Moby Dick

Back Forward Menu

that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm
Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old
Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on
the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the
back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the
regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New
England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks
of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs--I should say,
that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this
particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are
probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most