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- 3483
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- 2026-01-30T07:57:55.409Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 3416
- text
- Despairing of getting into unembarrassed talk with such a centaur,
Captain Delano, after glancing round for a more promising countenance,
but seeing none, spoke pleasantly to the blacks to make way for him;
and so, amid various grins and grimaces, returned to the poop, feeling
a little strange at first, he could hardly tell why, but upon the whole
with regained confidence in Benito Cereno.
How plainly, thought he, did that old whiskerando yonder betray a
consciousness of ill desert. No doubt, when he saw me coming, he
dreaded lest I, apprised by his Captain of the crew’s general
misbehavior, came with sharp words for him, and so down with his head.
And yet—and yet, now that I think of it, that very old fellow, if I err
not, was one of those who seemed so earnestly eying me here awhile
since. Ah, these currents spin one’s head round almost as much as they
do the ship. Ha, there now’s a pleasant sort of sunny sight; quite
sociable, too.
His attention had been drawn to a slumbering negress, partly disclosed
through the lacework of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs
carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the
shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts, was her
wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from
the deck, crosswise with its dam’s; its hands, like two paws,
clambering upon her; its mouth and nose ineffectually rooting to get at
the mark; and meantime giving a vexatious half-grunt, blending with the
composed snore of the negress.
The uncommon vigor of the child at length roused the mother. She
started up, at a distance facing Captain Delano. But as if not at all
concerned at the attitude in which she had been caught, delightedly she
caught the child up, with maternal transports, covering it with kisses.
There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain
Delano, well pleased.
This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more
particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like
most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough
of constitution; equally ready to die for their infants or fight for
them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves. Ah! thought
Captain Delano, these, perhaps, are some of the very women whom Ledyard
saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of.
These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and
ease. At last he looked to see how his boat was getting on; but it was
still pretty remote. He turned to see if Don Benito had returned; but
he had not.
To change the scene, as well as to please himself with a leisurely
observation of the coming boat, stepping over into the mizzen-chains,
he clambered his way into the starboard quarter-gallery—one of those
abandoned Venetian-looking water-balconies previously
mentioned—retreats cut off from the deck. As his foot pressed the
half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom
cats-paw—an islet of breeze, unheralded, unfollowed—as this ghostly
cats-paw came fanning his cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of
small, round dead-lights—all closed like coppered eyes of the
coffined—and the state-cabin door, once connecting with the gallery,
even as the dead-lights had once looked out upon it, but now calked
fast like a sarcophagus lid; and to a purple-black tarred-over, panel,
threshold, and post; and he bethought him of the time, when that
state-cabin and this state-balcony had heard the voices of the Spanish
king’s officers, and the forms of the Lima viceroy’s daughters had
perhaps leaned where he stood—as these and other images flitted through
his mind, as the cats-paw through the calm, gradually he felt rising a
dreamy inquietude, like that of one who alone on the prairie feels
unrest from the repose of the noon.
- title
- Chunk 7