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_ 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!" _
Read next: CHAPTER 112 The Blacksmith.
Read previous: CHAPTER 110 Queequeg in His Coffin.
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