CHAPTER 111
The Pacific
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the greatSouth Sea; were it not for other things I could have greeted my dearPacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youthwas answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousandleagues of blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea,whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath;like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buriedEvangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents,the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly;for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams,somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls,lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds;the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld,must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmostwaters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms.The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns,but yesterday planted by the recentest race of men and lave the fadedbut still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham;while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless,unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious,divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes allcoasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god,bowing your head to Pan.
But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing, like an ironstatue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with onenostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and withthe other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea;that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.Launched at length upon these almost final waters, and glidingtowards the Japanese cruising-ground, the old man's purposeintensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vice;the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks;in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull,"Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!"
Moby Dick; Or, The Whale Page 111
