Moby Dick

are the wife and child of thy loving, longing, paternal old age!
Away! let us away!--this instant let me alter the course!
How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl
on our way to see old Nantucket again!  I think, sir, they have
some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."

"They have, they have.  I have seen them--some summer days
in the morning.  About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--
the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells
him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep,
but will yet come back to dance him again."

"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself!  She promised that my boy,
every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first
glimpse of his father's sail!  Yes, yes! no more! it is done!
we head for Nantucket!  Come, my Captain, study out the course,
and let us away!  See, see! the boy's face from the window!
the boy's hand on the hill!"

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook,
and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it;
what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings,
I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time;
recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart,
I durst not so much as dare?  Is Ahab, Ahab?  Is it I, God, or who,
that lifts this arm?  But if the great sun move not of himself;
but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve,
but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat;
this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating,
does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man,
we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass,
and Fate is the handspike.  And all the time, lo! that smiling sky,
and this unsounded sea!  Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him
to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man!
Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?
But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the airs
smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making
hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers
are sleeping among the new-mown hay.  Sleeping?  Aye, toil we how
we may, we all sleep at last on the field.  Sleep?  Aye, and rust
amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left
in the half-cut swarths--Starbuck!"

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side;
but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there,
Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.



CHAPTER 133

The Chase - First Day


That night, in the mid-watch when the old man--as his wont
at intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned,
and went to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely,
snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing
nigh to some barbarous isle.  He declared that a whale must be near.
Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given
forth by the living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch;
nor was any mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass,
and then the dog-vane, and then ascertaining the precise bearing
of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's
course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently
vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek
on the sea directly and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil,
and resembling in the pleated watery wrinkles bordering it,
the polished metallic-like marks of some swift tide-rip, at
the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"

Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on
the forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such
judgment claps that they seemed to exhale from the scuttle,
so instantaneously did they appear with their clothes
in their hands.

"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

"Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.

"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"

All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved
for swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments
they were hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds
of the way aloft, and while peering ahead through the horizontal
vacancy between the main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised
a gull-like cry in the air.  "There she blows!--there she blows!
A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!"