THE WHITE WHALE 183 
brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any 
other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor’- 
Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, 
might blow Moby Dick into the devious zigzag world-circle of the 
Pequod’s circumnavigating wake. 
But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it 
not but a mad idea, this — that in the broad boundless ocean, one soli- 
tary whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual 
recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the 
thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. Por the peculiar 
snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not 
but be unmistakable. “And have I not tallied the whale,” Ahab would 
mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after mid- 
night he would throw himself back in reveries — “tallied him, and shall 
he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost 
sheep’s ear!” And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless 
race ; till a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him ; and in 
the open air of the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, 
God ! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed 
with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched 
hands ; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. 
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably 
vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts 
through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of frenzies, and 
whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throb- 
bing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was 
sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up 
from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked 
flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to 
leap down among them ; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, 
a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes 
Ahab would burst from his state-room, as though escaping from a 
bed that was on fire. Yet these perhaps, instead of being unsuppress- 
able symptoms of some latent weakness, of fright at his own resolve, 
were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. Por, at such times, Ahab, 
the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this 
Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused 
