in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one
trodden under foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails
came from him, as desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes
condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly
diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts,
though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in
their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of
instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those
noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on
one bended arm--"is it safe!"

"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.

"Lay it before me;--any missing men!"

"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here are
five men."

"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him!
there! there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--Hands off
from me! The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail;
out oars; the helm!"

It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is
thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus
now. But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of
the whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming
with a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these
circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely
prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long
a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing
barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate
means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for
her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes--the two parts of the
wrecked boat having been previously secured by her--and then hoisting
everything to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways
outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an
albatross; the _Pequod_ bore down in the leeward wake of Moby Dick. At
the well known, methodic intervals, the wh