THE WHITE WHALE 211 
Dick; for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal 
monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve 
the remotest suspicion as to any boat’s crew being assigned to that boat. 
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon 
waned away ; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and 
then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from 
the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating 
outlaws of whalers ; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer 
castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, hits 
of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what 
not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down 
into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any 
unsubduable excitement in the forecastle. 
But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate 
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it 
were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Bedallah re- 
mained a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly 
world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced him- 
self to be linked with Ahab’s peculiar fortunes ; nay, so far as to have 
some sort of a half-hinted influence ; Heaven knows, but it might have 
been even authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot 
sustain an indifferent air cencerning Bedallah. He was such a creature 
as civilised, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their 
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide 
among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles 
to the east of the continent — these insulated, immemorial, unalterable 
countries, which even in these modem days still preserve much of the 
ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations, when the mem- 
ory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his 
descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real 
phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created 
and to what end; when though, according to Genesis, the angels 
indeed consorted with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the 
uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane amours. 
