176 
MOBY DICK; OR 
For Lima lias taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this 
whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins 
for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; 
spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that 
fixes its own distortions. 
I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of white- 
ness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror 
of objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there 
aught of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind 
almost solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhib- 
ited under any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. 
What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively 
elucidated by the following examples. 
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, 
if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels 
just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under pre- 
cisely similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to 
view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky-whiteness — as 
if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swim- 
ming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the 
shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real 
ghost ; in vain the lead assures him he is still off soundings ; heart and 
helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is under him 
again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, “Sir, it was not 
so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous 
whiteness that so stirred me?” 
Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the 
snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the 
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast 
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be to 
lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the 
back-woodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views 
an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or 
twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, behold- 
ing the scenery of the Antarctic seas ; where at times, by some infernal 
trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and 
half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his 
