THE WHITE WHALE 177 
misery, views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him 
with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses. 
But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness 
is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to 
a hypo, Ishmael. 
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley 
of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey — why is it that upon 
the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so 
that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness — 
why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in 
frenzies of affright ? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings 
of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muski- 
ness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experi- 
ence of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of 
the black bisons of distant Oregon? 
No : but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the 
knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles 
from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring 
bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, 
which this instant they may be trampling into dust. 
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings 
of the festooned frosts of mountains ; the desolate shiftings of the wind- 
rowed snows of prairies ; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of 
that buffalo robe to the frightened colt ! 
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the 
mystic sign gives forth such hints ; yet with me, as with the colt, some- 
where those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this 
visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed 
in fright. 
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and 
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul ; and more strange 
and far more portentous — why, as we have seen, it is at once the most 
meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Chris- 
tian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things 
the most appalling to mankind. 
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids 
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with 
