ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a
vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with
various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference
with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned
against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes,
which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting
polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night
sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now
fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
single spear or leaf.

In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove
to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to
finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of
Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever
conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when
he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance
awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah
now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious
at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal
substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen
being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go
below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan
but wondrous eyes did plainly say--We two watchmen never rest.

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,--the main-mast
and the mizen; or else they saw h