.. < chapter cxxiv 25  THE NEEDLE >

     Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea
rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's
gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread.  The strong,
unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying
sails; the whole world boomed before the wind.  Muffled in the full morning
light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place;

     where his bayonet
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rays moved on in stacks.  Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
queens, reigned over everything.  The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.  Long maintaining an enchanted
silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time the tetering ship loweringly
pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced
ahead; and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and
saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with
his undeviating wake.  Ha, ha, my ship!  thou mightest well be taken now for
the sea-chariot of the sun.  Ho, ho!  all ye nations before my prow, I bring
the sun to ye!  Yoke on the further billows; hallo!  a tandem, I drive the
sea!  But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.  East-sou-east,
sir, said the frightened steersman.  Thou liest!  smiting him with his
clenched fist.  Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun
astern?  Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause.  Thrusting his head half way
into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses; his uplifted
arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost seemed to stagger.  Standing behind
him Starbuck looked, and lo!  the two compasses pointed East, and the
Pequod was as infallibly going West.  But ere the first wild alarm could get
out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, I have
it!  It has happened before.  Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses --that's all.  Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take
it.  Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir, said the pale
mate, gloomily.  Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in
more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms.  The
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magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be
much marvelled at, that such things should be.  In instances where the
lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the
spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more
fatal; all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle.  But in
either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue
thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same
fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were the lowermost
one inserted into the kelson.  Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and
eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his
extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that
the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's
course to be changed accordingly.  The yards were hard up; and once more the
Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed
fair one had only been juggling her.  Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret
thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders;

     while Stubb and Flask --who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing
his feelings --likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced.  As for the men, though some
of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of
Fate.  But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly
unimpressed; or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into
their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.  For a space the old man walked
the deck in rolling reveries.  But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he
saw the crushed copper sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before
dashed to the deck.  Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot!  yesterday

     I wrecked thee, and to-day the compasses would feign have wrecked me.  So,
so.  But Ahab is lord over the level load-stone
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yet.  Mr. Starbuck--a lance without a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of
the sail-maker's needles.  Quick!  Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse
dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives,
whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of
his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.

     Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though
clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious
sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents.  Men, said he,
steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had
demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles; but out of this
bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was
said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow.  But
Starbuck looked away.  With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel

     head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,
bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck.  Then, with the
maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that,
several times, the mate still holding the rod as before.  Then going through
some small strange motions with it --whether indispensable to the magnetizing
of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain
--he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two
reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sail-needle by its
middle, over one of the compass-cards.  At first, the steel went round and
round, quivering and vibrating at either end; but at last it settled to its
place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped
frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
exclaimed, --Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level
loadstone!  The sun is East, and that compass swears it!  One after another
they peered in, for nothing but their own
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eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they
slunk away.  In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all
his fatal pride.
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