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Updated: September 21, 2025
Another day, January 1, 1912, brought us to the end of this gorge and into a wider and more open canyon, with the country above covered with volcanic peaks and cinder cones. Blow-holes had broken through the canyon walls close to the top of the gorge, pouring streams of lava down its sides, filling the bottom of the canyon with several hundred feet of lava.
Their blow-holes on the top of the head answer to the nostrils of terrestrial animals. Many of these simple facts were quite new to some of our intelligent companions. Flying-fish were frequently seen, queer little creatures with the nature of a fish and the ambition of a bird.
Sending two thick spouts of frothy water out of his blow-holes forty feet into the air with tremendous noise, he fell flat upon the sea with a clap like thunder, tossed his flukes, or tail, high into the air, and disappeared. I was so amazed at this sight that I could not speak. I could only stare at the place where the huge monster had gone down. "Stand by to lower," shouted the captain.
"Never saw a whale in such a flurry," said old David, into whose boat I was taken. For upwards of two minutes the flurry continued, we all the while looking on, and no one daring to approach it; at the same time a spout of blood and mucus and oil ascended into the air from its blow-holes, and sprinkled us all over.
Hume spread the mat under the boy, wrapped the kaross over him, and made him comfortable as could be, and then he looked anxiously about. Little comfort did he gain. They had evidently pursued a false trail, and the platform was the end, standing sheer on the edge of that very vaulted space, down which, far down, the jets of water shot out through the blow-holes.
It was the Canadian he could not be mistaken who signalled a whale on the eastern horizon. Looking attentively, one might see its black back rise and fall with the waves five miles from the Nautilus. "Ah!" exclaimed Ned Land, "if I was on board a whaler, now such a meeting would give me pleasure. It is one of large size. See with what strength its blow-holes throw up columns of air an steam!
Land was left on the starboard at a distance of about fifteen miles; the mountains seemed tinged with a red-coloured bistre. During the evening, several whales of the finners species, which have fins on their backs, came playing about in the midst of the ice-trails, throwing out air and water from their blow-holes.
Afterwards he learned that Marian was twelve and Eddie ten when first they had hidden there from Indians, and they had been five years in finding where every passage led. Also, in daytime the place was not so fearsome, since sunlight slanted down into many a passageway through the blow-holes high above. "She ain't here.
They tore and hacked at the poor creatures with penknives and any weapon they could get, they carved their names on them and stopped up their blow-holes with stones, till the place was a perfect shambles and the blood soaked into the sand as into an arena in ancient Rome.... Nobody could stop them. It was a sight to make one weep for shame that one was a man." Ishmael lay in silence.
The whale was heading in the direction of the ship, and when we came up to the scene of action the second mate had just "touched the life"; in other words, he had driven the lance deep down into the whale's vitals. This was quickly known by jets of blood being spouted up through the blow-holes. Soon after, our victim went into its dying agonies, or, as whalemen say, "his flurry."
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