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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
