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I'll hold the musket boldly while I think. I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom, THAT'S fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for that accursed fish. The very tube he pointed at me! the very one; THIS one I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now. Aye and he would fain kill all his crew.
But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself, at it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat.
Time itself now held long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it. "Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there! brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye.
Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious accompaniments were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if offered.
That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick.
That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one technical phrase the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then, for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac.
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo.
When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him.
As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea.
Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled "Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that speak English?" "Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be the chief-mate. "Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?" "WHAT whale?" "The WHITE Whale a Sperm Whale Moby Dick, have ye seen him?
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