第 一百零二 章 · A Bower in the Arsacides.

Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly

dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail

upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough

sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still

further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,

and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost

bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his

unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the

fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the

whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures

on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a

specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land a

full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a

roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,

Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;

the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,

ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of

leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and

cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far

beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed

with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged

to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his

poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the

heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my

boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the

contents of that young cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their

gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted

to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.

For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey

of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with

the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side

glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his

capital.

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted

with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought

together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his

people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,

chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes; and

all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the

wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an

unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his

head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings

seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of

its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,

then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where

a grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebræ were carved with

Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests

kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again

sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended from a bough, the

terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung

sword that so affrighted Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy Glen;

the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the

industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous

carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and

woof, and the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their

laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the

message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the

lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving

the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one

word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all

these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single

word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the

loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god,

he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal

voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened;

and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak

through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken

words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words

are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened

casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be

heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy

subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the

great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging—a gigantic idler! Yet,

as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around

him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven over

with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but

himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim

god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the

skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real

jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as an

object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests

should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced

before this skeleton—brushed the vines aside—broke through the ribs—and

with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid its many

winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was out; and

following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no

living thing within; naught was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the

skeleton. From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me

taking the altitude of the final rib, “How now!” they shouted; “Dar’st

thou measure this our god! That’s for us.” “Aye, priests—well, how long

do ye make him, then?” But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them,

concerning feet and inches; they cracked each other’s sconces with

their yard-sticks—the great skull echoed—and seizing that lucky chance,

I quickly concluded my own admeasurements.

These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it

recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied

measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can

refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell

me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where

they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise,

I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they

have what the proprietors call “the only perfect specimen of a

Greenland or River Whale in the United States.” Moreover, at a place in

Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford

Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of

moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend

King Tranquo’s.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons

belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar

grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir

Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir

Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a great

chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony

cavities—spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan—and swing all day upon

his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and

shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of

keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep

at the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the

echo in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled

view from his forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied

verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild

wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving

such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished

the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then

composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not

trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all

enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.