Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of
the middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast
corpulence of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if
it were a hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad
palms of his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the
surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost
think a great gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light
wreath of vapour from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would
think that that was the smoke from the touch-hole.
Fifth:
As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie
considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely out
of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into the
deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime BREACH—somewhere else
to be described—this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the
grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature.
Out
of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically
snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic
Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic
of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you
are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of
Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a
sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in
the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in
concert with peaked flukes.
As it seemed to me at the
time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld,
even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater
testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale,
pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King
Juba, the military elephants of antiquity often hailed the morning with
their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.
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