Zomby Dick or, The Undead Whale

by Melville, Herman

  At dusk the sky glowed in shades of red-streaked umber at the rim of the world, deepening to a crimson glow due westward in the wake of the sun already gone down below the horizon. The harsh clamor of cicadas buzzed in the evening heat. I wended my way homeward to our cozy cabin at the edge of town, clutching the medicine for Gennie’s fever; medicine dearly bought after a long day splitting logs and wrestling them into place for the Turner’s new cabin.

  It would lessen Lil’s burden to give the poor child some comfort from her fever, and, that being done, I could think of nothing better than dinner with Lilith in the soft glow of the lit lanterns. There ahead, across our grassy clearing I saw the golden glow from our cabin windows and the flickering reddish light from the fire; in the still evening air, smoke slowly rose in a smooth unblemished trail from the river-stone chimney, high up into the indigo infinity above, now spackled with stars; all about, enveloping me, was the fresh scent of cool evening dew and woodsmoke. I hurried my step.

  Pushing open the door, a sharp unpleasant odor overpowered and befuddled me, for upon entering the house at this hour, usually was I met with some savory smell from whatever Lilith had prepared for supper. Instead I smelt a metallic smell, but wet and somehow torpid. The smell, or mayhap the overturned chair in the front room brought an inexplicable pang to my heart and I raced to the bedroom, bursting open the door to—to—to....

  What comes surging back—a hard blow to my sternum—is color and sound; a horrible everywhere redness, and a gray pallor, and as water against a ship’s side but thicker somehow, and more dire, the slurping sloshing, sucking sound abhorrent beyond endurance.

  There, prone on her back, lay Lilith, her beautiful fiery hair on the floor about her head, as a halo about her pale face and something dark soaking into it, but suddenly I could not see or think clearly; all sense had left me. Kneeling there by her side, was little Gennie, her own pale elbows buried in the pale and looping entrails of her mother, she did shovel them into her tiny, gore-smeared mouth; Lilith’s thick and copious blood spreading in a slow ooze toward my booted feet.

  I know not how long I stood, struck dumb and blinded to my Self; I felt as if I were a hard-struck bell, all my being vibrating and a deafening clarion resounding in my battered brain; the scene as unreal as a fever dream.

  Some whimpering noise of horrible disbelief finally welled up from deep inside me, a broken, keening sound; and at this mewling, that thing that once was my sweet little girl did dart its crimson-soaked face up from its gorging and, with fearful silent alacrity,—never taking its unblinking dead white eyes from mine—this thing leapt across Lilith’s still-beautiful corpse and graspingly advanced on me, hissing. To my everlasting shame, I fled in a daze, that soon turned to rage, whereupon I did go to the Walker house, of which sad business I bespoke previously. That portion of this grim tale came to me then with more clarity, but I will not speak of it again.

  After my time with the Walkers, staggering back to our cabin, a feeling of greater unreality stole over me as I approached it. Though upon this occasion no smoke rose from the stone chimney, the lamps were yet lit, and I fancied that somehow this had all been a grand and elaborate jest, and my two girls would greet me at the door and we would laugh together while eating and finally retire to warm beds. Alas!

  Gennie had gone, I knew not where, nor then cared, for all thoughts were of Lilith. Had Gennie come upon me then, it would have been Ishmael’s doom, and that gladly greeted, nay, embraced. For there, lying in her own filth, lay my Lilith, her hair still beautiful except where some of it was black and slick with blood. With frantic, febrile speed I then took the planks that were to have been for porch decking, and from them crafted a simple coffin. I then weepingly dug a deep grave under Lil’s favorite maple by the creek. I do not remember placing her body in that sad casket, but I do remember the sound of heavy clay as it smacked with hollow wetness against the coffin’s lid. After a foot of earth had covered it, I heard a thump and a hiss from within; ignoring it in my lunacy, I frantically shoveled in the rest of the dark dirt and finished by stacking upon the mound the largest river stones I could carry. Only then did I stagger off to be lost in laudanum’s haze of forgetting. I knew nothing more for what seems a long dark age of the earth.

  Starting from this vision of woe, goaded from me by the red abomination of butchering and boiling the whale, I gradually became conscious of something fatally wrong, but still only stood there dumbly. The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.

  A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.

  My God! what is the matter with me? thought I.

  Lo! in my brief nightmare I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass! In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her!

  Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.

  Solomon says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e., even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

  Chapter

  Young Life’s

  Old Routine

  Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside and beheaded; and on the precise principle by which the Militia—as executioners of old—is entitled to the garments of the executed, the whale’s great padded surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;—but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by rehearsing—singing, if I may—the romantic proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.

  While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery deck, like so many landslides, till at last man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper.

  At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This do
ne, the hatches are replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.

  In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is deafening.

  But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale whaleboats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides, from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it.

  Hands go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put away. Every cask is out of sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship’s company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.[1]

  [1] Here then, is one way in which the Militia is not like the whaleman, and this difference being no small source of the disdain and shunning heaped upon him, moreso than the whaleman; for the Militia, as a general rule, do not spend overmuch time cleaning after battle, unless one is lucky enough to duck one’s head in a stream that has not been putrefied by the recent slaughter of the undead.

  Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins!

  But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day rowing on the Line,—they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again, as the old whaling chanty laments:

  Oh a man must be mad, or want money bad,

  To venture catching whales;

  For he may well be drowned when the whale turns around,

  Or his head may be smashed by the tail.

  Though the work seems grand to the young green hand,

  And his heart is high when he goes;

  In a very short burst, you’ll hear his bitter curse,

  At the cry of “There she blows!”

  Oh! my friends, but this is man, killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from battleground defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—or Ware the Zomby!—the ghost is raised, and we sally forth to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

  Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!

  And thus does all come back—in mine own orbit at least—to the damnéd zomby; what of metempsychosis for it? Has the soul that once resided in that fleshy residence fled to other habitation, as I pray it does? Or does the soul yet linger there, trapped in that rotting flesh, slavering in rage at its entrapment? If linger it does, though my skin crawls to think on it, then mayhap Ishmael did free many tortured souls—at the last returning to finally deliver those I held so dear!—sending them on along their journey.

  I make no claim to know how it is, but however it truly is, mayhap I will some day teach her, too, how to splice a rope!

  Chapter

  The Doubloon

  Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck, taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.

  But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now needing some fresh interpretation for himself, to divulge whether, in some monomaniac way, some significance might lurk therein. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload.

  Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed midst all the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white whale’s talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever live to spend it.

  On its round border it bore the letters, Republica Del Ecuador: Quito. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra. And unknown to the crew, this coin had yet another stamp, the stamp of a less spendab
le kind of fortune, but mayhap more valuable withal: that good fortune known by some as luck.

  Before this equatorial coin, Ahab was now pausing.

  “There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,—three peaks as proud as Lucifer adorn that auspicious coin. How well I know them. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself.

  “Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, ‘tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here’s stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then,” and so saying, he stalked off muttering.

  Starbuck observed this as he stood leaning against the bulwarks. “No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil’s claws must have left their mouldings there since yesterday,” murmured Starbuck to himself. “The old man seems to read Belshazzar’s awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly. He goes below; let me read.