App-PigLatin

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no fire at all--the landlord said he couldn't afford it.

Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet.

We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our

lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers.

But the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only meat

and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper!

One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself

to these dumplings in a most direful manner.



"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare

to a dead sartainty."



"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"



"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer

is a dark complexioned chap.  He never eats dumplings, he don't--

he eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."



"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer?

Is he here?"

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certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.



Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,

it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one

solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet.

But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all

tides and currents; and thereby calculating the driftings of

the sperm whale's food; and, also calling to mind the regular,

ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular latitudes;

could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching

to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this

or that ground in search of his prey.



So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the sperm

whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that,

could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world;

were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated,

then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in

invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.

On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory

charts of the sperm whale.*

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of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,

she would infallibly encounter him there.  So, too, with some

other feeding-grounds, where he had at times revealed himself.

But all these seemed only his casual stopping-places and

ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged abode.

And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object

have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made

to whatever way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his,

ere a particular set time or place were attained, when all

possibilities would become probabilities, and, as Ahab

fondly thought, every possibility the next thing to a certainty.

That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one

technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,

for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically

descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun,

in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any

one sign of the Zodiac.  There it was, too, that most of

the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place;

there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was

that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found

the awful motive to his vengeance.  But in the cautious

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setting her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam

of Nantucket.  Squaring her yards, she bore down,

ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat;

it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being rigged

by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain,

the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern

in token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary.

It turned out that the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board,

and that Mayhew, her captain, was fearful of infecting

the Pequod's company.  For, though himself and the boat's crew

remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifle-shot off,

and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between;

yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the land,

he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the Pequod.



But this did by no means prevent all communications.

Preserving an interval of some few yards between itself and

the ship, the Jeroboam's boat by the occasional use of its oars

contrived to keep parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged

through the sea (for by this time it blew very fresh), with her

main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by the sudden onset

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scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side,

which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone,

form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned.

The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres,

through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose

intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes

through the seas of brit in feeding time.  In the central blinds

of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain

curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen

calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings.

Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable,

yet it has the savor of analogical probability.  At any rate,

if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale

than at first glance will seem reasonable.



In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies

concerning these blinds.  One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous

"whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;* another, "hogs' bristles";

a third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:

"There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his

upper chop, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth."

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But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday

of his time.



It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole;

if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water,

then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell

seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all answers

to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged with

two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling.

But owing to the mystery of the spout--whether it be water or whether it

be vapor--no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head.

Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories.

But what does he want of them?  No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water

in the sea.



Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his

spouting canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--

is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut)

for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water,

therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying,

that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose.

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And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--

frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which

the contents turned to ice, and shiver it.  And still this hair

is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it;

but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere,

between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava.

How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn

shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to.

A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors

and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes

blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.  Out upon it!--it's tainted.

Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.

I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there.  And yet,

'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it?

In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow.  Run tilting

at it, and you but run through it.  Ha! a coward wind that strikes

stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow.

Even Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler thing than that.

Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most

exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless,

but only bodiless as objects, not as agents.  There's a