Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

 

[Old Thunder]

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject.

 

[Old Thunder]

The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundering ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

 

[Old Thunder]

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears.

 

[Old Thunder]

Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower.

 

[Old Thunder]

You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement.

 

[Old Thunder]

Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed.

 

[Old Thunder]

Some were stories weapons.

 

[Old Thunder]

With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset.

 

[Old Thunder]

And that harpoon -- so like a corkscrew now -- was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco.