.. < chapter cxxvii 2  THE DECK >

     The coffin laid upon two line-tubs, between
the vice-bench and the open hatchway; the Carpenter calking its seams; the
string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the
bosom of his frock. --Ahab comes slowly from the cabin-gangway, and hears Pip
following him.  Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently.  He goes!  Not
this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy. -- Middle aisle
of a church!  What's here?  Life buoy, sir.  Mr. Starbuck's orders.  Oh,
look, sir!  Beware the hatchway!  Thank ye, man.  Thy coffin lies handy to
the vault.  Sir?  The hatchway?  oh!  So it does, sir, so it does.  Art
not thou the leg-maker?  Look, did not this stump come from thy shop?  I
believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?  Well enough.  But art
thou not also the undertaker?  Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a
coffin for Queequeg; but they've set me now to turning it into something
else.  Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, inter-meddling,
monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next
day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same
coffins?  Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
jack-of-all-trades.  But I do not mean anything, sir.  I do as I do.  The
gods again.  hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin?  The
Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes;

     and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in hand.  Dost thou never?

     Sing, sir?  Do I sing?  Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but the
reason why the grave-digger made music must
.. 

have been because there was none in his spade, sir.  But the calking mallet is
full of it.  Hark to it.  Aye, and that's because the lid there's a
sounding-board; and what in all things makes the sounding-board is this
--there's naught beneath.  And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty
much the same, Carpenter.  Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the
coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in?  Faith, sir, I've--

     Faith?  What's that?  Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like
--that's all, sir.  Um, um; go on.  I was about to say, sir, that-- Art
thou a silk-worm?  Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?  Look at thy
bosom!  Despatch!  and get these traps out of sight.  He goes aft.  That was
sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes.  I've heard that the
Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the
middle.  Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his
middle.  He's always under the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye!  He's looking this
way --come, oakum; quick.  Here we go again.  This wooden mallet is the cork,
and I'm the professor of musical glasses --tap, tap! ( Ahab to himself.)

     There's a sight!  There's sound!  The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the
hollow tree!  Blind and dumb might well be envied now.  See!  that thing rests
on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines.  A most malicious wag, that fellow.
Rat-tat!  So man's seconds tick!  Oh!  how immaterial are all materials!  What

     things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?  Here now's the very
dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the
help and hope of most endangered life.  A life-buoy of a coffin!  Does it go
further?  Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but
an immortality-preserver!  I'll think of that.  But no.  So far gone
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am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one,
seems but uncertain twilight to me.  Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with
that accursed sound?  I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return
again.  Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee!  Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must
empty into thee!
..