491 
THE WHITE WHALE 
however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in 
his hammock ; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never 
tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times : 
or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he 
stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded 
night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and 
hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s sunshine dried 
upon him ; and so, day after day, and night after night ; he went no 
more beneath the planks ; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing 
he sent for. 
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals, — breakfast 
and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which 
darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which 
still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. 
But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and 
though the Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; 
yet these two never seemed to speak — one man to the other — unless at 
long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. 
Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, 
and to the awe-struck crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by 
day they chanced to speak one word; by night, dumb men were both, 
so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for 
longest hours, without a single hail, they stood far parted in the star- 
light ; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast ; but still fixedly 
gazing upon each other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown 
shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned substance. 
And yet, somehow, did Ahab — in his own proper self, as daily, 
hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates, 
— Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still 
again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them ; 
the lean shade siding the solid rib. For.be this Parsee what he may, 
all rib and keel was solid Ahab. At the first faintest glimmering of 
the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft — “Man the mastheads !” 
— and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight, the same 
voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman’s bell,, was heard — 
“What d’ye see? — sharp! sharp!” 
But when three or four days had glided by, after meeting the chil- 
