The helm! take
the helm; let me pass,"--and so saying, two of the oarsmen helped him
forward to the bows of the still flying boat.
At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with
the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the
smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled
round his great, Monadnock rump; he was even thus close to him; when,
with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his
nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so
suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated
part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have
been tossed into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen--who
foreknew not the precise instant of the dart, and were therefore
unprepared for its effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in
an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its
level on a combining wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the
third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.
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