The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #135719   Message #3095950
Posted By: Rapparee
15-Feb-11 - 04:58 PM
Thread Name: BS: Spaw Actually Does Return
Subject: RE: BS: Spaw Actually Does Return
I found some more.

...Had you stepped on board the Peepod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you blithely strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity and envy, if you are male, a very strange, enigmatical object to old maids, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers or whatever they're called. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, - longer than a small Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yoho, the ebony cola drink of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or, rather, in old times, its likeness was, and, to some, still is. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea or Lily's place in Nantucket; and for worshipping which, king Asshole, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, polluting the water thereby, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the first book of Kings or somewhere.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now minces along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs into the grandissimus, as the mariners never called it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg, if your pantaloons had but one leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling, and the other end, left from his butchery, has an end fastened shut with hawser and glue, to be used by Ahab when next he goes to shore.