第 六十九 章 · The Funeral.

“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the

beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,

it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.

Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and

splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with

rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many

insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats

further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats,

what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the

murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that

hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon

the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that

great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite

perspectives.

There’s a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all

in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or

speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween,

if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral

they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from

which not the mightiest whale is free.

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost

survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war

or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring

the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in

the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the

whale’s unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the

log—_shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!_ And for years

afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly

sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there

when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your

utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of

old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in

the air! There’s orthodoxy!

Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror

to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a

world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than

the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe

in them.