498 
MOBY DICK; OR 
making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I 
durst not so much as dare ? Is Ahab, Ahab ? Is it I, God, or who, that 
lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as 
an errand-boy in heaven ; nor one single star can revolve, but by some 
invisible power ; how then can this one small heart beat ; this one small 
brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that think- 
ing, does that living, and not I ? By heaven, man, we are turned round 
and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the hand- 
spike. And all the time, lo ! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea ! 
Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that 
flying-fish ? Where do murderers go, man ? Who’s to doom, when the 
judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, 
and a mild-looking sky ; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far- 
away meadow ; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes 
of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- 
mown hay. Sleeping ? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last 
on the field. Sleep ? Aye, and rust amid greenness ; as last year’s 
scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swathes — Starbuck!” 
But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair, the mate had stolen 
away. 
Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started 
at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motion- 
lessly leaning over the same rail. 
CHAPTER CXXXII 
THE CHASE FIRST DAY 
That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man — as his wont at 
intervals — stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went 
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing 
up the sea air as a sagacious ship’s dog will, in drawing nigh to some 
barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that 
peculiar odour, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the 
living Sperm Whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any 
mariner surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the 
