Namalee had said that the monster could not expel its darts with any force unless it was through a straightened-out tentacle. A bend considerably decreased the force of the air. This may have explained why it did not shoot immediately. It wanted to be able to use its tentacles as perfectly straight tubes.
Ishmael could hear the whoosh of indrawn air into the bladder which served it as an air tank. It gulped again and again, as it compressed the air.
One tentacle, looking in the moonlight-edged darkness like the trunk of a starved elephant or a headless cobra, moved along the ground ahead of the others. Ishmael had raised his head swiftly, seen it, and then ducked back behind the log. He estimated how soon it would glide over the log and held between two fingers of one hand a dart and in the other hand the stone knife.
Above him, three tentacles curved downward, looking with the blind eyes which saw only the heat of his body. Then one dipped down as if to get close enough so that, even with a considerably reduced charge of air, it could still flick a bone-shaft deep enough to drive its poison into him.
A tentacle curved over the log and stopped. Sniffing for the heat of a living body, it moved back and forth. Then it began to straighten out.
Ishmael rammed the needle point of his dart into the open end of the extension.
Immediately after, he rolled back across the log behind him and into the net of vegetation in back of it.
Ishmael rolled back between the two logs, picked up a dart with one hand, leaped up and jumped at the emptied tentacle.
The tentacle retreated, but slowly, as if it were not accustomed to reacting defensively. Ishmael grabbed the tip and this time drove the point of the dart into the soft fleshy part just inside the opening.
The tentacle did react violently then. It dragged him back under the huge disk of the beast, past the fore tentacles. The aft tentacles, which had been facing the other way, perhaps to act as a rear defense, began to turn around toward him.
Ishmael went up the tentacle as if he were climbing a line on the Pequod.
His weight pulled it downward hard against the trees.
A dart struck the tentacle just above his head.
The beast was turning its tentacles inward and shooting at him but striking itself.
Ishmael released his hold, fell back about five feet, and crashed into a plant leaning at a forty-five degree angle from the ground. It bent under him until it snapped, and he fell the rest of the way.
The monster abruptly soared, then settled, wobbling, and grabbed a number of plants and pulled itself away.
Ishmael rolled as far as he could, got to his feet, and ran forward until he was stopped by a net of creepers. He bounced back, fell, got up, and ran around the creepers.
He stopped to look behind him.
A huge mass was settling like a cloud upon the tops of the plants. It seemed to lose its outline and to melt over and down into the jungle.
Ishmael could not clearly see the underside of the shivaradoo, but he could detect no movement of the tentacles.
Suddenly, a long torpedo-shape with an enormous head and teeth gleaming whitely in the moonlight shot out of the night.
It bit once at one of the humps on the back of the sagging pancake creature, and the hump exploded. The air shark, scenting death, had come in swiftly. Another appeared behind the first and anchored itself by biting into the loose skin of the destroyed hump. It also rotated its wing-fins to eliminate the pressure of the wind on them.
Ishmael wondered if the poison which had killed the shivaradoo was strong enough to spread through the body and also kill the air sharks.
He had no time to watch for such a development. He turned around swiftly at a noise behind him. It had sounded as if a large body was trying to move stealthily through the jungle. He got down on his knees and waited with the stone knife. Then he heard a deep and familiar breathing, and he said, softly, "Namalee."
"I could not allow you to sacrifice yourself," she said. "I wanted to help, so... oh!"
She had seen the shivaradoo, draped over the tree-tops like a cloth.
He told her what had happened, and she took his hand and kissed it.
"Zalarapamtra and Zoomashmarta will thank you," she said.
"I could have used their help a moment ago."
They continued walking, skirting the dead beast, which was now being torn at by half a dozen sharks. They walked for hour and then lay down again to sleep. Though very tired, Ishmael kept waking up because of the cold. The end of the night was on them, and the temperature, he estimated, was down to about forty above zero, Fahrenheit.
He tore off a huge leaf and climbed into Namalee's hammock-leaf, wrapped his arms around her, and covered himself and her with the leaf. She did not object, though she did turn her back to him. He went to sleep at once and dreamed of that first night in the Spouter-Inn in New Bedford when the giant savage, Queequeg, had shared his bed. Queequeg, whose bones had turned to dust and become flesh and plant again and again and again...
They continued north, sleeping four times, catching the twin-noses and cockroaches, which tasted much like crabs, and several other animals, including a flying snake. This was one of the few beasts of the air which lacked a gas bladder. Some of its ribs had developed into great wings which it was able to flap up and down in crude imitation of a bird's wings. Another night passed with its perils, and another sun arose.
"How long before we reach your city?" Ishmael said.
"I do not know," she said. "By ship, it would take us, I calculate, about twenty days. Perhaps it will take us five times that long."
"About four hundred of the days of my world," he said. He did not groan, because time was not such a precious currency to a whaler. But he would have preferred to ride. It was heavy and exasperating labor to force a path through this dense complex. He envied the beasts that sailed with such seeming effortlessness through the clouds.
At noon of that day, they saw another of the many immense clouds of billions of tiny red animals, each borne by its umbrella-shaped head. And there were the leviathans that followed and fed upon the air brit. And there was a great ship of the air. Namalee stood up, dropping the white meat of the insect she had caught only an hour before. She stood silent for a long time after an initial gasp. Then she smiled.
"It is from Zalarapamtra!"
The ship looked like a huge, rather elongated cigar beneath which hung a very thin mast and yardarms and sails and on both sides of which, at right angles to the hull, were two masts and sails. The sails, fore-and-aft rigged, were so thin that the dark-blue sky could be seen through them. At the stern were horizontal and vertical rudders.
"It's not as flat as it looks from here," she said in answer to his question. "If you could see it closer up, you would see that in profile it is twelve men high." The ship was following a pod of about thirty leviathans, which, spreading out their double pair of dragon- shaped wings, veined with red and black and green and purple, their tremendous cylindrical bodies and huge heads gleaming silver, were driving through the clouds of air brit.