Ill 
THE WHITE WHALE 
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. 
CHAPTEK XXVIII 
ENTER AHAB J TO HIM, STUBB 
Some 1 days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now 
went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost per- 
petually 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-com- 
manders, 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 cau- 
tiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing their slumber- 
ing shipmates; when this sort of steady quietude would begin to 
