He did not remember striking the water, and that he did awake testified that he had fallen in feet-first and straight up. He was choking with the saltiness in his throat and nose, and he was fighting to get his head above the surface.
Then his head cleared the heavy liquid, and a hundred yards away he saw something he never expected to see again, though he would never forget it. The black coffin floated on top of the water as if it were on the Styx and carrying Queequeg slowly, dawdling with the certainty that time did not count now, toward the other shore.
A shadow flashed by. Beyond the coffin-canoe, by several hundred yards, the two whales, one entangled in the entrails of the other, crashed.
The coffin lifted with the first wave, rolled, turned and headed toward him.
He looked for the two boats and their crews. One boat was lying bent in half on the surface about a hundred yards away. Its flatness showed that the gas bladders had been broken, but one mast, minus a boom, projected drunkenly.
He counted three heads of swimmers and several still floaters.
Above, while tacking, two boats were sinking toward them.
The coffin rushed bow-first at him. He reached up and gripped the carvings, as he had done after the sinking of the Pequod, and hauled himself onto it. The odor of pitch was still strong. After all, it had not been long, in terms of the days of his life, since the carpenter had nailed shut the lid and caulked the seams.
It was evident that he had not dived. And even if, for instance, he had suffered a heart attack, he was not going to sink. He would have floated.
Something had pulled him under. After a few minutes, Ishmael knew that it was keeping the man under. Up until then, Ishmael had taken it for granted that the seas were empty of life. He still could not believe that any fish existed in this poisonously salty element. The predator must be an air-breather.
Ishmael shouted at the other men, telling them what had happened. They began to pull themselves toward the shore, and he began to paddle the coffin-buoy. As he did so, he felt a tingling in the hands, born of his fear that something would tear off a hand as it dipped into the water.
But no such thing happened, and the other swimmers reached the shore unhurt. They helped Ishmael pull the buoy up on the quaking shore and then they gazed out over the sea. The bodies of the floaters had disappeared. Whatever it was that had seized the swimmer had also disposed of the corpses. Ishmael asked the sailors if they knew what prowled under the heavy sullen surfaces, and they replied that they knew nothing of the dead seas. They had never seen, or heard of, any life in them. But then they were inhabitants of the air, and they entered the dead seas only by accident.
"But leave by permission of an unseen host," Ishmael said, shivering.
The two air boats drifted in, sails furled, undermasts folded, and threw out lines which the men grabbed. They pulled the boats down and climbed aboard. Ishmael, looking back down at Queequeg's coffin, longed for it because it was his only link to home, the planet orbiting about the sun of dead Time. It also might be the only key to return, since, if a man could go ahead of time in Time, why not backtrack in Time? And it could be that the mysterious schematics carved on the lid of the coffin were in some as-yet-incomprehensible manner keys to be twisted against the tumblers of Time.
On board the ship, he requested permission to be admitted to the captain. There he asked that a boat be sent back to pick up the coffin. At first Captain Baramha was outraged at the expenditure of time and energy if this were done. But Namalee overruled his denial, and Baramha accepted her ruling without apparent resentment. This was because she said that the coffin was a religious matter, and in religion she had the final word. Ishmael did not follow her reasoning, unless she thought that the coffin was his god, but he did not ask her to clarify. He was content to have the deed; the explanation could wait.
Two boats went down, and the coffin was taken aboard and lashed down, one half supported on one boat and the other half on the second boat. The two crafts had been tied together for greater buoyancy and each had only two crewmen. Then the double-craft arose slowly, the mouth-creatures of the bladders eating triple portions of food to generate gas. Eventually, while the captain strode back and forth on his bridge, his lips moving soundlessly, the boats were drawn into the ports of the ship. The coffin was tied down in the center of gravity of the ship, and the boatmen went to work to help cut up and store the two whales that had been killed.
Later the boats went out again, this time drawing pieces of meat behind them on bladders. When the air sharks came in for passes at the bait, they were harpooned. Those not killed at once followed the same rising and diving tactics as the whales, but they lacked the gas-generating capabilities or the weight of the leviathans.
After a dozen sharks were killed, the ship resumed sailing. But it still lacked enough meat, so the first time it encountered another cloud of atmospheric brit, it hunted again. It was not until near the end of the long day that there was enough meat aboard to supply them until they reached Zalarapamtra.
The last whale killed gave up to the cutting butchers a prize that would have been the cause of a great celebration at any other time.
It was a round ivory-hard substance two feet in diameter, alternately striated with red, blue and black. It exuded a powerful perfume that caused drunkenness in those who came near. This was the same perfume that the little god of the ship, Ishnuvakardi, exuded.
The ball was found in one of the smaller stomachs of the whale, the creature having many stomachs distributed along the bony framework of the tail. Namalee said that a certain small creature of the air, a vrishwanka, was sometimes swallowed by a whale. It passed through the entrails that climbed around the skeleton of the tail until it was either eliminated or caught in a blind corner of a sac. If the latter happened, the digestive system of the whale secreted a substance around the vrishwanka just as an oyster did around a grain of sand.
Namalee, during one of their many talks during the long, long journey back, told him of how the gods of Zalarapamtra were found and "born," as she called the process of carving.
She also told him of how, when old whales died, their flesh fed their own bladders, and they rose upward where the sky became totally black in the daytime and there was little air. The mighty corpses drifted with the high winds eastward and then began to sink as, one after the other, the bladders burst from corruption. And somewhere at the foot of the insurmountable mountains to the east (which Ishmael knew were the once submarine slopes of continents) was a place where the dead whales ended up. There was a tangle of bones almost as high as the cliffs, since the beasts had been drifting there since time began. And there, of course, was an immense treasure of vrishkaw, of perfume-exuding unborn gods.
The city that found the ancient burial grounds of the wind whales would be the richest in the world and hence the most powerful.
And also the drunkenest, Ishmael thought. He envisioned a city thronged with such gods, the citizens reeling during waking hours, falling soddenly into bed, rising as intoxicated as when they went to bed.
Many a ship from many a city had put out with the sole purpose of locating the burial ground, Namalee said. But it was near the eastern cliffs that the Purple Beasts of the Stinging Death were most numerous.