167 
THE WHITE WHALE 
swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious 
agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left 
living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malig- 
nity which has been from the beginning; which the ancient Ophites of 
the east reverenced in their statute devil; — Ahab did not fall down 
and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the 
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All 
that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; 
all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the 
brain ; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought ; all evil, to crazy 
Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby 
Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the 
general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and 
then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell 
upon it. 
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise 
at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at 
the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, pas- 
sionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore 
him, he probably felt the agonising bodily laceration, but nothing 
more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and 
for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched 
together in one hammock, rounding in mid-winter that dreary, howling 
Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled 
into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was 
only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final 
monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at 
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic ; and, though un- 
limbed of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian 
chest, and was moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates 
were forced to lace him fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his ham- 
mock. In a strait-jacket, he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. 
And, when running into more sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild 
stun’sails spread, floated across the tranquil tropics, and, to all ap- 
pearances, the old man’s delirium seemed left behind him with the 
Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark den into the blessed 
light and air ; even then, when he bore that firm, collected front, how- 
