“Peleg! Peleg!” said Bildad, lifting
his eyes and hands, “thou thyself, as I myself,
hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg,
what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can’st
thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest
thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same
Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that
typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went
mate with Captain Ahab, did’st thou not think
of Death and the Judgment then?”
“Hear him, hear him now,” cried Peleg,
marching across the cabin, and thrusting his hands
far down into his pockets,—“hear him,
all of ye. Think of that! When every moment
we thought the ship would sink! Death and the
Judgment then? What? With all three masts
making such an everlasting thundering against the
side; and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft.
Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no
time to think about Death then. Life was what
Captain Ahab and I was thinking of; and how to save
all hands how to rig jury-masts how to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of.”
Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked
on deck, where we followed him. There he stood,
very quietly overlooking some sailmakers who were
mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then
he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred
twine, which otherwise might have been wasted.
CHAPTER 19
The Prophet
“Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?”
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were
sauntering away from the water, for the moment each
occupied with his own thoughts, when the above words
were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question.
He was but shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and
patched trowsers; a rag of a black handkerchief investing
his neck. A confluent smallpox had in all directions
flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated
ribbed bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have
been dried up.
“Have ye shipped in her?” he repeated.
“You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose,”
said I, trying to gain a little more time for an uninterrupted
look at him.
“Aye, the Pequod—that ship there,”
he said, drawing back his whole arm and then rapidly
shoving it straight out from him-, with the fixed
bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.
“Yes,” said I, “we have just signed
the articles.”
“Anything down there about your souls?”
“About what?”
“Oh, perhaps you hav’n’t got any,”
he said quickly. “No matter though, I know
many chaps that hav’n’t got any,—
good luck to ’em; and they are all the better
off for it. A soul’s a sort of a fifth
wheel to a wagon.”
“What are you jabbering about, shipmate?”
said I.
“He’s got enough, though, to make up for
all deficiencies of that sort in other chaps,”
abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis
upon the word he.
