.. < chapter lxix 2  THE FUNERAL >

     Haul in the chains!  Let the carcase go
astern!  The vast tackles have now done their duty.  The peeled white body of
the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it
has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk.  it is still colossal.  slowly it
floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the
insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming

     fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale.  The
vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and
every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods
of fowls, augment the murderous din.  For hours and hours from the almost
stationary ship that hideous sight is seen.  Beneath the unclouded and mild
azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous
breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite
perspectives.  There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral!  The
sea-vultures all in pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in
black or speckled.  In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I
ween, if peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral
they most piously do pounce.  Oh, horrible vultureism of earth!  from which
not the mightiest whale is free.  Nor is this the end.  Desecrated as the body
is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare.  Espied by some
timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance
obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass
floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it;
straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down
in the log -- shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware!  And for
years afterwards,
.. 

perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a
vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.
There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's
the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the
earth, and now not even hovering in the air!  There's orthodoxy!  Thus, while
in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in
his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.  Are you a believer
in ghosts, my friend?  There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far
deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
..