l. But do they only have mercy on long faces?--have
they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck--but it's too dark
to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will
work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will
yet be as three spermaceti candles--that's the good promise we saw."

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and once
more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
supernaturalness in their pallor.

"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,
the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away
from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where
they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a
knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted
attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in
Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes
upcast.

"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white
flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast
links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it;
blood against fire! So."

Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot
upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he
stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to
this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now
know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence
wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all
are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,
placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will
dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the
personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at
best; whencesoe'er I came; wheres