Leviathan or The Whale

sperm whale painted directly onto the plaster, a mural so large that it carries on around the corner and onto the next wall. It is a lurid lesson in cetacean anatomy, but its bright blue and red organs cannot rival what lies on the table below. Swimming in a Tupperware dish is a sample of the spermaceti sac, glistening like tripe. I prod it, gingerly; the oil has crystallized like old honey.
    Next to it is a square chunk of blubber. I am taken aback at how hard it feels, more like wood than fat. I squeeze a piece between my finger and thumb; the intricate mesh that runs through it barely yields. I imagine an armoured animal, tank-like. ‘They were tremendously difficult for the whalers to cut,’ says Malcolm. The blubber is also burrowed and wormed by parasites, a certain source of irritation for their unwilling host.
    Something stranger lies in a third container: what looks like a lump of brownish-grey mud at the bottom of an old coffee jar. As I lift the lid, the smell hits my nostrils: pungent, musky, discernibly animal, its congealed, peaty texture reminds me of nothing so much as cannabis resin. Then Malcolm shows me on his diagram where this stuff came from: the whale’s rectum. I am holding a piece of ambergris the size of a small potato, the most precious product of any animal, a natural creation more elusive than any gold or diamond. But what I had hitherto assumed to be the result of some mysterious process, like grit in an oyster shell forming a pearl, is actually whale shit.
    It was a marvellous irony, thought Thomas Beale, ‘that a resemblance to the smell of this drug, which is the most agreeable of all the perfumes, should be produced by a preparation of one of the most odious of all substances’. On his own researches into the interior of the whale, Beale cited the chemist Wilhelm Homberg, who found ‘that a vessel in which he had made a long digestion of human fæces, acquired a very strong and perfect smell of ambergris’. This somewhat unsavoury experiment–which swiftly led to the evacuation of Homberg’s laboratory by his assistants–brought Beale to the same conclusion: that ambergris was ‘nothing but the hardened fæces of the spermaceti whale, which is pretty well proved from its being mixed so intimately with the refuse of its food’. Indeed, his friend Samuel Enderby possessed ‘a fine specimen…about six or seven inches long, and which bears very evident marks of having been moulded by the lower portion of the rectum of the Whale’. And during his own adventures in the North Pacific, Beale himself had collected some ‘semi-fluid fæces’ which had floated from the carcase of a whale, ‘and which on being dried in the sun bore all the properties of ambergris’.
    The exact origins of ambergris remain obscure; but it is certainly the result of a remarkable process. The sperm whale swallows squid alive, taking its food into the first of four stomachs. It then passes into a second stomach to be broken down by strong acids, assisted by a writhing mass of nematode worms, ‘a disgusting sight’ according to Malcolm, who has seen it many times. When the waste moves through the lower intestine the brittle, shiny black squid beaks–along with other indigestible material such as nematode cuticles–prompt the whale’s digestive system to secrete bile and thereby ease their passage. Occasionally–in as few as one in a hundred whales–this chemical reaction produces ambergris. Once expelled, it may spend months or even years in the water, oxidizing and hardening into layered lumps, often still containing bits of squid beaks. Lighter than water, ambergris is occasionally cast up on beaches–hence its name, grey amber, an allusion to the fossilized tree resin also found on seashores.
    Early authorities thought that ambergris was only produced by ailing whales. Frederick Bennett concluded that animals that displayed ‘a torpid and sickly appearance’ and which failed to ‘void liquid excrement’ when alarmed or harpooned were those most likely to yield the stuff. He reasoned that the sharp beaks could cause a cicatrix to form, a scarred wound which closed up the return, leaving the whale to waste away to its death, ‘a goose killed by the golden egg within’. Modern cetologists, however, think that ambergris comes from healthy whales.
    I smell the lump again, trying to detect its complexity like a wine-taster–the qualities that make it so desirable to
parfumiers:
    its