TAHITAN sailor (Reclining on a mat)
Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls!—the
Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti!
I still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has
slid! I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat!
green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn and
wilted quite. Ah me!—not thou nor
I can bear the change! How then, if so be transplanted
to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from
Pirohitee’s peak of spears, when they leap down
the crags and drown the villages?—The blast,
the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (Leaps
to his feet.)
How the sea rolls swashing ’gainst the side!
Stand by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just
crossing swords, pell-mell they’ll go lunging
presently.
Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest,
thou holdest! Well done! The mate there
holds ye to it stiffly. He’s no more afraid
than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight
the Baltic with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt
cakes!
4Th Nantucket sailor
He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old
Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something
as they burst a waterspout with a pistol—
fire your ship right into it!
Blood! but that old man’s a grand old cove!
We are the lads to hunt him up his whale!
Aye! aye!
How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest
sort of tree to live when shifted to any other soil,
and here there’s none but the crew’s cursed
clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is
the sort of weather when brave hearts snap ashore,
and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has
his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there’s another
in the sky lurid—like, ye see, all else
pitch black.
What of that? Who’s afraid of black’s
afraid of me!
I’m quarried out of it!
(Aside.) He wants to bully, ah!—the old
grudge makes me touchy (Advancing.) Aye, harpooneer,
thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish
dark at that. No offence.
Daggoo (Grimly)
None.
That Spaniard’s mad or drunk. But that
can’t be, or else in his one case our old Mogul’s
fire-waters are somewhat long in working.
5Th Nantucket sailor
What’s that I saw—lightning?
Yes.
