Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.

 

[Old Thunder]

Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.

 

[Old Thunder]

The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit.

 

[Old Thunder]

Three of them ran something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:--

SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
JOHN TALBOT
Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard,
Near the Island of Desolation, off Patagonia,
November 1st, 1836.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY HIS SISTER.​

 

[Old Thunder]

SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY,
NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY,
AND SAMUEL GLEIG,
Forming one of the boats' crews
OF
THE SHIP ELIZA,
Who were towed out of sight by a Whale,
On the Off-shore Ground in the
PACIFIC,
December 31st, 1839.
THIS MARBLE
Is here placed by their surviving
SHIPMATES.​

 

[Old Thunder]

SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
The late
CAPTAIN EZEKIAL HARDY,
Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a
Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan,
August 3d, 1833.
THIS TABLET
Is erected to his Memory
BY
HIS WIDOW.​

 

[Old Thunder]

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me.

 

[Old Thunder]

Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance.

 

[Old Thunder]

This savage was the only person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall.

 

[Old Thunder]

Whether any of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not; but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.