Chapter 1
The rest of his body
was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue,
that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White
Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen
gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of
creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.
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Nor was it his unwonted magnitude,
nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much
invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent
malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over
again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats
struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before
his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had
several times been known to turn round suddenly, and, bearing down upon
them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in
consternation to their ship.
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![Already several fatalities had<br /> attended his chase]()
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title="Already several fatalities had attended his chase" width="200"
/>Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But
though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means
unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White
Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or
death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by
an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what
pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate
hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the
sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the
whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled
on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
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Chapter 2
His three boats stove around him, and
oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the
line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas
duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the
fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was,
that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick
had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No
turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more
seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since
that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness
against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he
at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all
his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before
him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which
some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half
a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the
beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half
of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their
statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted
himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments;
all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all
that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of
life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and
made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white
hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from
Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot
heart's shell upon it.
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![It is not probable that this monomania<br /> in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily<br /> dismemberment]()
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title="It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise
at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment" width="200"
/>It is not probable that this monomania in him took its
instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in
darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden,
passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore
him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing
more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for
long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in
one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape;
then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and
so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward
voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage, he
was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified by
his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even there, as
he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad
rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable latitudes,
the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the tranquil
tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed left
behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den
into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that firm,
collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again; and
his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even then, Ahab,
in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and
most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become
transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided
not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble
Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But,
as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness
had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great
natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the
living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred
cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength,
Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than
ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.
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Chapter 3
At the period of our
arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost
completed; comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and
staves. But, as before hinted, for some time there was a continual
fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and ends of things, both
large and small.
Chief among those who did this
fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean old lady of a
most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who
seemed resolved that, if SHE could help it, nothing should be found
wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time she
would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry;
another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he
kept his log; a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some
one's rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which
was Charity—Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of
charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither,
ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield
safety, comfort, and consolation to all on board a ship in which her
beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a
score or two of well-saved dollars.
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![But it was startling to see this<br /> excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board]()
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title="But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming
on board" width="320" />But it was startling to see this
excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last day, with
a long oil-ladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in the
other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for
Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and
at every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the
paper. Every once in a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den,
roaring at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the
mast-head, and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.
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Chapter 4
In a few minutes
there was, so far as the soldier could see, not a living thing left upon
the common, and every bush and tree upon it that was not already a
blackened skeleton was burning. The hussars had been on the road beyond
the curvature of the ground, and he saw nothing of them. He heard the
Martians rattle for a time and then become still. The giant saved Woking
station and its cluster of houses until the last; then in a moment the
Heat-Ray was brought to bear, and the town became a heap of fiery ruins.
Then the Thing shut off the Heat-Ray, and turning its back upon the
artilleryman, began to waddle away towards the smouldering pine woods that
sheltered the second cylinder. As it did so a second glittering Titan
built itself up out of the pit.
The second monster
followed the first, and at that the artilleryman began to crawl very
cautiously across the hot heather ash towards Horsell. He managed to get
alive into the ditch by the side of the road, and so escaped to Woking.
There his story became ejaculatory. The place was impassable. It seems
there were a few people alive there, frantic for the most part and many
burned and scalded. He was turned aside by the fire, and hid among some
almost scorching heaps of broken wall as one of the Martian giants
returned. He saw this one pursue a man, catch him up in one of its steely
tentacles, and knock his head against the trunk of a pine tree. At last,
after nightfall, the artilleryman made a rush for it and got over the
railway embankment.
Since then he had been skulking
along towards Maybury, in the hope of getting out of danger Londonward.
People were hiding in trenches and cellars, and many of the survivors had
made off towards Woking village and Send. He had been consumed with thirst
until he found one of the water mains near the railway arch smashed, and
the water bubbling out like a spring upon the road.
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![That was the story I got from him, bit<br /> by bit]()
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title="That was the story I got from him, bit by bit" width="320"
/>That was the story I got from him, bit by bit. He grew
calmer telling me and trying to make me see the things he had seen. He had
eaten no food since midday, he told me early in his narrative, and I found
some mutton and bread in the pantry and brought it into the room. We lit
no lamp for fear of attracting the Martians, and ever and again our hands
would touch upon bread or meat. As he talked, things about us came darkly
out of the darkness, and the trampled bushes and broken rose trees outside
the window grew distinct. It would seem that a number of men or animals
had rushed across the lawn. I began to see his face, blackened and
haggard, as no doubt mine was also.
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Chapter 5
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![It seemed to me that the pit had been<br /> enlarged]()
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title="It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged" width="320"
/>When we had finished eating we went softly upstairs to my
study, and I looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley
had become a valley of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had
been there were now streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of
shattered and gutted houses and blasted and blackened trees that the night
had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the pitiless light of dawn.
Yet here and there some object had had the luck to escape--a white railway
signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh amid the
wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so
indiscriminate and so universal. And shining with the growing light of the
east, three of the metallic giants stood about the pit, their cowls
rotating as though they were surveying the desolation they had made.
/>
It seemed to me that the pit had been enlarged, and ever
and again puffs of vivid green vapour streamed up and out of it towards
the brightening dawn--streamed up, whirled, broke, and vanished.
/>
Beyond were the pillars of fire about Chobham. They
became pillars of bloodshot smoke at the first touch of day.
/>
As the dawn grew brighter we withdrew from the window
from which we had watched the Martians, and went very quietly
downstairs.
The enormous broad tires of the
chariots and the padded feet of the animals brought forth no sound from
the moss-covered sea bottom; and so we moved in utter silence, like some
huge phantasmagoria, except when the stillness was broken by the guttural
growling of a goaded zitidar, or the squealing of fighting thoats. The
green Martians converse but little, and then usually in monosyllables, low
and like the faint rumbling of distant thunder.
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