Leviathan or The Whale

with eyes as big as basketballs–are eaten by sperm whales, their only predators. The extraordinary nature of its quarry only underlines the abiding mystery of the hunter, feeding day and night, forever stoking the insatiable furnace of its metabolism.
    Upstairs, corridors which only an hour before were filled with chattering school children have fallen quiet. I can hear the distant hum of a vacuum cleaner as I make my way past galleries of long-dead animals, past the blue whale and the dark skeletons hanging above it. Now, in the silence, they seem harmless and foreboding at the same time, resonant with what they once were. I leave by the main doors–only to find my way barred by the museum’s locked gates.
    I have visions of spending the night inside the museum, with the dinosaurs and stuffed tigers with their yellowing teeth and glass eyes. I think of the corner of the grounds where, until just before the war, it rendered its own specimens in pits of silver sand. Here carcasses were prepared for articulation and display, lowered into the sand where rain would percolate through, speeding up a process of decay that might take two years or more. Photographs show sperm whales being hauled out of a kind of animal dry dock, although they look to me like bodies being pulled from blitzed buildings. Only when local residents complained about the smell was the practice put to an end. It is hard to believe–as I eventually find my way into the bright lights of Knightsbridge–that behind the gothic façade dead whales once lay, tended by a boiler-suited scientist, who looked more like a gardener engaged in double-digging a trench–only with a cigarette purposefully in his mouth, presumably to counter the stench of the rotting animal at his feet.
    Other whales are inhabitants of the superficial waters, connected to the sun and the waves. The sperm whale is a denizen of the deep, spending half its life feeding on blind-eyed creatures of the abyss. Yet as dark as it is,
Physeter
once provided the essential element of light. For two centuries or more, that same hooded head provided luminescence for drawing rooms and street lamps from Kensington to Kentucky. The very unit of light, the lumen, was measured from a pure white spermaceti candle, one candlepower being equivalent to the burning of one hundred and twenty grains of wax per hour. As it did not freeze, sperm oil could be used in lamps during the winter, as well as a lubricant for watches and other fine instruments. The whale was itself a manufactory, of strange substances and of human fortunes.
    The sperm whale’s head contains two reservoirs of fluid which sit in the semicircular basin of its skull. The uppermost is the spermaceti organ, or
case
, a long, barrel–or cone-shaped structure surrounded by a muscular sheath and containing a spongy network of tissues saturated with oil. This lies on top of the second chamber, the
junk
, divided from it by the right nasal passage, also filled with oil. It is this precious semi-liquid that defines the whale–still more its historical value–and yet which its terse-lipped owner declines to explain.
    In the absence of any such elaboration, science steps in. Or at least, it tries to. One theory is that the whale’s head is an enormous buoyancy aid. The oil’s density and viscosity changes with temperature; thus, as the whale draws in cold water along its right nasal passage, it cools the oil which becomes heavier in the process (unlike water, which gets lighter as it freezes). Warming the organ with its body heat, the effect is that of wax in a lava lamp, allowing the whale to rise and fall at will. But this elegant hypothesis is disputed, and others consider that the oil’s primary function is to act as a focus for the whale’s powerful sound system. In effect, its ability to carry sound turns the animal’s head into a highly directional loudspeaker, allowing it to broadcast its presence.
    Ishmael assigns a more sensual role to this magical liquid. In one of
Moby-Dick’s
most extraordinary chapters, ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’, he and his shipmates sit round a tub of spermaceti, squeezing lumps out of the cooling oil.
    Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it…and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this