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- deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole,
or exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,—the
main-mast and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the
cabin-scuttle,—his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step;
his hat slouched heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he
stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never
tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at
times; or whether he was still intently scanning them; no matter,
though he stood so in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and
the unheeded night-damp gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved
coat and hat. The clothes that the night had wet, the next day’s
sunshine dried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night;
he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin
that thing he sent for.
He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,—breakfast and
dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly
grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still
grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But
though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the
Parsee’s mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these
two never seemed to speak—one man to the other—unless at long intervals
some passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent
spell seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck
crew, they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak
one word; by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the
slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a
single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his
scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each
other; as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the
Parsee his abandoned substance.
And yet, somehow, did Ahab—in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,—Ahab
seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean
shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and
keel was solid Ahab.
At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
from aft,—“Man the mast-heads!”—and all through the day, till after
sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking
of the helmsman’s bell, was heard—“What d’ye see?—sharp! sharp!”
But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
old man seemed distrustful of his crew’s fidelity; at least, of nearly
all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But
if these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from
verbally expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.
“I will have the first sight of the whale myself,”—he said. “Aye! Ahab
must have the doubloon!” and with his own hands he rigged a nest of
basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved
block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin
for the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with
that end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round
upon his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long
upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then
settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,—“Take the
rope, sir—I give it into thy hands, Starbuck.” Then arranging his
person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his
perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last; and
afterwards stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the
royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles,—ahead,
astern, this side, and that,—within the wide expanded circle commanded
at so great a height.
When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is
hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict
charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such
a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations
aloft cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at
the deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few
minutes cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural
fatality, if, unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor
should by some carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all
swooping to the sea. So Ahab’s proceedings in this matter were not
unusual; the only strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck,
almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with
anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision—one of those
too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt
somewhat;—it was strange, that this was the very man he should select
for his watchman; freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise
distrusted person’s hands.
Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his
head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a
thousand feet straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and
went eddying again round his head.
But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked
it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
sight.
“Your hat, your hat, sir!” suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing
them.
But already the sable wing was before the old man’s eyes; the long
hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
his prize.
An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace
it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be
king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen
accounted good. Ahab’s hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on
and on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared;
while from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was
dimly discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.
CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.
The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
misnamed the Delight, was descried.