Moby Dick

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained.
Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close
to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half
an inch or so, into the plank.  His bone leg steadied in that hole;
one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect,
looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow.
There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate,
unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
forward dedication of that glance.  Not a word he spoke;
nor did his officers say aught to him; though by all their
minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy,
if not painful, consciousness of being under a troubled
master-eye. And not only that, but moody stricken Ahab stood
before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless
regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew;
either standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had;
or heavily walking the deck.  As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began
to grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse;
as if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry
bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded.  And, by and by,
it came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air;
but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at
last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast.
But the Pequod was only making a passage now; not regularly cruising;
nearly all whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully
competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself,
to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval,
the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever
all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant,
holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood.
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home
to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most
thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts,
to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end,
a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air.
More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any
other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.



CHAPTER 29

Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb



Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod
now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which at sea,
almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August
of the Tropic.  The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing,
redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--
flaked up, with rose-water snow.  The starred and stately nights seemed
haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride,
the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!
For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and
such seducing nights.  But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather
did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world.
Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild
hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice
most forms of noiseless twilights.  And all these subtle agencies,
more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life,
the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
Among sea-commanders, the old greybeards will oftenest
leave their berths to visit the night-cloaked deck.
It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he seemed so much
to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks.
"It feels like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter
to himself--"for an old captain like me to be descending this
narrow scuttle, to go to my grave-dug berth."

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night
were set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt it
to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when this
sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the silent
steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man
would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.
Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,
he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his
wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel,
such would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step,
that their dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks.
But once, the mood was on him too deep for common regardings;
and as with heavy, lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from
taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below,
and with a certain unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if
Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay;
but there might be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something
indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion
into it, of the ivory heel.  Ah!  Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.