Moby Dick

Back Forward Menu

flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
be truly and livingly found out.

But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now
it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on
a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest,
a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth
more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the
tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white
billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they
had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children,
who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the
spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple