...The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; - ran foul even as it set upon the very boat, being as it was near the petrol tanks. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turd caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood cheering and applauding and voicing their approval; then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana or something similar, I know not what; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight and down the drain from which Ahab had so recently removed the plug.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the shrunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billions of billows they almost touched; - at that instant, a red arm and a sickle and hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag flag of rebellion faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks and curses and obscenities too awful to repeat, and his imperial middle feather thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it, even though I have no idea of what that means.

Now small fowls that maken melody flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago, but in truth longer, for as I said earlier, there is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath, or perhaps God's own spatula; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness and the discharges from the head of Pequod. To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption, his home, his very soul. It rolls the midmost waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same waves wash the malignant moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans, and watching this water roll and roll again makes one wish to make water with it, and so one does, especially Peeleg. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Peter Pan and his mistress Tinkerbell. As I said before. In the meantime, everyone, including me, was dead.