196 
MOBY DICK; OR 
and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding 
contrast in tbe final aspect of the completed fabric ; this savage’s sword, 
thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof ; 
this easy indifferent sword must be chance — ay, chance, freewill, and 
necessity— nowise incompatible — all interweavingly working together. 
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate 
course — its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; 
freewill still free to ply her shuttle between given threads ; and chance, 
though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and 
sideways in its motions modified by freewill, though thus prescribed to 
by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow 
at events. 
Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound 
so strange, long-drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball 
of freewill dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds 
whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees 
was that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly 
forward, his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden inter- 
vals he continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very 
moment perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whale- 
men’s lookouts perched as high in the air ; but from few of those lungs 
could that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence 
as from Tashtego the Indian’s. 
As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and 
eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him 
some prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild 
cries announcing their coming. 
“There she blows ! there ! there ! there ! she blows ! she blows !” 
“Where-away ?” 
“On the lee-beam, about two miles off ! a school of them !” 
Instantly all was commotion. 
The sperm whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating 
and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish 
from other tribes of his genus. 
“There go flukes !” was now the cry from Tashtego ; and the whales 
disappeared. 
