Moby Dick

the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true.
In general, the same remark, only within a less wide limit,
applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured,
aged sperm whales.  So that though Moby Dick had in a former
year been seen, for example, on what is called the Seychelle
ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast;
yet it did not follow that were the Pequod to visit either
of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,
she would infallibly encounter him there.  So, too, with some
other feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.
But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and
ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode.
And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object
have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made
to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his,
ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all
possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab
fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty.
That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one
technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically
descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,
in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any
one sign of the Zodiac.  There it was, too, that most of
the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place;
there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found
the awful motive to his vengeance.  But in the cautious
comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab
threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not
permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact
above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those hopes;
nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize
his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning
of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could
enable her commander to make the great passage southwards,
double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude
arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there.
Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps,
been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion
of things.  Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five
days and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of
impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt;
if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas
far remote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up
his wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay,
or China Seas, or in any other waters haunted by his race.
So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind
but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious
zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly,
seems it not but a mad idea, this; that in the broad
boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even if encountered,
should be thought capable of individual recognition from his hunter,
even as a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares
of Constantinople?  Yes.  For the peculiar snow-white brow of
Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but be unmistakable.
And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself,
as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he would
throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear!
And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race;
till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him!
and in the open air of the deck he would seek to recover
his strength.  Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man
endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire.
He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody
nails in his palms.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably
vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts
through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies,
and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain,
till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish;
and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him
heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him,
from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends
beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself
yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship;
and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though
escaping from a bed that was on fire.  Yet these, perhaps, instead of
being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright
at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast
hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock,
was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.
The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him;
and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,
which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent,
it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the
frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it
must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts
and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer
inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind