Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized,
domestic people in the temperate zone only see in
their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom
now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities,
especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—
those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries,
which even in these modern days still preserve much
of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal
generations, when the memory of the first man was
a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms,
and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created
and to what end; when though, according to Genesis,
the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of
men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Robbins,
indulged in mundane amours.
The Spirit-Spout
Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory
Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruising-grounds;
that off the Azores; off the Cape de Verdes; on the
Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the Rio
de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery
locality, southerly from St. Helena.
It was while gliding through these latter waters that
one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves
rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft,
suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence,
not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet
was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the
bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial;
seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet.
For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to
mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out
there, with the same precision as if it had been day.
And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night,
not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering
for them. You may think with what emotions, then,
the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft
at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions
in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform
interval there for several successive nights without
uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence,
his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery,
moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his
feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging,
and hailed the mortal crew. “There she
blows!” Had the trump of judgment blown, they
could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no
terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a
most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry,
and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul
on board instinctively desired a lowering.
