บทที่ บทที่ 111 · The Pacific.

When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great

South Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear

Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my

youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a

thousand leagues of blue.

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently

awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those

fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist 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 midmost waters of

the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same

waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday

planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but 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 all coasts 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 iron

statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one

nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles

(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the 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 gliding towards the Japanese

cruising-ground, the old man’s purpose intensified 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!”