Philip Jose Farmer

The Wind Whales of Ishmael

One man survived.

The great white whale with its strange passenger, and the strangled monomaniac its trailer, had dived deeply. The whaling ship was on its last, its vertical, voyage. Even the hand with the hammer and the hawk with its wing nailed to the mast were gone to the deeps, and the ocean had smoothed out the tracks of man with all the dexterity of billions of years of practice. The one man thrown from the boat swam about, knowing that he would soon go down to join his fellows.

And then the black bubble, the last gasp of the sinking ship, burst. Out of the bubble the coffin-canoe of Queequeg soared, like a porpoise diving into the sky, and fell back, rolled, steadied, and then bobbed gently. The porpoise had become a black bottle containing a message of hope.

Buoyed up by that coffin, he floated for a day and a night on a soft and dirge-like sea. On the second day, the devious-cruising Rachel, in her retracing search after her missing children, found another orphan.

Captain Gardiner thought Ishmael's story the strangest he had ever heard, and he had heard many. But he had agonizing business to press and little time to wonder. And so the Rachel sailed on her crazy path, looking for the whaling boat containing the captain's little son. The day passed, and the night rushed over the sea, and lanterns were lighted. The full moon arose and turned the smooth waters to patches of sable and sparkle.

"Aye, I wonder what the heathen savage wrote when he fashioned these," the captain muttered. "Curious that an unlettered wild man should make these letters. A prayer to one of his Baal-like gods? A letter to some being he thinks dwells in the otherworld? Or perhaps these form words which, if uttered, would open the gateway to some clime or time that we Christians would find very uncomfortable indeed."

Ishmael remembered these speculations. In after times he wondered if the captain, with his last remark, had not struck deep into the lungs of the truth. Were the twisted carvings which began to slide and melt if looked at too intently the outlines of a key that could turn the tumblers of time?

But Ishmael did not have much time to think. Captain Gardiner, in consideration of the strain through which he had gone, allowed him to sleep for the rest of the day and half of the night. Then he was awakened and sent aloft to the head of t'gallant mast to watch and so earn his keep. With the lantern blazing at his back, he scanned the sea which, having lost all movement, lay like quicksilver around the Rachel. The wind was dead and so boats had been put out ahead of the Rachel to pull her along, and the only sound was the splashing of the oars as the men strained and an occasional grunt from a sweating sailor. The air seemed as heavy as the sea, and indeed it had assumed a silvery and heavy shroud. The moon was full, drifting through a cloudless sky as if through a sluggish stream. Suddenly the hairs on the back of Ishmael's neck, so accustomed these last few days to this reaction, stood on end. The tips of the yardarms ahead and below seemed to be haunted with the ghosts of fire. And each of the three-pointed lightning rods seemed to burn. He turned and looked behind him, and the tips of the yardarms spouted phantom flames.

"St. Elmo's fire!" a cry arose.

Ishmael remembered that other ship and wondered if this, too, were doomed. Had he been saved only to be killed shortly thereafter?

The men in the boats quit rowing when they saw the giant candles of the elemental fire, but the officers in the bows of their boats urged them back to their work.

Captain Gardiner shouted up, "Ishmael, my man, do you see any sign of the lost boat?"

"Nay, Captain Gardiner!" Ishmael shouted back down to him, it seeming to him that his breath made the nearest taper waver as if it were a candle of genuine fire. "Nay, I can see nothing -- as yet!"

But a moment later he started and gripped the narrow railing before him. Something to the starboard had moved. It was long and black, and for a moment he thought that it surely must be the boat, perhaps half a mile away. But he did not cry out, wanting to make sure and so not gladden the captain only to destroy his happiness. Thirty seconds later, the black object lengthened out, cutting the mercury-colored sea with furrows of a lighter silver. Now it looked like a sea serpent, and it was so long and slender that he thought it must be that beast of which he had heard much and seen nothing. Or perhaps it was the tentacle of a kraken surfaced for some reason known only to itself.

But the black snaky thing suddenly disappeared. He rubbed his eyes and wondered if the exhaustion of the three days' chase of the white whale and the ramming and sinking of the ship and a day and a night and half a day of floating on top of a coffin had made him forever after subject to disorders of the brain.

Another lookout cried out then, "A sea snake!"

Other cries arose, even from the men in the towing boats, who were not able to see nearly as far as the men on the masts.

From every quarter, long thin black things writhed and spun and slid over the black-and-silver waters. They seemed destined to drive their lancelike heads into the sides of the hull of the Rachel, and then to evaporate. At first there were only a dozen; then there were two dozen and soon there were several hundred.

"What are they?" Captain Gardiner shouted.

"I do not know, Captain, but I don't particularly care for them!" the second mate shouted back.

"Are they interfering with your rowing?" the captain said.

"They may do what they wish with their minds!" Captain Gardiner bellowed. "But their backs belong to me! Bend to your oars, men! Whatever those things are, they cannot hurt you any more than the corposants!"

"Aye, aye, sir!" the second mate called back, though not cheerily. "All right, men, you heard the captain! Dig in your blades and pull! Pay no attention to those mirages! Ah, that is what they are, mirages of the sea! Phantoms, reflections of things that don't exist! Or, if they do, so far away they can't hurt you!"

The dip of the oars and the grunting of the men was heard again over the still waters and still air. But now the serpentine "mirages" began to circle, as if they were trying to catch up with their own tails and swallow them. Around and around they went, cutting deeper and brighter furrows in the sea, or seeming to do so. And the corposants, the St. Elmo's fire, on the tips of the yardarms and the trines of the lightning rods, seemed to burn more fiercely. They were no longer phantoms but living creatures whose breath was hot.

Ishmael moved away from them, pressing his legs and stomach against the hard railing and looking straight ahead, not wanting to look directly at either of the flames which flanked him.

There was a shriek from below, and a man ran into a hatch as a flame twice as tall as a man, and bifurcated, capered after him.

At the same time, the forward tips of the long black circling objects in the sea spouted St. Elmo's fire. They were like those snaky whales of prehistoric times, the fathers of the present-day round monsters, blowing out spouts of flaming brimstone.

Ishmael looked to left and right and saw that the tapers at each tip of the yardarm had split and that one of each pair was dancing along the yardarm toward him.

Ishmael grabbed the railing and closed his eyes tightly.

The captain shouted, "Lord have mercy on us! The sea has come alive, and the ship is burning!"

Ishmael dared not open his eyes but he also dared not remain in ignorance of what was happening. He saw that the ocean surface was a maze of whirling broken circles of black with a flaming jet at each end. The ship itself, at every point where any object projected upward more than several inches, was crowned with a flame which no longer danced but gyrated. Around and around the flames whirled. And the corposants which had been doing the minuet toward him had leaped while his eyes were closed and fused directly above his head. He could not see all of them, because they leaned when he bent his head to look at them and so most of their "body" -- if they could be said to have a "body" -stayed out of reach of his eyes, But enough light shone from them so that he could see their outer surface, and he knew a moment later, on looking down at the officers and crew, that the corposants were gyrating on top of his head, a slender toe of fire almost touching the crown of his head.