CHAPTER 66: The Shark Massacre They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures.
CHAPTER 100: Leg and Arm “Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing, sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more than two feet and several inches long.
Moby Dick / Herman Melville
Maw
CHAPTER 9: The Sermon I saw the opening maw of hell, with endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell– Oh, I was plunging to despair.
In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints– No more the whale did me confine.
With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God.
CHAPTER 70: The Sphynx …muttered Ahab “[…] Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed– while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
CHAPTER 72: The Monkey-Rope Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark–he was provided with still another protection.
Moby Dick / Herman Melville
Hell
Twenty-six occurrences? Oh, hell no. Too much work. Too much hell. Let’s just pick one. Let’s return to the sermon….
CHAPTER 9: The Sermon … and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet–‘out of the belly of hell’–when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten–his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean– Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
Moby Dick / Herman Melville
Elder G, You Doin’ Okay?
Elder G provided some very creepy images based on “The Gaping Maw of Hell.”
