App-PigLatin

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his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself

was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts,

some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon

the deeply marked chart of his forehead.



But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude

of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts.

Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night

some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted.

For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was

threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more

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

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Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,

for an additional lashing to our boat.  So still and subdued and yet

somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of revelry

lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his

own invisible self.



I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat.

As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline

between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle,

and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy

oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon

the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn;

I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over

the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting

dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were

the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically

weaving and weaving away at the Fates.  There lay the fixed

threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning,

unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit

of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own.

This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own

hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into

these unalterable threads.  Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,

indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly,

or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be;

and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a

corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric;

this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions

both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance--

aye, chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--

all interweavingly working together.  The straight warp

of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course--

its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;

free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads;

and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines

of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will,

though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either,

and has the last featuring blow at events.





Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound

so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly,

that the ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood

gazing up at the clouds whence that voice dropped like a wing.

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of the Town-Ho himself.  It was the private property of three

confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems,

communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,

but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed

so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not

well withhold the rest.  Nevertheless, so potent an influence did

this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full

knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so,

were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among

themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast.

Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story

as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair

I now proceed to put on lasting record.





*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,

still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.





For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated

it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,

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has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships,

with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.



As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea,

gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan

or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble

came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought,

that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost

monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!

Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.

Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great

Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock.

Suspended? and to what?  To three bits of board.  Is this

the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou

fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears?

The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear,

the dart, nor the habergeon:  he esteemeth iron as straw;

the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;

he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!"  This the creature?

this he?  Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.

For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail,

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Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least

as temporary an effect on Ahab.  But if these secret golden

keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasuries,

yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing.



Oh, grassy glades! oh ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul;

in ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthly life,--

in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover;

and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life

immortal on them.  Would to God these blessed calms would last.

But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp

and woof:  calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not

advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--

through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless

faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism,

then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose

of If.  But once gone through, we trace the round again;

and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.

Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?

In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest

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With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of

the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,

bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck.

Then, with the maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this

iron rod, he placed the blunted needle endwise on the top of it,

and less strongly hammered that, several times, the mate still holding

the rod as before.  Then going through some small strange motions

with it--whether indispensable to the magnetizing of the steel,

or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain--

he called for linen thread; and moving to the binnacle, slipped out

the two reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the

sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass cards.  At first,

the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at either end;

but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had been intently

watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the binnacle,

and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look ye,

for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level loadstone!

The sun is East, and that compass swears it!"



One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes

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after her missing children, only found another orphan.











  ETYMOLOGY



  (Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)



The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain;

I see him now.  He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars,

with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay

flags of all the known nations of the world.  He loved to dust

his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.



  "While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by

what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out,

through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the

signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true."

    --HACKLUYT