These mouths are fitted with heavy doors of iron.
The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates.
There are no external chimneys; they open direct from the rear wall.
And here let us go back for a moment.
It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were first started on this present voyage.
It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.
"All ready there?
Off hatch, then, and start her.
You cook, fire the works."
This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage.
Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood.
After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties.
These fritters feed the flames.
Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time.
It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres.
It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.
By midnight the works were in full operation.
We were clear from the carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense.
But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.
So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them.
Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers.
With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.
The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps.
To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.
Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.
This served for a sea-sofa.
Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.
Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.
As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.
So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea.
Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.
The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me.
Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong.
The jaw-bone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart.
But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.
Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness.
Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.
A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me.
Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted.
My God! what is the matter with me? thought I.
Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass.
In an instant I faced back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very probably capsizing her.
How glad and how grateful the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being brought by the lee!
Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!
Never dream with thy hand on the helm!
Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.