Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the
creature was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or
despair, seemed working in him; as if the sight of that dead body
reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a
thousand other whales were brought to his ship, all that would not
one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon you would
have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands
were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for heavy chains are being
dragged along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the port-holes.
But by those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is
to be moored. Tied by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the
bows, the whale now lies with its black hull close to the vessel's
and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured the spars
and rigging aloft, the two--ship and whale, seemed yoked together
like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while the other remains
standing.*
*A little item may as well be related here.
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