499 
THE WHITE WHALE 
dog-vaiie, and then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odour as 
nearly as possible, Ahab rapidly ordered the ship’s course to be slightly 
altered, and the sail to be shortened. 
The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindi- 
cated at daybreak by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly 
and lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated 
watery wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some 
swift tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream. 
“Man the mastheads! Call all hands!” 
Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the fore- 
castle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that 
they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they 
appear with their clothes in their hands. 
“What d’ye see?” cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky. 
“Nothing, nothing, sir!” was the sound hailing down in reply. 
“T’gallant-sails ! stunsails alow and aloft, and on both sides!” 
All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for sway- 
ing him to the mainroyal masthead ; and’ in a few moments they were 
hoisting him thither, when, while, but two-thirds of the way aloft, 
and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the 
ma intopsail and topgallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the air, 
“There she blows! — there she blows! A hump like a snowhill! It 
is Moby Dick !” 
Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the 
three lookouts, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the 
famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained 
his final perch, some feet above the other lookouts, Tashtego standing 
just beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the In- 
dian’s head was almost on a level with Ahab’s heel. From this 
height the whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll 
of the sea revealing his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his 
silent spout into the air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the 
same silent spout they had so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic 
and Indian Oceans. 
“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab, hailing the 
perched men all around him. 
