CHAPTER 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 seems 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 California 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!"