER 92 Ambergris.
CHAPTER 93 The Castaway.
CHAPTER 94 A Squeeze of the Hand.
CHAPTER 95 The Cassock.
CHAPTER 96 The Try-Works.
CHAPTER 97 The Lamp.
CHAPTER 98 Stowing Down and Clearing Up.
CHAPTER 99 The Doubloon.
CHAPTER 100 Leg and Arm.
CHAPTER 101 The Decanter.
CHAPTER 102 A Bower in the Arsacides.
CHAPTER 103 Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.
CHAPTER 104 The Fossil Whale.
CHAPTER 105 Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?
CHAPTER 106 Ahab's Leg.
CHAPTER 107 The Carpenter.
CHAPTER 108 Ahab and the Carpenter.
CHAPTER 109 Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.
CHAPTER 110 Queequeg in His Coffin.
CHAPTER 111 The Pacific.
CHAPTER 112 The Blacksmith.
CHAPTER 113 The Forge.
CHAPTER 114 The Gilder.
CHAPTER 115 The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.
CHAPTER 116 The Dying Whale.
CHAPTER 117 The Whale Watch.
CHAPTER 118 The Quadrant.
CHAPTER 119 The Candles.
CHAPTER 120 The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.
CHAPTER 121 Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks.
CHAPTER 122 Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning
CHAPTER 123 The Musket.
CHAPTER 124 The Needle.
CHAPTER 125 The Log and Line.
CHAPTER 126 The Life-Buoy.
CHAPTER 127 The Deck.
CHAPTER 128 The Pequod Meets The Rachel.
CHAPTER 129 The Cabin.
CHAPTER 130 The Hat.
CHAPTER 131 The Pequod Meets The Delight.
CHAPTER 132 The Symphony.
CHAPTER 133 The Chase--First Day.
CHAPTER 134 The Chase--Second Day.
CHAPTER 135 The Chase.--Third Day.
Epilogue - "AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"