第 一百二十四 章 · The Needle.

Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of

mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod’s gurgling track, pushed her on

like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded

so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world

boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the

invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned

Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a

crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.

Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time

the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to

eye the bright sun’s rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly

settled by the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun’s rearward

place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating

wake.

“Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot

of the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to

ye! Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!”

But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards

the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

“East-sou-east, sir,” said the frightened steersman.

“Thou liest!” smiting him with his clenched fist. “Heading East at this

hour in the morning, and the sun astern?”

Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then

observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very

blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse

of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost

seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two

compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.

But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the

old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, “I have it! It has happened

before. Mr. Starbuck, last night’s thunder turned our compasses—that’s

all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it.”

“Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir,” said the pale mate,

gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than

one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as

developed in the mariner’s needle, is, as all know, essentially one

with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much

marvelled at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning

has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars

and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more

fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before

magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife’s knitting needle.

But in either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the

original virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be

affected, the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship;

even were the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed

compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took

the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were

exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship’s course to be

changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod

thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair

one had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said

nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and

Flask—who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his

feelings—likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some

of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear

of Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost

wholly unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain

magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But

chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper

sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

“Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun’s pilot! yesterday I wrecked

thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But

Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck—a lance without

a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker’s needles.

Quick!”

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about

to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to

revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a

matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old

man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily

practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious

sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.

“Men,” said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him

the things he had demanded, “my men, the thunder turned old Ahab’s

needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own,

that will point as true as any.”

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as

this was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic

might follow. But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the

lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade

him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the

maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he

placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly

hammered that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before.

Then going through some small strange motions with it—whether

indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to

augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain—he called for linen thread;

and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there,

and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of

the compass-cards. At first, the steel went round and round, quivering

and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its place, when

Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly

back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,

exclaimed,—“Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level

loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!”

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could

persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk

away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his

fatal pride.