英語(yǔ)聽(tīng)書(shū)《白鯨記》第10期

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Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you foundyourself in a wide, low,

straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots,reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemnedold craft.

On one side hung a very large oilpainting sothoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced,

that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewedit, it was only by diligent study and a series ofsystematic visits to it,

and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of itspurpose.

Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought someambitious young artist,

in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.

But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especiallyby throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry,

you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogetherunwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass ofsomething hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue,

dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picturetruly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.

Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained,

unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it,

till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous paintingmeant. Ever and anon a bright,

but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.

It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.

It's a blasted heath.It's a Hyperborean winter scene.

It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to thatone portentous something in the picture's midst.

THAT once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faintresemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this:a final theory of my own, partly based upon theaggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject.

The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane;

the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and anexasperated whale,

purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon thethree mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubsand spears.

Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted withknots of human hair;

and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in thenew-mown grass by a long-armed mower.

You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could everhave gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement.

Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Somewere storied weapons.

With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteenwhales between a sunrise and a sunset.