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Updated: May 2, 2025
Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a line-of-battle-ship.
Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims. We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and do not perceive that any thing man can do may be divinely done.
But a whale can no more force water through its spiracle or blow-hole than you or I through our nostrils. It inhales, when at the surface, atmospheric air, and exhales breath like ours, which, coming warm into a cooler medium, becomes visible, as does our breath on a frosty morning.
A very large dome, built with great care in the centre or pole, contains another small vault as it were rising out of it, and in this is a spiracle, which is right over the altar. There is but one altar in the middle of the temple, and this is hedged round by columns. The temple itself is on a space of more than three hundred and fifty paces.
The whale immediately dives to the bottom; and when forced to come up again to breathe, he repeats the operation and plugs up the other spiracle, so that it cannot get breath and is soon suffocated. When the whale dies, they fasten a line of withes or twisted branches to its neck, and tow it to the shore, where it serves a long while for them to feed upon.
His jaw-bones were forty feet in length; the roof of his mouth was fifteen feet high, and formed of a spacious arch of 'balleen, or whale-bone. His crescent-shaped tail, thirty-five feet from tip to tip, swept the depths twice or thrice; and when we emerged into the air, the blood spouted from his pores, and he threw cataracts of water through his spiracle.
After the gems in that glittering figure had ceased chiming their angelic songs, the poet seemed to hear the murmur of a river which comes falling from rock to rock, and chews, by the fulness of its tone, the abundance of its mountain spring; and as the sound of the guitar is modulated on the neck of it, and the breath of the pipe is accordant to the spiracle from which it issues, so the murmuring within the eagle suddenly took voice, and, rising through the neck, again issued forth in words.
It is certain that the mouth indirectly communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would.
It was then spouting with a great noise like the blowing-off of steam, and, situated at such a distance from the shaft at the Landing and from the Point Brulé spiracle described, indicated, throughout the district, available resources of light, heat and power so vast as almost to beggar imagining. Mr.
I'm gwine ter wait on him,'n get him 'longside 'soon's he's out'er his flurry. Ole man sez yew'd best wait on what's fast t' yer an' nev' mine th' other." Away he went, reaching my prize just as the last feeble spout exhaled, leaving the dregs of that great flood of life trickling lazily down from the widely expanded spiracle.
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