Chapter 131 The Pequod Meets the Delight

        The Pequod sailed on. Days went by. And then another ship "most miserably named the Delight" drew nigh. Very obvious on her deck was a shattered whaleboat. The same old greeting is shouted by Ahab: "Hast seen the White Whale?"

        "'Look!' replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; [railing on the stern] and with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck."

        "Hast killed him?" [Anyone who has seen the movie with Gregory Peck as Ahab will remember the emotion in Ahab's voice -- an almost prayerful supplication to heaven that Moby Dick still lives to be killed to satisfy Ahab's desperation for revenge.]

        "The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that."

        "'Not forged!' and snatching his special harpoon, Ahab held it out, exclaiming -- 'Look ye, Nantucketer, here in this hand I hold his death. Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!'"

        "'Then God keep thee, old man -- see'st thou that?' pointing to a corpse in a hammock -- 'I bury one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday; only that one I bury; the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.' Then turning to his crew, 'Place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body; so, then -- Oh! God! --'" [The crew of the Delight make ready to perform the service of burial at sea . . .]

        "'Brace forward! Up helm!' [These commands are to adjust the sails to catch the wind, while the tiller is pulled up into the wind, steering the ship so that the wind catches the sails more fully from behind, propelling it forward and away from the unhappy goings on.] cried Ahab like lightning to his men."

        "But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of the splash that the corpse made as it struck the sea; not so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.

        "As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy [Queequeg's coffin] hanging from the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.

        "'Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!' cried a foreboding voice in the Pequod's wake. 'In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your taffrail to show us your coffin.'"

        And yet another warning is ignored.