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MOBY DICK; OR 
Bay on the Japanese coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod 
to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, 
she would infallibly encounter him there. So, -too, with some other 
feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all 
these seemed only his casual stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, 
not his places of prolonged abode. And where Ahab’s chances of ac- 
complishing his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only 
been made to whatever wayside, antecedent, extra prospects were his, 
ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all possibilities 
would become probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possi- 
bility the next thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place 
were conjoined in the one technical phrase — the Season-on-the-Line. 
For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been 
periodically described, lingering in those waters for a while, as the sun, 
in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of 
the Zodiac. There it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with 
the white whale had taken place; there the waves were storied with 
his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old 
man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the cautious 
comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw 
his brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit him- 
self to rest all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, 
however flattering it might he to those hopes; nor in the sleeplessness 
of his vow could he so tranquillise his unquiet heart as to postpone all 
intervening quest. 
Eow, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning 
of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavours then could enable 
her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape 
Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the 
equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait 
for the next ensuing season. Yet the premature hour of the Pequod 3 s 
sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to 
this very complexion of things. Because, an interval of three hundred 
and sixty-five days and nights was before him; an interval which, in- 
stead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous 
hunt ; if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far re- 
mote from his periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled 
