THE WHITE WHALE 
49 
warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished 
with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For 
the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket 
between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then 
there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. 
He had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when 
all at once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, 
whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way 
of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the 
snugness of being in bed : because no man can ever feel his own identity 
aright except his eyes he closed ; as if darkness were indeed the proper 
element of our essences, though light he more congenial to our clayey 
part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant 
and self-created darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the 
unilluminated twelve-o’clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable re- 
vulsion. Uor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that per- 
haps it were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake ; 
and besides he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his 
tomahawk. Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance 
to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff 
prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked 
nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, be- 
cause he seemed to he full of such serene household joy then. I no 
more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I 
was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing 
a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn 
about our shoulders, we now passed the tomahawk from one to the 
other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke, 
illuminated by the flame of the new-lit lamp. 
Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away 
to far distant scenes, I know not, hut he now spoke of his native island ; 
and, eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He 
gladly complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a 
few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more 
familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the 
whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give. 
