505.)
From "Moby Dick."
=_309._= SPERM WHALE FISHING.
It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made as they rolled along
the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;
the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on
the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening
to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and
hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side; all these, with
the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of
the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down
upon her boats, with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
screaming brood; all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching
from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not
the dead man's ghost, encountering the first unknown phantom in the
other world; neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions
than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into
the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale.
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