Crossing the deck, Ishmael takes the right head on its own terms: where the sperm looked a Roman chariot, this mass at distance resembles a gigantic shoe or shoemaker's last big enough for the nursery's old woman and all her children, yet proximity reshapes it into a bass-viol with F-shaped spoutholes, then into a barnacled oak crown where crabs nest and a sulky king wears twenty feet of pouting lip worth five hundred gallons of oil.
Over the hare-lip threshold the mouth opens into wigwam or Haarlem organ, three hundred scimetar slats of baleen per side straining brit like Venetian blinds whose curves whalemen read for age as arborists read rings, though certainty stays analogical; old voyagers called the plates whiskers, hog's bristles, or fins on the upper chop, and Queen Anne's farthingales and modern umbrellas alike borrowed the same bone while a six-barrel tongue lies glued to the floor, fat and tender, apt to tear on hoisting.
Ishmael tallies absence and presence: no sperm well, no ivory teeth, no slender mandible here; instead double spouts, blinds, lip, and tongue, then bids you look your last while both hooded heads still touch, one soon to sink unrecorded, the other following. On the sperm brow he reads prairie placidity, speculative indifference toward death; on the right, the lip pressed to the vessel's side speaks enormous practical resolution, Platonian calm beside Stoic jaw, and both faces still hanging while the ship asks what front will batter next.
Coming Up in Chapter 76
Before leaving the sperm whale's head, Ishmael asks for a straight look at its front, with no exaggeration, because the battering power lodged there is a point you either settle or you stay an unbeliever about one of the worst true events on record. In ordinary swimming that front is almost a vertical wall against the water.
