CHAPTER 30

  The Pipe

  When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the

bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a

sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also

his pipe. Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the

stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.

  In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings

were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How

could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without

bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the

plank, and a king of the sea and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

  Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his

mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his

face. "How now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube,

"this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with

me if thy charm be gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not

pleasuring- aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while;

to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying

whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What

business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for

sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not

among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more-"

  He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in

the waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking

pipe made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.