Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  CHAPTER 130

  The Hat

  And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and widea preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to have chased his foe into an oceanfold, to slay himthe more securely there; now, that he found himself hardby the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting woundhad been inflicted; now that a vessel had been spoken which onthe very day preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with various shipscontrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference with whichthe white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned against;now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes,which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see.As the unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic,six months' night sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze;so Ahab's purpose now fixedly gleamed down upon the constantmidnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered above them so,that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fainto hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a singlespear or leaf.

  In this foreshadowing interval, too, all humor, forcedor natural, vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile;Starbuck no more strove to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow,hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered,for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul.Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever consciousthat the old man's despot eye was on them.

  But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidentialhours when he thought no glance but one was on him;then you would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awedthe crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance awed his;or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thinFedallah now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him;that the men looked dubious at him; half uncertain,as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal substance,or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseenbeing's body. And that shadow was always hovering there.For not by night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been knownto slumber, or go below. He would stand still for hours:but never sat or leaned; his wan but wondrous eyes did plainly say--We two watchmen never rest.

  Nor, at any time, by night or day could the marinersnow step upon the deck, unless Ahab was before them;either standing in his pivot-hole, or exactly pacing the planksbetween two undeviating limits,--the main-mast and the mizen;or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,--his livingfoot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouchedheavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood,however the days and nights were added on, that he had notswung in his hammock; yet hidden beneath that slouching hat,they could never tell unerringly whether, for all this, his eyeswere really closed at times; or whether he was still intentlyscanning them; no matter, though he stood so in the scuttlefor a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-dampgathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat.The clothes that the night had wet, the next day's sunshinedried upon him; and so, day after day, and night after night;he went no more beneath the planks; whatever he wanted fromthe 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 reapedhis beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed rootsof trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base,though perished in the upper verdure. But though his wholelife was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee'smystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these twonever seemed to speak--one man to the other--unless at longintervals 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 menwere both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal interchange.At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they stoodfar parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parseeby the main-mast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other;as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahabthe 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 unseentyrant 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 washeard 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! sharp!"

  But when three or four days had slided by, after meetingthe 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 seemedto doubt, even, whether Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlookthe 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 withhis own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines;and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block,to secure to the mainmast head, he received the two ends ofthe downwardreeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepareda 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 eyeupon the chief mate, said,--"Take the rope, sir--I give it intothy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his person in the basket,he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck beingthe 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 commandedat so great a height.

  When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated placein the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailorat sea is hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope;under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always givenin strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it.Because in such a wilderness of running rigging, whose variousdifferent relations aloft cannot always be infallibly discernedby what is seen of them at the deck; and when the deck-ends of theseropes are being every few minutes cast down from the fastenings,it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with aconstant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessnessof 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 himwith anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision--one of those too, whose faithfulness on the look-out he had seemedto doubt somewhat; it was strange, that this was the very manhe should select for his watchman; freely giving his whole lifeinto such an otherwise distrusted person's hands.

  Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been thereten minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so oftenfly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemenin these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaminground 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 anyone else have marked it much, it being no uncommon circumstance;only now almost the least heedful eye seemed to see some sortof cunning meaning in almost every sight.

  "Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cri
ed 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 gulfof 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 blackhawk darted away with his prize.

  An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap toreplace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquinwould be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the capwas 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 vastheight into the sea.

  CHAPTER 131

  The Pequod Meets The Delight