CHAPTER 69
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 vulturism 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 the 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.
