Six thousand years and uncounted ages before, whales have spouted across the sea while hunters watched from arm's length, yet at one fifteen on this sixteenth of December, eighteen fifty-one, Ishmael notes the elementary question still open: water or vapour, a mystery plain things refuse to settle.
Fish breathe dissolved air through gills; the sperm whale carries human-like lungs and must surface, yet his mouth lies buried eight feet down and never connects to the windpipe, so the spiracle alone admits air while labyrinthine vessels store oxygen for hour-long depths without a breath, camels of the sea who must finish having their spoutings out, seventy jets in eleven minutes if unmolested, returning to complete the count if frightened early, a ritual that exposes them to harpoons no net could reach a thousand fathoms under sunlight.
Man breathes without pause; the whale breathes on Sundays, roughly a seventh of life, with no real nose and no voice except the rumble insulted as nasal speech; the spout canal runs horizontal beneath the brow like a city gas-pipe, perhaps mixing swallowed water, perhaps not, and close observation fails because mist hides the core, spray surrounds the commotion, and even calm seas leave a basin in the countersunk summit.
Whalemen deem the jet poisonous, skin peeling from one investigator's face, blindness feared if it strikes the eyes, so wisdom says stand off; Ishmael hypothesises pure mist, dignity rising from ponderous thinkers like steam from Plato or his own tea-heated attic mirror, and when a rainbow crowns the whale's canopy he thanks God for intuitions that pierce doubt without making him mere believer or mere denier, only a man who watches the fountain and still cannot fill his pitcher from it.
Coming Up in Chapter 86
Other poets take the antelope's eye. Ishmael takes the tail. On a large sperm whale it begins where the trunk thins to a man's girth, and the upper surface alone covers at least fifty square feet. The root opens into two flukes like wings, less than an inch thick at the edge, and in a full-grown whale the span runs past twenty feet.
