Moby Dick

Back Forward Menu

transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's end.
Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--

"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye
may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out
the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the
flame.

As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts;
so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him
in a terror of dismay.